The preferred method to do this on Freenode is to set your password in the "Server Password" field of your IRC client; the Hyperion IRCD can associate this with your Nickserv account and authenticate you. This is even more secure than/quote nickserv and even easier to set up.
The preferred method to identify is to send your password in the "IRC server password" field when you connect. This method is a lot more "out of band" than the rest of your transactions in the IRC protocol and cannot be hijacked short of replacing the IRCD process itself.
When I was running Xiph.Org, both lilo and Diablo-D3 were spamming people for money.
OMG. Freenode sends server notices a couple times a day during fundraising season. Gasp.
Freenode is a black hole of idiocy, and if you really want to dive into it, go ahead -- Just don't expect logic, reason or honesty to win out over egotistical mania and deception.... Freenode may be 'Animal Farm,' though without the Orwellian context.
Your calm, reflective tone reassures me of your cool and level-headed rationality.
Freenode uses Hyperion. The preferred authentication technique at the moment, FYI, is to send your nick's password in the IRC server password field when you connected; this will serve to authenticate you to that nick, bypassing Nickserv or/nickserv or/quote nickserv or/msg nickserv@services. - and is probably the most secure option available, and one of the easiest to set up.
Freenode had a trusted component; namely, Robert Levin's privilages. This should never have been present in the system and was simlpy a disaster waiting to happen.
My web server has a trusted component too, it's my root login. Obviously this should never have been present in the system and is simply a disaster waiting to happen. Only one problem: If I remove it, how am I supposed to administer my computer?
I mean, SOMEBODY needs to have the permissions to administer the darned network, or the network isn't going to get administered.
Well, if you'd read the fine summary (maybe if you'd UNDERSTOOD the fine summary, I guess you read it) you'd know that it does not store the passwords in the clear but that someone logged on to impersonate the authentication service, which recieves passwords sent in the clear. But there's really not too much you can do about that, even when you have a secure connection. It's like someone who replaces the CGI script on your log-in page to capture everyone's <input type="password"> submissions. Which are also recieved in the clear, whether or not they are sent via SSL.
Yeah, we have things like public key authentication. No, there's no real good way to use them on IRC. It is an old protocol. Sorry.
I thought the animated PNG spec was called MNG and that even Mozilla threw out support for it since it was being used absolutely nowhere (and was a bit bloaty. even for Mozilla.)
Oh, wait, Wikipdia tells me there's an APNG too. Hmm. From the looks of the links there it's still highly experimental and I don't think anyone's using it.
Because economics has become warfare- and unless you want to be forced to worship Krishna, there's a reason why we have national sovereignity.
Wow. This, sir, is truly a most unusual juxtaposition of viewpoints. I'll go so far as to say it's perhaps the most unusual one I've ever seen.
But let me say this. My dad is an award-winning economist (Jonathan Hughes Prize, actually) and he's a good man, and I've taken an introductory class myself, though it's been a while. Still, I know a few things. Economics is a science. It has laws. True, they are not as solid as the Laws Of Physics, but they're just as true. And the truth is that free markets, by and large, make peoples' lives better, not worse. Your rhetoric about how "markets never did any good for anybody" is extremism of the most ridiculous and absurd variety. What did help people then? Sustanance farming? People don't trade in a market , whether they're trading corn or computers or labor or lemons, unless both parties gain something. You may groan about your soul-sucking job, but the fact is that you'd be far worse off without it.
My father has argued that free trade is a fundamental human right: If someone in Cuba has something to sell me, and I want to buy it, what business has anyone stopping us? Anything else is simply coercing us. You argue "protectionism!" to build a strong local economy. Why must it be local? Are the people overseas less deserving of jobs, and the progress of the modern world? Ah, I am sure you will argue about "what progress?" and tell us of how they are so terribly exploited and make only sixty cents a day in a factory - but you have missed the alternative, that they were making the equivalent of thirty cents a day doing sustainence farming beforehand.
Ah, you will say, but the companies, the evil companies of course, they are going to pass all the savings along to the CEOs, those rich evil bastards. In a truly free market, though, another company will gladly spring up doing the exact same thing, but NOT pay the CEOs a bunch of money, until the other company goes out of business (or changes).
Markets are not there to make your life better. They are there to make everybody's lives better. If it comes down to it, assuming you still have Free Will, you can always choose to exclude yourself - if you're willing to pay the price. But then- maybe the price is too high, maybe the government demands taxes or such beyond your ability to pay. But that's outside of the market. That's government.
Moreover, economics - many think it's the study of money. It's not. It's the study of choices. That's all a market is- a set of choices. People associate Economics with Money because Money is the easiest sort of choice to quantify, the easiest to measure, the easiest to analyze. Recognize that to economists, everything is a market unless it's coersion. You're not in favor of coersion for every little thing, are you? If you think people should have any sort of choice in anything they do, you are supporting a market. And I hope you're not aiming for totalitariansim in your politics, especially not intentionally. I'd like to think better of you than that.
You need to retake Econ 150. That's not the "free market". This is the free market: everyone should be allowed to "cheat" by going anywhere -- except it's not cheating.
If a company can spend less to hire someone from India / Mexico / wherever, why on earth should we stop them? Why should they be forced to pay more money to hire someone from the US? This is utterly against the spirit of the free market.
In a completely free market, eventually wages for everybody doing a particular sort of job would end up about the same: as companies send work where it's cheapest, the local economy grows and thrives and the wages there will rise. Now, many things conspire to make markets non-free: sometimes things as simple and nigh unto insurmountable as Geography, sometimes things as ugly as petty politics.
Argue if you want that a free market is evil/bad/wrong. But recognize that any sort of visas and such are barriers to entry, and what you describe ("wages should be high because the skills are rare") is diametrically opposed to that: you are artificially limiting the supply by political machinations, almost exactly in the same way a monopolist can limit the supply of the product they can sell, in order to drive the price up so they can make the most profit.
What on Earth is wrong with naming a company something like "Stand Up!"? That's the sort of thing a marketer loves in a name- something motiviational and cool-sounding at the same time. Stand up, rise to the challenges, yaddayaddayadda....
On the topic of "misues of CSS", what's your take on the mess of CSS incompatibilities between Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, W3C standards, and the like? Do you have any choice words for any of the parties involved?
Go to alt.games.rctycoon on Google Groups or something, and search for old messages about crashes and anti-trainer patches trainers and such. Messages like this one (which actually is about an unrelated problem but it's about the first thing that I could dig up on the topic and it does mention the existance of this anti-single-player-cheat setting). It was all fairly well-documented back in the day when RCT was still big; things seem to have fallen apart a little since then, though.
The problem with game gods? Well, one "game god" at least... they can get to have too much of an ego. Consider Chris Sawyer, of Roller Coaster Tycoon fame. (And just consider Roller Coaster Tycoon and its expansion packs and such, since I haven't spent $$$ to buy RCT2 or anything:P).
So someone developed some cheats and patches and "trainers" and the like for RCT. Several people, actually, a variety of things you could do... But Chris Sawyer didn't like people cheating, apparently (never mind that this is a single-player game of a fairly open-ended nature)... so what does he do? There was some code, either in the original game or an expansion pack, that would sit and watch for some obvious signs of cheating (I think the main one was that if you had researched ALL the rides and stalls and such in the game). If it caught you cheating, the game would crash. Intentionally. And not just that! The game would create a secret little data file so that it would crash again, next time you started, whether or not you were trying to cheat this time around. Eventually some people provided a patch, but with the next expansion pack and such things were changed so you would need a DIFFERENT patch, and this time it would check if there, like, weren't enough trees (did you clear the land so you could have your own little sandbox world? HORRORS! You're not allowed to do that!)
Roller Coaster Tycoon was great. Transport Tycoon was a gem as well. But I don't like getting bossed around by the God of my Game. If these multi-programmer teams can realize things like this better, and let people cheat at their single-player games (at least) if they want to cheat, please, why stop them? (Heck, you can cheat until the cows come home in a game like Morrowind/Oblivion or Half-Life (2 or otherwise) by using the console, and the Sims 2 takes codes as well...)
PHP is a fine hypertext preprocessor - it is simple to use, readily available, and excessively convenient. The problem comes when novices discover it, delight in its convenience, want to use it for something big and important and they don't know how.
Granted, if they were using, say, Perl, they still probably wouldn't know how to build anything big and important, but PHP in particular provides some simple, obvious, and well-defined mechanisms to implement Bad Coding Practices. Separation of the logic and the content are the first things thrown out the window; PHP's SQL-related functions invite no end of bad design (database-specific query functions instead of something generic like Perl's DBI classes, no prepared statements, practically BEGGING for SQL injection vulnerabilities -- then there's the whole register_globals fiasco, short-tags vs long tags and magic-quotes settings just to keep you excited, and so on and so forth...)
There are other things, too - some will point out the lack of decent namespaces, inconsistent function naming schemes, too many functions that are too similar, and such- many valid complaints, a few silly complaints -- but they pale in comparison to all the Bad Stuff that PHP invites upon itself from novice coders.
Compilers ignore whitespace which means you should focus on introducing changes in to the white space.
So, uhh, out of curiosity, what happens when a malicious client who knows something's up does something like, say, strip out all the whitespace, and then runs things through a whitespace prettifier?
To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
If we're talking political abuse-of-science, can I link to this essay by Michael Crichton about "environmentalism as religion" just to remind everyone that things like this cut both ways?
I've used a webserver on a phone before... it was actually more of a phone/PDA (Seimens SX66). It was for demonstration purposes- we had some stuff there running on the NetFront multimodal browser, and the pages were being served up using an IBM Java-based setup, WCTME (Websphere Client Technology Micro Edition).
I don't believe it was running there on the final product, though. Which is good, since you'd have to invoke the Java service management framework manually and give it some time to start up before using it...
Slashdot Mirror
HTTP. Like the kind you use it to log into Slashdot, you know.
Sure, yes, you can tunnel that through SSL. You can IRC through SSL too. The server still gets the plaintext password on the other end.
The preferred method to do this on Freenode is to set your password in the "Server Password" field of your IRC client; the Hyperion IRCD can associate this with your Nickserv account and authenticate you. This is even more secure than /quote nickserv and even easier to set up.
The preferred method to identify is to send your password in the "IRC server password" field when you connect. This method is a lot more "out of band" than the rest of your transactions in the IRC protocol and cannot be hijacked short of replacing the IRCD process itself.
OMG. Freenode sends server notices a couple times a day during fundraising season. Gasp.
Your calm, reflective tone reassures me of your cool and level-headed rationality.
Now get a grip.
Freenode uses Hyperion. The preferred authentication technique at the moment, FYI, is to send your nick's password in the IRC server password field when you connected; this will serve to authenticate you to that nick, bypassing Nickserv or /nickserv or /quote nickserv or /msg nickserv@services. - and is probably the most secure option available, and one of the easiest to set up.
My web server has a trusted component too, it's my root login. Obviously this should never have been present in the system and is simply a disaster waiting to happen. Only one problem: If I remove it, how am I supposed to administer my computer?
I mean, SOMEBODY needs to have the permissions to administer the darned network, or the network isn't going to get administered.
Well, if you'd read the fine summary (maybe if you'd UNDERSTOOD the fine summary, I guess you read it) you'd know that it does not store the passwords in the clear but that someone logged on to impersonate the authentication service, which recieves passwords sent in the clear. But there's really not too much you can do about that, even when you have a secure connection. It's like someone who replaces the CGI script on your log-in page to capture everyone's <input type="password"> submissions. Which are also recieved in the clear, whether or not they are sent via SSL.
Yeah, we have things like public key authentication. No, there's no real good way to use them on IRC. It is an old protocol. Sorry.
-- because the parent seems to have at least RTFS, unlike the grandparent.
Oh, wait, Wikipdia tells me there's an APNG too. Hmm. From the looks of the links there it's still highly experimental and I don't think anyone's using it.
But let me say this. My dad is an award-winning economist (Jonathan Hughes Prize, actually) and he's a good man, and I've taken an introductory class myself, though it's been a while. Still, I know a few things. Economics is a science. It has laws. True, they are not as solid as the Laws Of Physics, but they're just as true. And the truth is that free markets, by and large, make peoples' lives better, not worse. Your rhetoric about how "markets never did any good for anybody" is extremism of the most ridiculous and absurd variety. What did help people then? Sustanance farming? People don't trade in a market , whether they're trading corn or computers or labor or lemons, unless both parties gain something. You may groan about your soul-sucking job, but the fact is that you'd be far worse off without it.
My father has argued that free trade is a fundamental human right: If someone in Cuba has something to sell me, and I want to buy it, what business has anyone stopping us? Anything else is simply coercing us. You argue "protectionism!" to build a strong local economy. Why must it be local? Are the people overseas less deserving of jobs, and the progress of the modern world? Ah, I am sure you will argue about "what progress?" and tell us of how they are so terribly exploited and make only sixty cents a day in a factory - but you have missed the alternative, that they were making the equivalent of thirty cents a day doing sustainence farming beforehand. Ah, you will say, but the companies, the evil companies of course, they are going to pass all the savings along to the CEOs, those rich evil bastards. In a truly free market, though, another company will gladly spring up doing the exact same thing, but NOT pay the CEOs a bunch of money, until the other company goes out of business (or changes).
Markets are not there to make your life better. They are there to make everybody's lives better. If it comes down to it, assuming you still have Free Will, you can always choose to exclude yourself - if you're willing to pay the price. But then- maybe the price is too high, maybe the government demands taxes or such beyond your ability to pay. But that's outside of the market. That's government.
Moreover, economics - many think it's the study of money. It's not. It's the study of choices. That's all a market is- a set of choices. People associate Economics with Money because Money is the easiest sort of choice to quantify, the easiest to measure, the easiest to analyze. Recognize that to economists, everything is a market unless it's coersion. You're not in favor of coersion for every little thing, are you? If you think people should have any sort of choice in anything they do, you are supporting a market. And I hope you're not aiming for totalitariansim in your politics, especially not intentionally. I'd like to think better of you than that.
If a company can spend less to hire someone from India / Mexico / wherever, why on earth should we stop them? Why should they be forced to pay more money to hire someone from the US? This is utterly against the spirit of the free market.
In a completely free market, eventually wages for everybody doing a particular sort of job would end up about the same: as companies send work where it's cheapest, the local economy grows and thrives and the wages there will rise. Now, many things conspire to make markets non-free: sometimes things as simple and nigh unto insurmountable as Geography, sometimes things as ugly as petty politics.
Argue if you want that a free market is evil/bad/wrong. But recognize that any sort of visas and such are barriers to entry, and what you describe ("wages should be high because the skills are rare") is diametrically opposed to that: you are artificially limiting the supply by political machinations, almost exactly in the same way a monopolist can limit the supply of the product they can sell, in order to drive the price up so they can make the most profit.
What on Earth is wrong with naming a company something like "Stand Up!"? That's the sort of thing a marketer loves in a name- something motiviational and cool-sounding at the same time. Stand up, rise to the challenges, yaddayaddayadda....
On the topic of "misues of CSS", what's your take on the mess of CSS incompatibilities between Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, W3C standards, and the like? Do you have any choice words for any of the parties involved?
Wasn't sco.com hacked once before?
I don't know. If I made $65 million after 14 years... that's $4.64 million a year. I think I'd retire comfortably...
and hopefully, do a good job, to boot...
Go to alt.games.rctycoon on Google Groups or something, and search for old messages about crashes and anti-trainer patches trainers and such. Messages like this one (which actually is about an unrelated problem but it's about the first thing that I could dig up on the topic and it does mention the existance of this anti-single-player-cheat setting). It was all fairly well-documented back in the day when RCT was still big; things seem to have fallen apart a little since then, though.
So someone developed some cheats and patches and "trainers" and the like for RCT. Several people, actually, a variety of things you could do... But Chris Sawyer didn't like people cheating, apparently (never mind that this is a single-player game of a fairly open-ended nature)... so what does he do? There was some code, either in the original game or an expansion pack, that would sit and watch for some obvious signs of cheating (I think the main one was that if you had researched ALL the rides and stalls and such in the game). If it caught you cheating, the game would crash. Intentionally. And not just that! The game would create a secret little data file so that it would crash again, next time you started, whether or not you were trying to cheat this time around. Eventually some people provided a patch, but with the next expansion pack and such things were changed so you would need a DIFFERENT patch, and this time it would check if there, like, weren't enough trees (did you clear the land so you could have your own little sandbox world? HORRORS! You're not allowed to do that!)
Roller Coaster Tycoon was great. Transport Tycoon was a gem as well. But I don't like getting bossed around by the God of my Game. If these multi-programmer teams can realize things like this better, and let people cheat at their single-player games (at least) if they want to cheat, please, why stop them? (Heck, you can cheat until the cows come home in a game like Morrowind/Oblivion or Half-Life (2 or otherwise) by using the console, and the Sims 2 takes codes as well...)
It obviously belongs in Games.
Granted, if they were using, say, Perl, they still probably wouldn't know how to build anything big and important, but PHP in particular provides some simple, obvious, and well-defined mechanisms to implement Bad Coding Practices. Separation of the logic and the content are the first things thrown out the window; PHP's SQL-related functions invite no end of bad design (database-specific query functions instead of something generic like Perl's DBI classes, no prepared statements, practically BEGGING for SQL injection vulnerabilities -- then there's the whole register_globals fiasco, short-tags vs long tags and magic-quotes settings just to keep you excited, and so on and so forth...)
There are other things, too - some will point out the lack of decent namespaces, inconsistent function naming schemes, too many functions that are too similar, and such- many valid complaints, a few silly complaints -- but they pale in comparison to all the Bad Stuff that PHP invites upon itself from novice coders.
So, uhh, out of curiosity, what happens when a malicious client who knows something's up does something like, say, strip out all the whitespace, and then runs things through a whitespace prettifier?
If we're talking political abuse-of-science, can I link to this essay by Michael Crichton about "environmentalism as religion" just to remind everyone that things like this cut both ways?
I don't believe it was running there on the final product, though. Which is good, since you'd have to invoke the Java service management framework manually and give it some time to start up before using it...