"Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities."
Obviously the author has never visited dailykos.com or atrios.blogspot.com which have developed their own communities nad are motivating people to act locally, vote locally, and gather funds in the range of tens of thousands a week to democractic politicians.
They also criticize media and bring to light stories buried or neglected by the corporate press. And these are just two examples of thousands of political sites making a real difference everyday.
Also, the internet is not just for geeks anymore. That argument might have made sense in 1995.
The point that you're missing is that all the militias in the world are worthless without intelligent leaders who can fill their heads with new ideas and get the ball rolling for violent action.
Look at the US's own militia organizations. Honestly, they're a bunch of hicks with no leadership and no ideology. They sit around while congress passes laws like the PATRIOT ACT. They sit around doing nothing while national elections are in serious question. They just talk and shoot targets. That is the sword by itself.
Obviously, you need well-read "pens" to get the "swords" going. Both elements are needed for change but the "sword" is the most useless alone. At least a lowly poet or a political writer can pass on memes and information that one could not get elsewhere and make them question authority. No "sword" can do that, that's why unarmed dissidents are rotting away in jail while militia boys are playing Rambo in the woods.
>Social evolution in action: corporations are more efficient -- better adapted to their environment
Okay, so considering corporate consolidation and conformity in business practices is the norm the next step is to just grant them all monopolies thus socialism - government controled means of production.
Or we can break monopolies, remove corporate money and influence from our politicians, and pass pro-consumer laws.
Considering how few companies own so much capital, our media fails us, and how little say we have and in anything then we're practically the USSR and we all know how that little experiment ment.
>no Revolution, no Topple the State, no Stop the Corporations
Yeah, that's the defeatist attitude they want to have. Go back to watching Reality TV while us adults try to fix things.
The Clone Wars series has to be one of the more interesting and original TV shows/experiments in TVs short history. They're short, paced perfectly, fun to watch, and just well done overall. I fully believe if this wasn't attached to the Star Wars franchise we would be singing its praises on originality and animation quality alone.
Cut Tartakovsky some slack here. He inherited a big job and pulled it off almost flawlessly. Kids love it, adults (at least the ones I know) dig it. He managed to work with such a limiting format and deliver the goods.
Instead of worrying about things we can't change (1 day/0 day exploits) lets focus on things we can change.
Here are some hypotheticals and not-so hypotheticals.
Are there any products that will ghost my drive onto another drive inaccessible to the OS by ordinary means every day?
How can we teach people and developers the wonders of encryption so their credit card numbers and passwords can't be stolen?
What will it take for hardware and OS makers to find a solution to most/all buffer overflows.
Why are non-servers on the internet 24/7? A 'disconnect me after 1 hour of inactivity' would go a long way.
Should we be encouraging residential ISPs to temporarily block ports during major outbreaks?
Should ISPs be denying access to computers found to be spewing spam, viruses, or trojans?
Why are we storing data locally? A fire or a crashed disk could mean the loss of important data, photos, etc. The internet hasn't seemed to provided users with an easy way to upload/download/synch documents off-site securely and easily.
By choosing they mean stealing it and putting it on every windows machine I can find, right?
I wonder what Office's penetration would be like if 97 and 2000 had XP-like activation. The fact that MS, Adobe, et al turn a blind-eye to piracy on the residential and small business front to 'push' their products really hurts competitors who are trying to actually sell a product.
If Photoshop is all I know then that's going to be on my resume, its going to be taught at school, and my employer will have to buy another $500+ Photoshop license when she hires me.
If Office is all I know - same situation.
OO would be *everywhere* if the alternative wasn't borrowing a friend's Office CD, but actually paying for Office.
This is why I sometimes smile when I hear about the BSA (yes they are evil incarnate) cracking down on some shop without licenses. Instead of buying something cheaper or going OSS they chose to steal. At a certain point all that MS software suddenly isn't free. Funny how that works.
I dont know why slashdot posted this particular fact-free article and with the "what are users supposed to do?" tagline.
The patch is six months old, people. This isn't some major zero-day exploit that is tearing the internet apart.
I use firefox/tbird on windows, but still, lets be sensible here. People can use the IE/OE combo without too much fear as long as they keep auto-update running.
The patch for this was released in October 2003. Users should have auto-update up and running if they're using windows. ISPs should make sure users have auto-update on and an anti-virus when they install broadband service.
>And when the hardware box has a 0-day exploit and a worm gets loose before the patch, what then?
The real problem here isnt soft vs. hard (although runnig a firewall on different machine is always smarter) its that firewall vendors are suffering from feature-creep and creating more exploitable situations. Man, have you seen a modern win firewall? Its not just port-blocking, its everything they can toss in there - spam blocking, remote admin, ad blocking, 'smart' triggering, report generator, gives your daily horoscope, etc.
The nice thing about plain-jane hardware firewalls like the commodity stuff you can get at best buy is that they don't really do much other than block and forward ports. Less complexity is better when it comes to security.
I'm not saying the green vote cost the dems the election its the rhetoric of "theres no difference between the parties" that had a lot of swing voters go Bush because they couldnt tell the difference between him and Gore. The third parties are partly guilty for perpetuating this meme.
Yes, Gore ran a not so hot campaign, but shit like "Republicrats" and entire dismissals of the system are worse than political apathy. If you dont like the system, thats fine, stay home. But dont go around telling people that voting is useless because the parties are identical.
>It's a P4 2GHz with 512mb of ram (wtf?! why on earth does it need that)
"Rich" media ads. You'll need some power to play compressed video of that next hollywood blockbuster while you wait for your cash. Or maybe its just cheaper to buy 'off the shelf' PC commodity stuff. Prob both. Thats probably why WMP was installed.
The speakers are for the future ads and for the interface for the blind. Most have headphone jacks too.
Yeah, keep believing there are no differences between the parties. Its that kind of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place.
If you want reform, you're going to have to work with the system and within it to change it. Voting Green and walking away is about the least you can do and about as reformist as voting LaRouche and patting yourself on the back for being such an independant thinker.
Heaven forbid "reformists" meet the people running for office and help get a more progressive democrat on the ticket instead of just crying foul, voting third party, and bitching for 4 more years.
Here are some photos of a crashed Diebold ATM from National City bank. Yep, that's the windows desktop and the college kids who took the photos were controling the machine. Be afraid.
>Yeah, right. The customer is not going to test first because Microsoft says it's ok?
Wait a second, windows users are wrong for not updating and Microsoft is wrong for providing yet another downloadable tool to help people stay patched?
Oh please, this knee-jerk MS bashing is going too far. Yes, you are still free to test your home machine and no one running a server is going to do this. Yes, heaven forbid windows users get patched so I dont get days of network downtime when the next 'click me' virus hits. Heaven forbid Joe User's computer just doesnt update and firewall itself.
These people chose microsoft over apple, let them live with the consequences. On top of that MS patches have been very good of late and are not the patches and service packs of the NT4 era.
There are many, many monopolies out there, but MS is a convicted harmful monopoly.
>How about apache?
How about it? It has a powerful market position. Now show me the abuse? Is it bundling and destroying a whole different product like MS did with Netscape?
All apache is doing is competeing with other websevers. Nothin' wrong with that.
Windows is a platform for running windows software, billions of dollars of windows software. The amount of savings to migrate to non-windows apps would have to astronomical for any CEO/CIO to take Linux seriously as a desktop replacement on the level you suggest.
MS Office isn't just software, its how businesses are run. Its a brand, a religion, and a cult all rolled into one. We all know it just consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, etc but to users its all they do - and ALL THEY KNOW. Heck, most users can barely use office, and its much easier to use and has a better help system than the alternatives.
My prediction: MS will be around for longer than we care to admit. Linux will continue to make inroads into the server room and will eventually be knocked back a bit when MS finally make a server anyone can administer and setup.
I'd like to think otherwise, but MS is like the IBM electric typewriter. Once its made x amount of inroads into corporate culture it may never leave.
On the bright side, there will be more technological revolutions and if these can help business then some other company might be able to replace MS (that is if MS doesnt buy the tech). Linux's eternal game of 'catch-up' isn't a revolution, its a cheap alternative that may not be worth buying into. Its like buying generic compared to a name brand.
I'd like to be an optimist and pretend there will be a healthy and free IT market, but the Justice Department let MS go. No multi-boot machines. Still the same old. Maybe the next administration and another lawsuit can change things, but right now MS is winning out loud. Hell, even their products are much better than they were three years ago and they are learning from their security mistakes.
Its been the year of the Linux desktop for years now. It seems it will always be 'right around the corner.' The only saving grace I see is nationalistic paranoia so that other countries' government agencies aren't neccessarily running windows in all departments in fear of CIA backdoors.
I'm sure this will be modded down the same way an atheist at a church gets shouted down.
I just saw the trialer and its a brainless action movie with Wil Smith giving one-liners at every opportunity.
No mystery, no suspense, just lots of fighting robots. This doesnt even look like its worth a DVD rental.
On the bright side I just saw Robot Stories and its an excellent indie flick involving four stories about robots, some funny some very dramatic. Highly recommended. The last vignette "Clay" is worth the price of admission.
Hollywood really has nothing to offer me anymore it seems.
>It doesn't really do anything that is currently needed.
I don't want to pay for a POTS line and expensive long-distance.
>It is more complicated than it needs to be.
That can be said of a lot of things. It happens to work, and well.
>Cell phones accomplish the exact same thing for the same cost and at a sadly higher reliability level.
My cell phone goes out all the time, my VoIP works all the time. My cell phone has limited minutes and when in use it pushes a few watts of energy at my head t'boot. It also sounds more like a POTS phone than the crap that a cell-phone delivers. You can speakly quietly, listen to real human sounds like quiet sighs and other things cell-phones fail at delivering. No finger in the other ear using VoIP.
>It's going to be regulated as hell sooner or later.
Defeatist much? Even regulated that doesn't mean it will be unafforable or even more expensive. The last round of complaints have more to do with calling your local 911 service and many VoIP proviers already have that function working.
>It's not a satisfactory long-term solution.
Says you. Only the five richest kings of Europe will be able to afford computers too.
Slashdot Mirror
"Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities."
Obviously the author has never visited dailykos.com or atrios.blogspot.com which have developed their own communities nad are motivating people to act locally, vote locally, and gather funds in the range of tens of thousands a week to democractic politicians.
They also criticize media and bring to light stories buried or neglected by the corporate press. And these are just two examples of thousands of political sites making a real difference everyday.
Also, the internet is not just for geeks anymore. That argument might have made sense in 1995.
The point that you're missing is that all the militias in the world are worthless without intelligent leaders who can fill their heads with new ideas and get the ball rolling for violent action.
Look at the US's own militia organizations. Honestly, they're a bunch of hicks with no leadership and no ideology. They sit around while congress passes laws like the PATRIOT ACT. They sit around doing nothing while national elections are in serious question. They just talk and shoot targets. That is the sword by itself.
Obviously, you need well-read "pens" to get the "swords" going. Both elements are needed for change but the "sword" is the most useless alone. At least a lowly poet or a political writer can pass on memes and information that one could not get elsewhere and make them question authority. No "sword" can do that, that's why unarmed dissidents are rotting away in jail while militia boys are playing Rambo in the woods.
>Social evolution in action: corporations are more efficient -- better adapted to their environment
Okay, so considering corporate consolidation and conformity in business practices is the norm the next step is to just grant them all monopolies thus socialism - government controled means of production.
Or we can break monopolies, remove corporate money and influence from our politicians, and pass pro-consumer laws.
Considering how few companies own so much capital, our media fails us, and how little say we have and in anything then we're practically the USSR and we all know how that little experiment ment.
>no Revolution, no Topple the State, no Stop the Corporations
Yeah, that's the defeatist attitude they want to have. Go back to watching Reality TV while us adults try to fix things.
>Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.
Angelfire is providing her with bandwidth.
Man, what a harsh thread.
The Clone Wars series has to be one of the more interesting and original TV shows/experiments in TVs short history. They're short, paced perfectly, fun to watch, and just well done overall. I fully believe if this wasn't attached to the Star Wars franchise we would be singing its praises on originality and animation quality alone.
Cut Tartakovsky some slack here. He inherited a big job and pulled it off almost flawlessly. Kids love it, adults (at least the ones I know) dig it. He managed to work with such a limiting format and deliver the goods.
Tartakovsky could very well be the next Disney.
Here are some hypotheticals and not-so hypotheticals.
Are there any products that will ghost my drive onto another drive inaccessible to the OS by ordinary means every day?
How can we teach people and developers the wonders of encryption so their credit card numbers and passwords can't be stolen?
What will it take for hardware and OS makers to find a solution to most/all buffer overflows.
Why are non-servers on the internet 24/7? A 'disconnect me after 1 hour of inactivity' would go a long way.
Should we be encouraging residential ISPs to temporarily block ports during major outbreaks?
Should ISPs be denying access to computers found to be spewing spam, viruses, or trojans?
Why are we storing data locally? A fire or a crashed disk could mean the loss of important data, photos, etc. The internet hasn't seemed to provided users with an easy way to upload/download/synch documents off-site securely and easily.
By choosing they mean stealing it and putting it on every windows machine I can find, right?
I wonder what Office's penetration would be like if 97 and 2000 had XP-like activation. The fact that MS, Adobe, et al turn a blind-eye to piracy on the residential and small business front to 'push' their products really hurts competitors who are trying to actually sell a product.
If Photoshop is all I know then that's going to be on my resume, its going to be taught at school, and my employer will have to buy another $500+ Photoshop license when she hires me.
If Office is all I know - same situation.
OO would be *everywhere* if the alternative wasn't borrowing a friend's Office CD, but actually paying for Office.
This is why I sometimes smile when I hear about the BSA (yes they are evil incarnate) cracking down on some shop without licenses. Instead of buying something cheaper or going OSS they chose to steal. At a certain point all that MS software suddenly isn't free. Funny how that works.
> Wouldn't you say that religious fervor is preventing those distros from realizing the benefits of a very good language?
*silence*
*the OSS judges confer for 10 minutes looking confused*
*cough*
Someone gets up and yells, "Burn the witch!!!"
Problem solved.
> If I remember correctly, auto-update does not handle Office patches
e .j html?articleID=18401045
t in /MS03-040.mspx
2 00 30820.html
Its an IE patch given to everyone:
http://www.internetwk.com/allStories/showArticl
MS patch info here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulle
Eeye article here:
http://www.eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AD
Another reason to shut ActiveX the hell off.
>c. Stop using Outlook/Outlook Express
I dont know why slashdot posted this particular fact-free article and with the "what are users supposed to do?" tagline.
The patch is six months old, people. This isn't some major zero-day exploit that is tearing the internet apart.
I use firefox/tbird on windows, but still, lets be sensible here. People can use the IE/OE combo without too much fear as long as they keep auto-update running.
Many do, but the real problem here is patches.
The patch for this was released in October 2003. Users should have auto-update up and running if they're using windows. ISPs should make sure users have auto-update on and an anti-virus when they install broadband service.
>And when the hardware box has a 0-day exploit and a worm gets loose before the patch, what then?
The real problem here isnt soft vs. hard (although runnig a firewall on different machine is always smarter) its that firewall vendors are suffering from feature-creep and creating more exploitable situations. Man, have you seen a modern win firewall? Its not just port-blocking, its everything they can toss in there - spam blocking, remote admin, ad blocking, 'smart' triggering, report generator, gives your daily horoscope, etc.
The nice thing about plain-jane hardware firewalls like the commodity stuff you can get at best buy is that they don't really do much other than block and forward ports. Less complexity is better when it comes to security.
Should do it unless the worm does more damage not listed in the article.
>Honestly people, is this really /. front page news?
Yes, lets just wait till some kiddie write a worm that crashes thousands servers all over the world and then post about it.
I like that slashdot posts security problems. Why?
1. For the lazy admin. Theres lot of them.
2. because its important to keep reinforcing the idea that computers suck (I dont care what OS you like) and need constant care.
I'm not saying the green vote cost the dems the election its the rhetoric of "theres no difference between the parties" that had a lot of swing voters go Bush because they couldnt tell the difference between him and Gore. The third parties are partly guilty for perpetuating this meme.
Yes, Gore ran a not so hot campaign, but shit like "Republicrats" and entire dismissals of the system are worse than political apathy. If you dont like the system, thats fine, stay home. But dont go around telling people that voting is useless because the parties are identical.
Hmmm..
>It's a P4 2GHz with 512mb of ram (wtf?! why on earth does it need that)
"Rich" media ads. You'll need some power to play compressed video of that next hollywood blockbuster while you wait for your cash. Or maybe its just cheaper to buy 'off the shelf' PC commodity stuff. Prob both. Thats probably why WMP was installed.
The speakers are for the future ads and for the interface for the blind. Most have headphone jacks too.
>Democracy of the Republicrat Party
Yeah, keep believing there are no differences between the parties. Its that kind of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place.
If you want reform, you're going to have to work with the system and within it to change it. Voting Green and walking away is about the least you can do and about as reformist as voting LaRouche and patting yourself on the back for being such an independant thinker.
Heaven forbid "reformists" meet the people running for office and help get a more progressive democrat on the ticket instead of just crying foul, voting third party, and bitching for 4 more years.
Here are some photos of a crashed Diebold ATM from National City bank. Yep, that's the windows desktop and the college kids who took the photos were controling the machine. Be afraid.
>Yeah, right. The customer is not going to test first because Microsoft says it's ok?
Wait a second, windows users are wrong for not updating and Microsoft is wrong for providing yet another downloadable tool to help people stay patched?
Oh please, this knee-jerk MS bashing is going too far. Yes, you are still free to test your home machine and no one running a server is going to do this. Yes, heaven forbid windows users get patched so I dont get days of network downtime when the next 'click me' virus hits. Heaven forbid Joe User's computer just doesnt update and firewall itself.
These people chose microsoft over apple, let them live with the consequences. On top of that MS patches have been very good of late and are not the patches and service packs of the NT4 era.
Hey! Don't rip off our Godzilla rip-off!
There are many, many monopolies out there, but MS is a convicted harmful monopoly.
>How about apache?
How about it? It has a powerful market position. Now show me the abuse? Is it bundling and destroying a whole different product like MS did with Netscape?
All apache is doing is competeing with other websevers. Nothin' wrong with that.
Windows is a platform for running windows software, billions of dollars of windows software. The amount of savings to migrate to non-windows apps would have to astronomical for any CEO/CIO to take Linux seriously as a desktop replacement on the level you suggest.
MS Office isn't just software, its how businesses are run. Its a brand, a religion, and a cult all rolled into one. We all know it just consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, etc but to users its all they do - and ALL THEY KNOW. Heck, most users can barely use office, and its much easier to use and has a better help system than the alternatives.
My prediction: MS will be around for longer than we care to admit. Linux will continue to make inroads into the server room and will eventually be knocked back a bit when MS finally make a server anyone can administer and setup.
I'd like to think otherwise, but MS is like the IBM electric typewriter. Once its made x amount of inroads into corporate culture it may never leave.
On the bright side, there will be more technological revolutions and if these can help business then some other company might be able to replace MS (that is if MS doesnt buy the tech). Linux's eternal game of 'catch-up' isn't a revolution, its a cheap alternative that may not be worth buying into. Its like buying generic compared to a name brand.
I'd like to be an optimist and pretend there will be a healthy and free IT market, but the Justice Department let MS go. No multi-boot machines. Still the same old. Maybe the next administration and another lawsuit can change things, but right now MS is winning out loud. Hell, even their products are much better than they were three years ago and they are learning from their security mistakes.
Its been the year of the Linux desktop for years now. It seems it will always be 'right around the corner.' The only saving grace I see is nationalistic paranoia so that other countries' government agencies aren't neccessarily running windows in all departments in fear of CIA backdoors.
I'm sure this will be modded down the same way an atheist at a church gets shouted down.
I just saw the trialer and its a brainless action movie with Wil Smith giving one-liners at every opportunity.
No mystery, no suspense, just lots of fighting robots. This doesnt even look like its worth a DVD rental.
On the bright side I just saw Robot Stories and its an excellent indie flick involving four stories about robots, some funny some very dramatic. Highly recommended. The last vignette "Clay" is worth the price of admission.
Hollywood really has nothing to offer me anymore it seems.
The PNAC agenda + our current military status = the draft.
Its like the lottery, except when you win you lose. Don't like it? Kick out Bush and his PNAC buddies.
>It doesn't really do anything that is currently needed.
I don't want to pay for a POTS line and expensive long-distance.
>It is more complicated than it needs to be.
That can be said of a lot of things. It happens to work, and well.
>Cell phones accomplish the exact same thing for the same cost and at a sadly higher reliability level.
My cell phone goes out all the time, my VoIP works all the time. My cell phone has limited minutes and when in use it pushes a few watts of energy at my head t'boot. It also sounds more like a POTS phone than the crap that a cell-phone delivers. You can speakly quietly, listen to real human sounds like quiet sighs and other things cell-phones fail at delivering. No finger in the other ear using VoIP.
>It's going to be regulated as hell sooner or later.
Defeatist much? Even regulated that doesn't mean it will be unafforable or even more expensive. The last round of complaints have more to do with calling your local 911 service and many VoIP proviers already have that function working.
>It's not a satisfactory long-term solution.
Says you. Only the five richest kings of Europe will be able to afford computers too.