I hate it when people say, "Oh, there can't be life on these because...." or, "life can't for in an environment that hostile..." Really pisses me off. What the hell do you guys/gals know? Damn-near nothing, that's what. You have experienced a smallish percentage of ONE world. So, what was the weather like on Jupiter yesterday? What, you don't know?
Listen, guys. Here, on *this* planet, is life that can thrive on Jupiter. Yeah, that's right, it exists already. They're hidden in sealed-off caves beneath the ocean floor. There's microbes in the Antarctic.
The people who say life isn't likely to exist on these planets because of the extreme environment are probably the same people who think we're killing the Earth with pollution. We're friggin' *gnats* compared to the Earth. We try our hardest to destroy the Earth - and I mean bend *all* of our global effort towards it - and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference a million years from now. And according to our best knowledge, a million years is the blink of an eye. At *best* we'd be a tiny high/low point on a graph, and you'd need a magnifying glass to see the damage we did.
So, to sum up:
a) We don't know a damned thing about these planets, and we have absolutely *NO* idea whether or not life exists on them.
b) Life here on Earth, in our own backyard, can stand extremes like you wouldn't believe. Pressures that makes diamonds out of coal, cold that comes close to absolute zero(coldest known temperature is something like -200C, which is only 72/73 degrees above absolute zero), heat that would melt anything humans have ever produced are nothing to life.
c) Okay, offtopic, but I'm on a roll;) We can't destroy the Earth. At this point in time, the worst we could do wouldn't make a dent in the scheme of things, Earth-scale.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
As one of those "rare people" who have the technical knowledge to understand a broad range of computer/information-related ideas/tasks/problems/solutions, and who also has some good managerial/political skills, I'd like to say that I agree with you in principle.
However, it's as easy as you make it seem. I've learned quite a few things, and one of them is that most people participate in active stereotyping to some degree or another. In my experience, the more of a "fringe" group you are(translated: the more specialized your proffesion or way of life), the more you stereotype other people. I've suffered from this myself, and at least for me it stemmed from the fact that most people quickly and effortlessly put me into a stereotype, often with confidence-shattering results.
What I'm trying to say is that a lot of managerial-types I've dealt with need things explained to them not only in terms they understand, but also from someone who they think is a member of their own stereotype.
On the other hand, most techies I've dealt with also need things explained to them in terms they understand(and, well, let's be honest - everyone needs that for the most part), but they also need to hear it from someone they feel is a member of their particular stereotype.
This is a very difficult thing to accomplish. In one particular job, I did fairly well. I'm a pretty good actor, and had two different personalities/vocabularies/mannerism-sets to use with the two different groups of people. I thought it would be a great idea if everyone got together to hammer out some issues, and everything fell apart.
The managerial types saw that I related well with the techies, and they immediately got their hackles up. (after talking to a few of them, they said they had felt betrayed - I had put them on. In reality, that's exactly what I did, because it was what I needed to do to get the job done) The techies say the way I talked with the managerial staff and felt that I was really sort of a "spy". Someone who was actually management, trying to horn in on them. Fact is, both groups had taken my suggestions well, and we had implemented what we could. Compromises were quickly and easily reached, but as soon as everyone saw that I wasn't part of their stereotype, they didn't trust me. I really don't think there's much that can be done about it. You NEED to be able to talk to people in a way they'll understand. And, if you honestly sympathise with them, you shouldn't hide it. In this particular case, I was pretty much screwed. Luckily the project was finished and I was able to move on, but I'll never put myself in that situation again.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
No big deal, for me. I'm pretty happy with 2.2.17, and I'll be even happier with 2.2.18(the pre- series has some bugfixes I've been waiting for). I'm glad Linus decided to postpone the release, but it would have been nice had the article mentioned specifically what was holding it up. ie; bugfixes, waiting for some important code/drivers, etc., etc..
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Don't try this version of Netscape on Linux. I just tried it a few hours ago..
Lots of rendering bugs, slow (very slow!), a very slow java implementation, problems with Javascripts...
You're on drugs, and you must be lying. While I admit that I don't think Mozilla is yet ready for prime time, it does not suck as bad as you say it does. You are probably lying outright, but I doubt if I'll every know. Both Konqueror and now this latest release of Mozilla are better than Netscape. Don't tell people not to upgrade to one or the other. Let them make the decision. Ever since Troll Tech GPL'd QT, I havn't cared much about whichever desktop I use. Whichever fits the job. You, on the other hand, are spreading lies. Go back to the hole you crawled from; you're giving us all a bad name.
Dave
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Out the modem,
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I'm sorry to say, but there's a big difference between the environments of Mars and the outside of Mir. Mars is much friendlier:) Plenty of CO2, quite a bit of warmth(relatively speaking), radiation shielding, some good wind to spread the seeds, etc., etc..
Boy, who knows? We might have already started colonizing Mars, by unkowingly sending along some bacteria with the rover and its friends.
Dave
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...the serious lack of graphical user interfaces in Linux. Seriously, smbclient has been sitting in text-mode hell ever since it was created. No Linux programmer has even thought of creating a GUI network browser. Ever tried pushing a Linux programmer into building a GUI into his work? "Sorry, can't do that, too busy hacking the Cue:Cat!"
Good lord I can't believe you have a +1 bonus. Someone should shoot the adminstrators for allowing this to happen.
First of all, there is no lack of graphical interfaces on Linux, there is a proliferation of them. Be more specific. There may be no good graphical interfaces(in your opinion), but that does not mean they don't exist. And there ARE nice graphical front-ends to smbclient. My favorite is LinNeighborhood, and an old stand-by is xSMBrowser. There. Not only have Linux programmers thougt of creating a GUI network browser, but they DID. Shut up please, I don't like your ignorance. And you want to push a Linux programmer into building a GUI into his work? Why the hell don't you pay him, smart-ass? Or, better yet, why don't you do it yourself you lazy bastard? Most of these programmers are doing it for FREE. You want something, you pay for it. I'm sorry, but I'm not going spend years of my life trying to please you because you TOLD me to(have you ever ASKED for a feature in a program, as opposed to demanding it?!?).
Contrary to what you may believe, Linux is for getting work done. That means that if your hard drive failed, and all but 8 Megs of memory has been destroyed, you still have a deadline. What are you going to do? Go out and buy a new computer, spend hours setting it up, etc., etc., or are you just going to pop in that rescue disk you made last week to finish off what you started? I'm sorry pal, Linux was not designed from the ground up to be what you want it to be. Go somewhere else.
[big sigh]
Ahhh... That felt gooood:) Flamebait can, at times, be useful:)
Have a nice day:)
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Well, I don't know about the original poster, but I'll give you some examples of how Microsoft is using its desktop OS/Applications monopoly to help with the X-Box.
1) DirectX is a direct result of Microsoft's monopoly power, and it is held as one of the key features for the X-Box. Without its monopoly, it would not be able to leverage it the way it's being leveraged now.
2) Through its monopoly, Microsoft has managed to bring many companies to their knees. There's no way to know what might have happened had some of those companies been around to compete. So, even though we can't be sure, I'll say that Microsoft wouldn't have been as successful with those other companies around. It probably wouldn't have been successful enough to throw billions of dollars into a project to which they have almost no experience(ie: hardware manufacturing).
3) DirectX8 will most definetly be X-Box-centric. You can bet it'll support everything the X-Box graphics chipset does. There has already been industry rumbling about how(as opposed to in the past) Microsoft isn't listening to ATI, Matrox, 3Dfx about features they'd like included in the next version of DirectX. If ATI, Matrox, and 3Dfx start going down(not that a few of those arn't already close), you know people will be buying the X-Box for games, 'cause the PC ain't good enough no more(no competition in the graphics card market is a bad thing; look at where 3Dfx is now).
Just a few thoughts.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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You're right, it doesn't come right out and say, "Our software will read information from your computer, and then send the information back to our site in order to bypass any firewall or NAT box," but if you read the entire document carefully(it was obviously carefully written) it all leads to that conclusion. I've been wrong before, but I don't think I'm wrong on this one. There are dozens of little clues here and there, but they all fit in very nicely. 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
After getting over my initial disgust at what was written, I went over it again. This amazing innovation relies on the client(the computer being scannd) to install software. That's how the claim to "bypass" NAT and firewalling. So, this test will be totally unrealistic(as far as testing to see if hackers can get into your carefully setup system). For a hacker to do the same thing, they'd have to get you to voluntarily install some software(which, admittedly, is not out of the realm of possbility). Anyways, this is a crock for the most part. I suggest the fellow who wrote the paper reply to some of these posts.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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You're exactly right - he *is* suggesting that people install his weirdo software to get his "NanoProbes" to work. All his site will do is send requests for information to the client-side program(which, of course, has unrestricted access to the computer in question), and then the client-side program fires off the results back to grc.com. Bloody ***wipe. I used to respect grc.com for their ShieldsUp! service, but this is going too far.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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Down the wire,
The reason why he's specifically targetting Windows is that his "NanoProbes" require a client-side server. His "NanoProbes" talk to the client side program. The program gets information from the computer, and sends it back to grc.com . He's cheating.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
You know how he gets past the NAT/firewall? A *client-side program*. He's just sending packets to that program that the user installed, and the program is getting the data, and sending it back out. He's not "bypassing" the firewall, he's written a bloody server so he can read people's machine's information. Good lord, that's an ugly hack if I've ever seend one.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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I think that just about sums this up. They've put a fancy name on an existing technology, and claimed "innovation and invention." 'nmap' uses this sort of thing every day, it seems. Sure, they may have tweaked the packets to elicit specific responses from the target, but how is that any different than existing fingerprinting techniques? I don't think it is(although, I'm don't really know a whole heck of a lot about this stuff).
I used to really respect GRC. Their "ShieldUp!" was pretty darned cool, but these announcements all sound like bloddy half-baked press releases. I could be proven wrong, but this sounds really lame.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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This is nice to see. Big, front-page article saying they've been hacked, letting their users know. How many web sites do you think would do that for their users? Too few.
On the other hand, would we have been notified if the hackers hadn't put a big article on the front page? Food for though, but I'd like to think so.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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I'm not sure why it is that there can't be a small, efficient, simple, window manager for X.
There are plenty of small, light window managers for X11. You just havn't found them. Since they're all over the place, I imagine you havn't found any because you haven't looked. Examples: Sawfish, BlackBox", and LarsWM. Just to name a few.
maximize a window so it fills as much of the screen as possible without overlapping things you don't want it to
That's a configuration error. The three window managers I use on a regular basis(Enlightenment, Sawfish, and IceWM) all support this feature.
No offense, but if I had any moderation points, your post would quickly be rather to (-1:Troll). Pretty much everything you railed against is configurable at the user's end. You're not bitching about KDE and GNOME, you're bitching about what Corel Linux uses for its default desktop(or Debian, or Red Hat, whatever). Sure, it might take you a bit of work to get things "just right", but it can be done. Pretty easily, too. So, most of your post is not only trolling, but also *WRONG*, as in incorrect. Sorry to have to break the news to you.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Okay, so I don't buy millions of dollars worth of hardware every week. I may not arrange licensing agreements with IBM. But IBM looks a lot like Cisco - sure, they've got patents coming out of their wazoo, but they don't use their strength to control the market(so it seems. One can't be too sure). The fact that they're willing to GPL stuff sort of supports that idea.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Shame on them for not putting Bind 9 in. It has been out for 2 weeks now. wtf.
Hey there:) I assume you mean to say that they shouldn't be putting in such an untested piece of software in a "stable" distribution.
Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using Bind 9.0? I betcha the first thing that ran through your head was, "Well, they can't have been using it for more than two weeks!" Hey, this Bind is Open Source. No reason why they couldn't have been using it ever since the development for 9.0 started. You don't know how stable they've made their implementation - Red Hat 7.0 isn't even out yet, so I don't see how you can know. Don't be so judgemental.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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You may be right in saying that these things might not sell well, but I firmly believe there is a market. All else being equal, a Cellphone/PDA combo will be smaller than a standalone PDA and a standalone cell phone. People will pay for that. 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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And, not to mention the fact that they'll be using an encrypted version of the client's IP address as part of the sequence number. So, not only does every connection use a wee bit of CPU, but every *packet* does too, since it'll either have to encrypt the client's IP for each packet(which is actually what the author suggests), or keep a cache of some sort. 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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Down the wire,
I think they've (maybe) partially solved the current problem, but I don't know enough about it to be sure. However, I think this particular solution opens up a whole new big can 'o worms. If they do some encryption in the SYN/ACK part of the hand shake, that'll take up a wee bit of processing power. Multiply that response by the hundreds of thousands of times that a DDOS attack would elicit, and you've now got a server running at 100% CPU load. The server, as with a regular DDOS attack, is now toasted until the attack stops.
At least before, it was just bandwidth. Sure, nasty. But this about a server room with 60-70 rackmounts all running at 100% CPU. That'll be hot. Too hot. I worked for a little while at a Hydro company, and they spent about 60 grand on cooling for a single server room, and that'd only work up until all the servers were running at about 60% capacity. After that, we figured at about two hours before the fire suppression systems would fire.
Mind you, with load-balancing and such, it might only be a few computers which would run at 100%, because since a connection was never completed, none of the other servers ever did anything. But, still, the DDOS attack would succeed. And I'd rather it just take away all my bandwidth then (possibly) costing thousands of dollars in damages.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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First poster: And people talk about GNOME's icons looking cheap?
Second Poster: What?!?! I've never heard that. The gnome icons are central to why so many people think gnome looks so slick.
I've got to say I agree with the second fellow. Don't under-estimate quality artwork. We're finally getting the attention to detail that we see every day in the real world - texture, shades, lights, etc., - in computers. People will pay good money for that experience on their desktop - especially if the attention to detail is done so well that the computer itself feels "natural".
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Damn! Those are some fine-lookin' shots. No offense - I like Linux, and my computer is now officially Microsoft Free(tm), but damn! The artist in me comes out when I see these. Seems like MS has finally realized "pretty" is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of the elements in those screen shots were not only done proffesionally, but done well. Especially the Control Panel. I had to stop myself from pushing the icons on my monitor with my finger. I guess that's the plus of controlling everything from the top-down. You can do whatever you damn well please.:) Ah well, I still love my Linux boxen. And I can still get work done with 'em;)
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Slashdot Mirror
I hate it when people say, "Oh, there can't be life on these because ...." or, "life can't for in an environment that hostile ..." Really pisses me off. What the hell do you guys/gals know? Damn-near nothing, that's what. You have experienced a smallish percentage of ONE world. So, what was the weather like on Jupiter yesterday? What, you don't know?
;) We can't destroy the Earth. At this point in time, the worst we could do wouldn't make a dent in the scheme of things, Earth-scale.
Listen, guys. Here, on *this* planet, is life that can thrive on Jupiter. Yeah, that's right, it exists already. They're hidden in sealed-off caves beneath the ocean floor. There's microbes in the Antarctic.
The people who say life isn't likely to exist on these planets because of the extreme environment are probably the same people who think we're killing the Earth with pollution. We're friggin' *gnats* compared to the Earth. We try our hardest to destroy the Earth - and I mean bend *all* of our global effort towards it - and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference a million years from now. And according to our best knowledge, a million years is the blink of an eye. At *best* we'd be a tiny high/low point on a graph, and you'd need a magnifying glass to see the damage we did.
So, to sum up:
a) We don't know a damned thing about these planets, and we have absolutely *NO* idea whether or not life exists on them.
b) Life here on Earth, in our own backyard, can stand extremes like you wouldn't believe. Pressures that makes diamonds out of coal, cold that comes close to absolute zero(coldest known temperature is something like -200C, which is only 72/73 degrees above absolute zero), heat that would melt anything humans have ever produced are nothing to life.
c) Okay, offtopic, but I'm on a roll
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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As one of those "rare people" who have the technical knowledge to understand a broad range of computer/information-related ideas/tasks/problems/solutions, and who also has some good managerial/political skills, I'd like to say that I agree with you in principle.
However, it's as easy as you make it seem. I've learned quite a few things, and one of them is that most people participate in active stereotyping to some degree or another. In my experience, the more of a "fringe" group you are(translated: the more specialized your proffesion or way of life), the more you stereotype other people. I've suffered from this myself, and at least for me it stemmed from the fact that most people quickly and effortlessly put me into a stereotype, often with confidence-shattering results.
What I'm trying to say is that a lot of managerial-types I've dealt with need things explained to them not only in terms they understand, but also from someone who they think is a member of their own stereotype.
On the other hand, most techies I've dealt with also need things explained to them in terms they understand(and, well, let's be honest - everyone needs that for the most part), but they also need to hear it from someone they feel is a member of their particular stereotype.
This is a very difficult thing to accomplish. In one particular job, I did fairly well. I'm a pretty good actor, and had two different personalities/vocabularies/mannerism-sets to use with the two different groups of people. I thought it would be a great idea if everyone got together to hammer out some issues, and everything fell apart.
The managerial types saw that I related well with the techies, and they immediately got their hackles up. (after talking to a few of them, they said they had felt betrayed - I had put them on. In reality, that's exactly what I did, because it was what I needed to do to get the job done) The techies say the way I talked with the managerial staff and felt that I was really sort of a "spy". Someone who was actually management, trying to horn in on them. Fact is, both groups had taken my suggestions well, and we had implemented what we could. Compromises were quickly and easily reached, but as soon as everyone saw that I wasn't part of their stereotype, they didn't trust me. I really don't think there's much that can be done about it. You NEED to be able to talk to people in a way they'll understand. And, if you honestly sympathise with them, you shouldn't hide it. In this particular case, I was pretty much screwed. Luckily the project was finished and I was able to move on, but I'll never put myself in that situation again.
Dave
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No big deal, for me. I'm pretty happy with 2.2.17, and I'll be even happier with 2.2.18(the pre- series has some bugfixes I've been waiting for). I'm glad Linus decided to postpone the release, but it would have been nice had the article mentioned specifically what was holding it up. ie; bugfixes, waiting for some important code/drivers, etc., etc..
Dave
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Allright, cool© I apologize for misunderstanding© It looked like your post was yet another "bash anything that isn't part of KDE2" post© There are too many of them these days© Anyways, yeah you should have been a bit more clear, but I realize that you probably didn't know you'd get modded up so fast :
I was also unclear, in that I stupidly assumed that when you said "Netscape", you mean Mozilla which I use¥almost every day¥I would use it constantly, if it wern't for the friggin' auto-focus feature[bug]© And yeah, the latest nightlies are bloody amazing :
Dave
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Don't try this version of Netscape on Linux. I just tried it a few hours ago..
Lots of rendering bugs, slow (very slow!), a very slow java implementation, problems with Javascripts...
You're on drugs, and you must be lying. While I admit that I don't think Mozilla is yet ready for prime time, it does not suck as bad as you say it does. You are probably lying outright, but I doubt if I'll every know. Both Konqueror and now this latest release of Mozilla are better than Netscape. Don't tell people not to upgrade to one or the other. Let them make the decision. Ever since Troll Tech GPL'd QT, I havn't cared much about whichever desktop I use. Whichever fits the job. You, on the other hand, are spreading lies. Go back to the hole you crawled from; you're giving us all a bad name.
Dave
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Out the modem,
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I'm sorry to say, but there's a big difference between the environments of Mars and the outside of Mir. Mars is much friendlier :) Plenty of CO2, quite a bit of warmth(relatively speaking), radiation shielding, some good wind to spread the seeds, etc., etc..
Boy, who knows? We might have already started colonizing Mars, by unkowingly sending along some bacteria with the rover and its friends.
Dave
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Out the modem,
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...the serious lack of graphical user interfaces in Linux. Seriously, smbclient has been sitting in text-mode hell ever since it was created. No Linux programmer has even thought of creating a GUI network browser. Ever tried pushing a Linux programmer into building a GUI into his work? "Sorry, can't do that, too busy hacking the Cue:Cat!"
:) Flamebait can, at times, be useful :)
:)
Good lord I can't believe you have a +1 bonus. Someone should shoot the adminstrators for allowing this to happen.
First of all, there is no lack of graphical interfaces on Linux, there is a proliferation of them. Be more specific. There may be no good graphical interfaces(in your opinion), but that does not mean they don't exist. And there ARE nice graphical front-ends to smbclient. My favorite is LinNeighborhood, and an old stand-by is xSMBrowser. There. Not only have Linux programmers thougt of creating a GUI network browser, but they DID. Shut up please, I don't like your ignorance. And you want to push a Linux programmer into building a GUI into his work? Why the hell don't you pay him, smart-ass? Or, better yet, why don't you do it yourself you lazy bastard? Most of these programmers are doing it for FREE. You want something, you pay for it. I'm sorry, but I'm not going spend years of my life trying to please you because you TOLD me to(have you ever ASKED for a feature in a program, as opposed to demanding it?!?).
Contrary to what you may believe, Linux is for getting work done. That means that if your hard drive failed, and all but 8 Megs of memory has been destroyed, you still have a deadline. What are you going to do? Go out and buy a new computer, spend hours setting it up, etc., etc., or are you just going to pop in that rescue disk you made last week to finish off what you started? I'm sorry pal, Linux was not designed from the ground up to be what you want it to be. Go somewhere else.
[big sigh]
Ahhh... That felt gooood
Have a nice day
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Well, I don't know about the original poster, but I'll give you some examples of how Microsoft is using its desktop OS/Applications monopoly to help with the X-Box.
1) DirectX is a direct result of Microsoft's monopoly power, and it is held as one of the key features for the X-Box. Without its monopoly, it would not be able to leverage it the way it's being leveraged now.
2) Through its monopoly, Microsoft has managed to bring many companies to their knees. There's no way to know what might have happened had some of those companies been around to compete. So, even though we can't be sure, I'll say that Microsoft wouldn't have been as successful with those other companies around. It probably wouldn't have been successful enough to throw billions of dollars into a project to which they have almost no experience(ie: hardware manufacturing).
3) DirectX8 will most definetly be X-Box-centric. You can bet it'll support everything the X-Box graphics chipset does. There has already been industry rumbling about how(as opposed to in the past) Microsoft isn't listening to ATI, Matrox, 3Dfx about features they'd like included in the next version of DirectX. If ATI, Matrox, and 3Dfx start going down(not that a few of those arn't already close), you know people will be buying the X-Box for games, 'cause the PC ain't good enough no more(no competition in the graphics card market is a bad thing; look at where 3Dfx is now).
Just a few thoughts.
Dave
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Out the modem,
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Down the wire,
You're right, it doesn't come right out and say, "Our software will read information from your computer, and then send the information back to our site in order to bypass any firewall or NAT box," but if you read the entire document carefully(it was obviously carefully written) it all leads to that conclusion. I've been wrong before, but I don't think I'm wrong on this one. There are dozens of little clues here and there, but they all fit in very nicely.
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
After getting over my initial disgust at what was written, I went over it again. This amazing innovation relies on the client(the computer being scannd) to install software. That's how the claim to "bypass" NAT and firewalling. So, this test will be totally unrealistic(as far as testing to see if hackers can get into your carefully setup system). For a hacker to do the same thing, they'd have to get you to voluntarily install some software(which, admittedly, is not out of the realm of possbility). Anyways, this is a crock for the most part. I suggest the fellow who wrote the paper reply to some of these posts.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
You're exactly right - he *is* suggesting that people install his weirdo software to get his "NanoProbes" to work. All his site will do is send requests for information to the client-side program(which, of course, has unrestricted access to the computer in question), and then the client-side program fires off the results back to grc.com. Bloody ***wipe. I used to respect grc.com for their ShieldsUp! service, but this is going too far.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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Down the wire,
The reason why he's specifically targetting Windows is that his "NanoProbes" require a client-side server. His "NanoProbes" talk to the client side program. The program gets information from the computer, and sends it back to grc.com . He's cheating.
Dave
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Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
You know how he gets past the NAT/firewall? A *client-side program*. He's just sending packets to that program that the user installed, and the program is getting the data, and sending it back out. He's not "bypassing" the firewall, he's written a bloody server so he can read people's machine's information. Good lord, that's an ugly hack if I've ever seend one.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
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Down the wire,
From the web site:
"Aren't NanoProbes just IP packets?
Of course they are."
I think that just about sums this up. They've put a fancy name on an existing technology, and claimed "innovation and invention." 'nmap' uses this sort of thing every day, it seems. Sure, they may have tweaked the packets to elicit specific responses from the target, but how is that any different than existing fingerprinting techniques? I don't think it is(although, I'm don't really know a whole heck of a lot about this stuff).
I used to really respect GRC. Their "ShieldUp!" was pretty darned cool, but these announcements all sound like bloddy half-baked press releases. I could be proven wrong, but this sounds really lame.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
This is nice to see. Big, front-page article saying they've been hacked, letting their users know. How many web sites do you think would do that for their users? Too few.
On the other hand, would we have been notified if the hackers hadn't put a big article on the front page? Food for though, but I'd like to think so.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
I'm not sure why it is that there can't be a small, efficient, simple, window manager for X.
There are plenty of small, light window managers for X11. You just havn't found them. Since they're all over the place, I imagine you havn't found any because you haven't looked. Examples: Sawfish, BlackBox", and LarsWM. Just to name a few.
maximize a window so it fills as much of the screen as possible without overlapping things you don't want it to
That's a configuration error. The three window managers I use on a regular basis(Enlightenment, Sawfish, and IceWM) all support this feature.
No offense, but if I had any moderation points, your post would quickly be rather to (-1:Troll). Pretty much everything you railed against is configurable at the user's end. You're not bitching about KDE and GNOME, you're bitching about what Corel Linux uses for its default desktop(or Debian, or Red Hat, whatever). Sure, it might take you a bit of work to get things "just right", but it can be done. Pretty easily, too. So, most of your post is not only trolling, but also *WRONG*, as in incorrect. Sorry to have to break the news to you.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Ignore this too.
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Ignore this.
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Okay, so I don't buy millions of dollars worth of hardware every week. I may not arrange licensing agreements with IBM. But IBM looks a lot like Cisco - sure, they've got patents coming out of their wazoo, but they don't use their strength to control the market(so it seems. One can't be too sure). The fact that they're willing to GPL stuff sort of supports that idea.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Shame on them for not putting Bind 9 in. It has been out for 2 weeks now. wtf.
:) I assume you mean to say that they shouldn't be putting in such an untested piece of software in a "stable" distribution.
Hey there
Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using Bind 9.0? I betcha the first thing that ran through your head was, "Well, they can't have been using it for more than two weeks!" Hey, this Bind is Open Source. No reason why they couldn't have been using it ever since the development for 9.0 started. You don't know how stable they've made their implementation - Red Hat 7.0 isn't even out yet, so I don't see how you can know. Don't be so judgemental.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
You may be right in saying that these things might not sell well, but I firmly believe there is a market. All else being equal, a Cellphone/PDA combo will be smaller than a standalone PDA and a standalone cell phone. People will pay for that.
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
And, not to mention the fact that they'll be using an encrypted version of the client's IP address as part of the sequence number. So, not only does every connection use a wee bit of CPU, but every *packet* does too, since it'll either have to encrypt the client's IP for each packet(which is actually what the author suggests), or keep a cache of some sort.
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
I think they've (maybe) partially solved the current problem, but I don't know enough about it to be sure. However, I think this particular solution opens up a whole new big can 'o worms. If they do some encryption in the SYN/ACK part of the hand shake, that'll take up a wee bit of processing power. Multiply that response by the hundreds of thousands of times that a DDOS attack would elicit, and you've now got a server running at 100% CPU load. The server, as with a regular DDOS attack, is now toasted until the attack stops.
At least before, it was just bandwidth. Sure, nasty. But this about a server room with 60-70 rackmounts all running at 100% CPU. That'll be hot. Too hot. I worked for a little while at a Hydro company, and they spent about 60 grand on cooling for a single server room, and that'd only work up until all the servers were running at about 60% capacity. After that, we figured at about two hours before the fire suppression systems would fire.
Mind you, with load-balancing and such, it might only be a few computers which would run at 100%, because since a connection was never completed, none of the other servers ever did anything. But, still, the DDOS attack would succeed. And I'd rather it just take away all my bandwidth then (possibly) costing thousands of dollars in damages.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
First poster: And people talk about GNOME's icons looking cheap?
Second Poster: What?!?! I've never heard that. The gnome icons are central to why so many people think gnome looks so slick.
I've got to say I agree with the second fellow. Don't under-estimate quality artwork. We're finally getting the attention to detail that we see every day in the real world - texture, shades, lights, etc., - in computers. People will pay good money for that experience on their desktop - especially if the attention to detail is done so well that the computer itself feels "natural".
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Damn! Those are some fine-lookin' shots. No offense - I like Linux, and my computer is now officially Microsoft Free(tm), but damn! The artist in me comes out when I see these. Seems like MS has finally realized "pretty" is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of the elements in those screen shots were not only done proffesionally, but done well. Especially the Control Panel. I had to stop myself from pushing the icons on my monitor with my finger. I guess that's the plus of controlling everything from the top-down. You can do whatever you damn well please. :) Ah well, I still love my Linux boxen. And I can still get work done with 'em ;)
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,