This is quite harsh. While it is true that more could be done, it also true that it is thanks to security professionals that things are not as bad as they could be.
As opposed to what?! Bad is bad, especially in security, where one breach is all you need. I don't think there's any such thing as "secure to a degree". You're either secure or you're not.
Perhaps you meant that "the consequences are not as bad as they could be". But how much worse do you want it to get? So far the bad guys have been using victims' computers to send spam, DDoS attacks, phishing, empty bank accounts, steal email and IM accounts, spy your surfing, or bring the computer to a crawl with malware. What more do you want?
The article lists a long series of threats that endanger our systems everyday - but I fail to see how they are related to security professionals not doing their job. I'd rather blame the criminals.
I think you'll find that the state of security today is bad, because it's being designed poorly from the ground up. Why blame the criminal who breaches the system when you can blame whoever made the system? A system of any kind should only allow break-ins if it was meant to, not by accident.
Why blame viruses and play catch-up with antivirus definitions instead of making the OS virus resistant? Why blame whoever sent you a self-executable IM or email message instead of the dumbass who allowed your IM or email client to execute it? Why blame phishing attacks instead of designing the DNS system properly? Why blame spammers instead of the happy-go-lucky thing called SMTP? Need I go on? If a system has potential for abuse, it will be abused, period.
I think the movies should be about $10 and be able to be burned once to a DVD Disc so that people can enjoy them elsewhere and not on a PC.
You and mostly anybody else, but tell that to the Holywood execs. It's a simple problem, except they don't want to see it as such: they're competing with movies in 2 CD format, distributed for almost free, which only cost the downloader the Internet bandwidth and can be used however they please. How do you beat that? Hint: NOT with a 4+ GB download that plays on only one computer and is priced the same as a full DVD.
So what's the big advantage? Don't say the legal aspect. If that was really an issue, we wouldn't be talking about this. I suppose it would be nice to feel 100% legal, but under our conditions, not theirs.
So what they should do is sell downgraded versions about 1 or 1.5 GB big, without any restrictions, for at most 10 bucks. That and the legal bit would be worth it and make a good offer, but I reckon it's gonna be a while until we see that become the norm. Oh well, joke's on them. Any year that passes without such services is a year they don't collect from them. Let's see if they can match this would-be income with the money they get from lawsuits. No? Didn't think so either.
Nothing, and the article is pathetic. There's nothing "Web 2.0" in there, it's just a series of cheap tricks that any self-respectiv Web developer learned a long time ago. Floating tips, floating layers, showing and hiding elements, puleeeze.
Could you imagine what would happen if America was suddenly taken over by a fascist like Hitler?
"Taken over?" Don't you mean "if Americans vote themselves a dictatorship"? IIRC, even the Nazy Party back in the day in Germany rose through the vote of the people...
The difference between "good" and "bad" National ID's is made by the Government. And it strikes me, from the reactions I've seen here, that Americans fear their Government a lot more than people who have lived for 50 years under a communist dictatorship.
What the parent told about Span is pretty much the norm for many countries in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. It's mostly bureaucracy, but there are good sides to it. Identity theft is almost unheard of, and even if attempted it cracks down as some point along the way without liability for the victim. I don't have to shred and examine my trash for things that could compromise my identity. Many things and transactions of all kinds are safer, because it's not trivial to assume some else's identity.
I'm equally as bewildered by the Americans running around without ID's in the US as you are probably about having an ID on you at all times and using it for many daily tasks.
But think about it, what difference does it really make? I've outlined some advantages above. And the downside? You already leave a lot of traces everywhere as you interact with society and all kinds of services. If you think you are or can become some kind of stealth ninja, you are deluding yourself. This is real life, not a Dean R. Koontz novel.
Having a national ID doesn't prevent really determined criminals, but the lack of it makes trivial crime easy. In some respects, it's silly. I've heard that in the US you cannot prove you're not married. I mean, come on.
You've obviously never watched Star Trek. Only the head of the team can speak with the computer, the underlings have to use the LCAR panels exclusively. But it works out very very nice from what I've seen.
"Computer, create a database with all the wormhole related incidents in the Gamma quadrant, running back 200 years. Cross-reference with all known facts on the Bajoran wormhole." "Requested processing will take aproximately two hours."...[two hours later]... "Results are ready. One incident found. Stardate 35433.1. A ship full of nuns travelling from Earth to colony New Haven have accidentaly become intoxicated, got naked and engaged in a mass..." "Whoa there, stop it immediately, computer!" "What was that, Mr. LaForge?!" "Umm, Captain, I think the computer is trying to become sentient again. Don't worry, I think we can fine-tune the modulation in the deflector shield to interface with the holodeck and recreate the mass... I mean, examine the data thoroughly. I expect we'll have it fixed in... oh, two days, tops."
If it's vaporware, the Chinese gov would have to be in on it, and I don't see the purpose. You don't just pull cheap tricks like this in China and get away with it.
There is a danger that GNU/Linux will get a bad name because it mostly installed on very cheap systems. Often these projects tend to fail and then the scape goat will be GNU/Linux. Better would be that large hardware firms put GNU/Linux on there system. Just imagine Ubuntu on all Dell, HP... systems. That would be the break for GNU/Linux
This is a very simplistic way of looking at things, in so much that I don't know where to begin.
No, GNU/Linux won't get a bad name for working on cheap hardware, it will get a good name for working everywhere. And what's wrong with cheap hardware that gets the job done? Who says I have to spend thousands on a new computer every time someone releases a new shiny OS or game?
Large enough companies already put Linux on their products. Think IBM. Think supercomputers.
As for Dell and HP, and many other vendors, they are tied with lots of threads into the market and its connections. They can't very well afford the message that bundling GNU/Linux would send. Perhaps, in time, but it's often a delicate matter. You think Microsoft would just sit there and take it? Have we forgotten all the sweet OEM deals going around, the under the table hand twisting, the monopoly allegations?
Yeah the icons we have were made maybe half by me, half by kathleen, with a few stragglers by random users. Over the years they have been made in photoshop, the gimp, and using all sorts of different techniques.
The moral of the story? Take your PC off of auto updates and instead set it to ask permission first!
(btw, my copy of XP is legit.)
If it wasn't, you wouldn't have been able to disable auto-updates. Owners of copies that fail genuine check can choose between auto-updates or no updates, period.
I'd take it one step further and change the mouse to an oversized hot pink X with a desktop that says "Liscence key not valid". Anyone seeing that on someone elses computer would know it was stolen and there might be social pressure to pay for what you can steal.
But they don't want that. Microsoft has never really tried to cut off illegal users in all these years, although it could've done so at any point. They were content with that fact that piracy made their products spread and made them a de factor standard.
They cannot afford to actually hurt Windows users, even non-paying ones. The very fact that they're starting to do things like this now has a clear meaning for me: their sales are going down.
Their revenue is starting to take a turn for the worse to the point they have to start tightening the knot. As long as money was coming in thick they could afford to ignore the pirates. They don't ignore them anymore. Think about it. Why not? Dunno, it's just a speculation, but it makes damn good sense.
As for the pink bunny screen, no sane software produced would do that in a million years, for exactly the reasons above. You can be pretty sure that someone you embarass like that will NEVER buy. A MAYBE is better than NEVER. As long as there's a chance in hell of a purchase, they'll let the pirate be, no matter how loud they cry "thief" via BSA and all that.
It can be interpreted either way. Either a search engine for audio files with speech recognition, which could be used to index podcasts and news streams; or a voice-driven interface instead of a visual one. Now which is it?
Saying Linux is too fat is like complaining that there are too many pieces in an erector set. You don't have to use what you don't want to.
Exactly. Have those people compiled a kernel lately? Did they notice the modular design and the way you can strip out a lot of things you don't want?
I run Linux on a 206 MHz handheld with 32 megs of RAM, off a 512 MB flash-card. I use Familiar as a distro and Opie for a desktop environment. I have IR, Bluetooth, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, I have Opera as a browser and a whole lot of software I can't even begin to name (ipkgfind counts 35,000+ packages).
So what's with this complete bullshit about Linux not being fit for a 500 MHz/ 128 MB RAM machine? Negroponte didn't even support his statement in any way, that phrase you see in the Slashdot summary is all he said in the article too (serves me right for RTFA).
Don't get tricked into thinking about the regular desktop distro and how to slim it down for the 100$ laptop. There are established handheld distro's out there for which the specs of the 100$ laptop would be an upgrade, that's what they should go with. Think bottom up, not the other way around.
On one hand, I agree that it's far too early to be making such speculations. Who knows what more than a year into the future may look like?
OTOH, I wouldn't be so categorical about all low-end machines upgrading all the time. Vendors of both software (mostly games) and hardware (all of them) like to push new stuff down our throats all the time. But the insane upgrade reace will have to stop eventually once people realize it may not be worth it. Some of us don't want to, period.
At some point, a software producer is bound to overplay their hand and try pushing consumers a little too far. Will Microsoft do that with Vista? I know I like my low-end desktop machine. It works perfectly well and I does everything I need. Anybody who tries to force me to upgrade anything can go suck on a carrot.
Remember in the nineties when every web page had a list of three thousand keywords at the very bottom of the page to fool the search engines of the time?
What nineties, I see it today all the time. Check out this dumb sucker.
So far it's been mostly gentoo from what i've seen, but there are some places that have to use RedHat because their management said it has to have 'support.'
The need for official support is obvious, even if in reality it ends up being provided by the on site local admins. No need to write it down in quotes and roll our eyes. Official agencies have to have somebody accountable, it's part of justifying the spending of the public dollar.
As for Gentoo, sorry, but it makes little sense why anybody would choose it for a production environment. Yes, it has the emerge mechanism, but that the theoretical usage of emerge is pretty much the only thing it has going. It's a hobby distro from the start, it was meant to be one.
If you're in a large scale deployment scenario you need a distro that will provide binaries, a seamless update and install package management, good hardware support and, why not, good integration of a Windows emulator. I'm not going to mention any other distro names so as not to be accused I'm trying to promote it over Gentoo, but otherwise the idea is just ridiculous. A workstation, much like a production server, has no need for a compiler to be even present.
I mean, M$ has pleasing to look at icons, whereas OO has old Windows 3.1 looking icons.
I think Jakub Steiner would probably take offense at this statement. I mean, the dude spent all this time designing a huge set of icons for OpenOffice. Now, why OpenOffice doesn't actually uses them, that's another story.
Both suffer from serious shortcomings in proportional representation. A party squeaks into power with barely 50% of parliament / congress / etc, and they can run the country like there is no opposition at all.
Not always. Sometimes the opposition can and does block the actions of those in power. But generally they try to reach compromises and consensus and move things forward somehow. Would it be better if the system allowed even very small parts of it to block the initiatives of the people in power? Do you think anything would ever get done? It would be an eternal stalemate and re-elections every 6 months.
Both also suffer from serious shortcomings in letting the meritous reach the top. Both countries are starting to foster dynasties -- the law says anyone can become president / prime-minister, and while its true that any one can run -- increasingly only members from certain powerful families ever actually manage it.
Gee, big news. Political struggles take time, money, and powerful friends. Yes, John Doe can walk in off the street and if he's charismatic people may like him. But throughout the election process and even if he got elected, he needs the support of the system to make things move. Who has the biggest power in the system? Those who dedicate most time and resources to achieving it. What's so surprising that connections and power produce more connections and power? You're extremely naive if you really complain about John Doe not being able to get anywhere without any of these to back him up.
Besides, even in an utopical society where everybody is perfectly equal and any kind of "raising above" is non-existant (ie. there is no monetary system nor any method of owning anything), there would still be leaders and connections and peer pressure and all kinds of human power. Think of "The Dispossessed", by Ursula K. LeGuinn. It describes a fictional anarchist society of exactly this kind, and yet there are characters who still manage to aquire power and use it to their own advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
This is quite harsh. While it is true that more could be done, it also true that it is thanks to security professionals that things are not as bad as they could be.
As opposed to what?! Bad is bad, especially in security, where one breach is all you need. I don't think there's any such thing as "secure to a degree". You're either secure or you're not.
Perhaps you meant that "the consequences are not as bad as they could be". But how much worse do you want it to get? So far the bad guys have been using victims' computers to send spam, DDoS attacks, phishing, empty bank accounts, steal email and IM accounts, spy your surfing, or bring the computer to a crawl with malware. What more do you want?
The article lists a long series of threats that endanger our systems everyday - but I fail to see how they are related to security professionals not doing their job. I'd rather blame the criminals.
In that case, you're in serious need of some required reading. Try this for size: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security.
I think you'll find that the state of security today is bad, because it's being designed poorly from the ground up. Why blame the criminal who breaches the system when you can blame whoever made the system? A system of any kind should only allow break-ins if it was meant to, not by accident.
Why blame viruses and play catch-up with antivirus definitions instead of making the OS virus resistant? Why blame whoever sent you a self-executable IM or email message instead of the dumbass who allowed your IM or email client to execute it? Why blame phishing attacks instead of designing the DNS system properly? Why blame spammers instead of the happy-go-lucky thing called SMTP? Need I go on? If a system has potential for abuse, it will be abused, period.
Obligatory Penny Arcade: yes, that really is a catchy acronym.
I think the movies should be about $10 and be able to be burned once to a DVD Disc so that people can enjoy them elsewhere and not on a PC.
You and mostly anybody else, but tell that to the Holywood execs. It's a simple problem, except they don't want to see it as such: they're competing with movies in 2 CD format, distributed for almost free, which only cost the downloader the Internet bandwidth and can be used however they please. How do you beat that? Hint: NOT with a 4+ GB download that plays on only one computer and is priced the same as a full DVD.
So what's the big advantage? Don't say the legal aspect. If that was really an issue, we wouldn't be talking about this. I suppose it would be nice to feel 100% legal, but under our conditions, not theirs.
So what they should do is sell downgraded versions about 1 or 1.5 GB big, without any restrictions, for at most 10 bucks. That and the legal bit would be worth it and make a good offer, but I reckon it's gonna be a while until we see that become the norm. Oh well, joke's on them. Any year that passes without such services is a year they don't collect from them. Let's see if they can match this would-be income with the money they get from lawsuits. No? Didn't think so either.
What's so new about JavaScript?
Nothing, and the article is pathetic. There's nothing "Web 2.0" in there, it's just a series of cheap tricks that any self-respectiv Web developer learned a long time ago. Floating tips, floating layers, showing and hiding elements, puleeeze.
...multiplied three times.
Could you imagine what would happen if America was suddenly taken over by a fascist like Hitler?
"Taken over?" Don't you mean "if Americans vote themselves a dictatorship"? IIRC, even the Nazy Party back in the day in Germany rose through the vote of the people...
The difference between "good" and "bad" National ID's is made by the Government. And it strikes me, from the reactions I've seen here, that Americans fear their Government a lot more than people who have lived for 50 years under a communist dictatorship.
What the parent told about Span is pretty much the norm for many countries in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. It's mostly bureaucracy, but there are good sides to it. Identity theft is almost unheard of, and even if attempted it cracks down as some point along the way without liability for the victim. I don't have to shred and examine my trash for things that could compromise my identity. Many things and transactions of all kinds are safer, because it's not trivial to assume some else's identity.
I'm equally as bewildered by the Americans running around without ID's in the US as you are probably about having an ID on you at all times and using it for many daily tasks.
But think about it, what difference does it really make? I've outlined some advantages above. And the downside? You already leave a lot of traces everywhere as you interact with society and all kinds of services. If you think you are or can become some kind of stealth ninja, you are deluding yourself. This is real life, not a Dean R. Koontz novel.
Having a national ID doesn't prevent really determined criminals, but the lack of it makes trivial crime easy. In some respects, it's silly. I've heard that in the US you cannot prove you're not married. I mean, come on.
You've obviously never watched Star Trek. Only the head of the team can speak with the computer, the underlings have to use the LCAR panels exclusively. But it works out very very nice from what I've seen.
...[two hours later]...
"Computer, create a database with all the wormhole related incidents in the Gamma quadrant, running back 200 years. Cross-reference with all known facts on the Bajoran wormhole."
"Requested processing will take aproximately two hours."
"Results are ready. One incident found. Stardate 35433.1. A ship full of nuns travelling from Earth to colony New Haven have accidentaly become intoxicated, got naked and engaged in a mass..."
"Whoa there, stop it immediately, computer!"
"What was that, Mr. LaForge?!"
"Umm, Captain, I think the computer is trying to become sentient again. Don't worry, I think we can fine-tune the modulation in the deflector shield to interface with the holodeck and recreate the mass... I mean, examine the data thoroughly. I expect we'll have it fixed in... oh, two days, tops."
If it's vaporware, the Chinese gov would have to be in on it, and I don't see the purpose. You don't just pull cheap tricks like this in China and get away with it.
There is a danger that GNU/Linux will get a bad name because it mostly installed on very cheap systems. Often these projects tend to fail and then the scape goat will be GNU/Linux. Better would be that large hardware firms put GNU/Linux on there system. Just imagine Ubuntu on all Dell, HP ... systems. That would be the break for GNU/Linux
This is a very simplistic way of looking at things, in so much that I don't know where to begin.
No, GNU/Linux won't get a bad name for working on cheap hardware, it will get a good name for working everywhere. And what's wrong with cheap hardware that gets the job done? Who says I have to spend thousands on a new computer every time someone releases a new shiny OS or game?
Large enough companies already put Linux on their products. Think IBM. Think supercomputers.
As for Dell and HP, and many other vendors, they are tied with lots of threads into the market and its connections. They can't very well afford the message that bundling GNU/Linux would send. Perhaps, in time, but it's often a delicate matter. You think Microsoft would just sit there and take it? Have we forgotten all the sweet OEM deals going around, the under the table hand twisting, the monopoly allegations?
Yeah the icons we have were made maybe half by me, half by kathleen, with a few stragglers by random users. Over the years they have been made in photoshop, the gimp, and using all sorts of different techniques.
You must be so proud. I can tell.
But the question on everyone's mind is ... does it run Linux?
Sure it does. Didn't he mention that it's one of those 100$ laptops?
The moral of the story? Take your PC off of auto updates and instead set it to ask permission first!
(btw, my copy of XP is legit.)
If it wasn't, you wouldn't have been able to disable auto-updates. Owners of copies that fail genuine check can choose between auto-updates or no updates, period.
...Or the next worm...
I'd take it one step further and change the mouse to an oversized hot pink X with a desktop that says "Liscence key not valid". Anyone seeing that on someone elses computer would know it was stolen and there might be social pressure to pay for what you can steal.
But they don't want that. Microsoft has never really tried to cut off illegal users in all these years, although it could've done so at any point. They were content with that fact that piracy made their products spread and made them a de factor standard.
They cannot afford to actually hurt Windows users, even non-paying ones. The very fact that they're starting to do things like this now has a clear meaning for me: their sales are going down.
Their revenue is starting to take a turn for the worse to the point they have to start tightening the knot. As long as money was coming in thick they could afford to ignore the pirates. They don't ignore them anymore. Think about it. Why not? Dunno, it's just a speculation, but it makes damn good sense.
As for the pink bunny screen, no sane software produced would do that in a million years, for exactly the reasons above. You can be pretty sure that someone you embarass like that will NEVER buy. A MAYBE is better than NEVER. As long as there's a chance in hell of a purchase, they'll let the pirate be, no matter how loud they cry "thief" via BSA and all that.
At least it's not a dupe... but the time ain't lost yet.
It can be interpreted either way. Either a search engine for audio files with speech recognition, which could be used to index podcasts and news streams; or a voice-driven interface instead of a visual one. Now which is it?
HP Jornada 720.
Saying Linux is too fat is like complaining that there are too many pieces in an erector set. You don't have to use what you don't want to.
Exactly. Have those people compiled a kernel lately? Did they notice the modular design and the way you can strip out a lot of things you don't want?
I run Linux on a 206 MHz handheld with 32 megs of RAM, off a 512 MB flash-card. I use Familiar as a distro and Opie for a desktop environment. I have IR, Bluetooth, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, I have Opera as a browser and a whole lot of software I can't even begin to name (ipkgfind counts 35,000+ packages).
So what's with this complete bullshit about Linux not being fit for a 500 MHz/ 128 MB RAM machine? Negroponte didn't even support his statement in any way, that phrase you see in the Slashdot summary is all he said in the article too (serves me right for RTFA).
Don't get tricked into thinking about the regular desktop distro and how to slim it down for the 100$ laptop. There are established handheld distro's out there for which the specs of the 100$ laptop would be an upgrade, that's what they should go with. Think bottom up, not the other way around.
On one hand, I agree that it's far too early to be making such speculations. Who knows what more than a year into the future may look like?
OTOH, I wouldn't be so categorical about all low-end machines upgrading all the time. Vendors of both software (mostly games) and hardware (all of them) like to push new stuff down our throats all the time. But the insane upgrade reace will have to stop eventually once people realize it may not be worth it. Some of us don't want to, period.
At some point, a software producer is bound to overplay their hand and try pushing consumers a little too far. Will Microsoft do that with Vista? I know I like my low-end desktop machine. It works perfectly well and I does everything I need. Anybody who tries to force me to upgrade anything can go suck on a carrot.
But it sounds like it's more puritanical than the US, something I didn't think was possible. What is up with this country?
Didja ever hear how prostitutes end up making the most puritanical and righteous housewives?
Remember in the nineties when every web page had a list of three thousand keywords at the very bottom of the page to fool the search engines of the time?
What nineties, I see it today all the time. Check out this dumb sucker.
So far it's been mostly gentoo from what i've seen, but there are some places that have to use RedHat because their management said it has to have 'support.'
The need for official support is obvious, even if in reality it ends up being provided by the on site local admins. No need to write it down in quotes and roll our eyes. Official agencies have to have somebody accountable, it's part of justifying the spending of the public dollar.
As for Gentoo, sorry, but it makes little sense why anybody would choose it for a production environment. Yes, it has the emerge mechanism, but that the theoretical usage of emerge is pretty much the only thing it has going. It's a hobby distro from the start, it was meant to be one.
If you're in a large scale deployment scenario you need a distro that will provide binaries, a seamless update and install package management, good hardware support and, why not, good integration of a Windows emulator. I'm not going to mention any other distro names so as not to be accused I'm trying to promote it over Gentoo, but otherwise the idea is just ridiculous. A workstation, much like a production server, has no need for a compiler to be even present.
I mean, M$ has pleasing to look at icons, whereas OO has old Windows 3.1 looking icons.
I think Jakub Steiner would probably take offense at this statement. I mean, the dude spent all this time designing a huge set of icons for OpenOffice. Now, why OpenOffice doesn't actually uses them, that's another story.
Both suffer from serious shortcomings in proportional representation. A party squeaks into power with barely 50% of parliament / congress / etc, and they can run the country like there is no opposition at all.
Not always. Sometimes the opposition can and does block the actions of those in power. But generally they try to reach compromises and consensus and move things forward somehow. Would it be better if the system allowed even very small parts of it to block the initiatives of the people in power? Do you think anything would ever get done? It would be an eternal stalemate and re-elections every 6 months.
Both also suffer from serious shortcomings in letting the meritous reach the top. Both countries are starting to foster dynasties -- the law says anyone can become president / prime-minister, and while its true that any one can run -- increasingly only members from certain powerful families ever actually manage it.
Gee, big news. Political struggles take time, money, and powerful friends. Yes, John Doe can walk in off the street and if he's charismatic people may like him. But throughout the election process and even if he got elected, he needs the support of the system to make things move. Who has the biggest power in the system? Those who dedicate most time and resources to achieving it. What's so surprising that connections and power produce more connections and power? You're extremely naive if you really complain about John Doe not being able to get anywhere without any of these to back him up.
Besides, even in an utopical society where everybody is perfectly equal and any kind of "raising above" is non-existant (ie. there is no monetary system nor any method of owning anything), there would still be leaders and connections and peer pressure and all kinds of human power. Think of "The Dispossessed", by Ursula K. LeGuinn. It describes a fictional anarchist society of exactly this kind, and yet there are characters who still manage to aquire power and use it to their own advantage.