Decreasing the s/n ratio helps to publicaly discredit slashdot as a news site. This, in turn, helps lower the commercial value of slashdot, which will hopefully liberate slashdot of the censorship and other bullshit.
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Gain karma *and* fight /.'s unethical journalism!
on
Double Pulsar Discovered
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Gain karma *and* fight /.'s unethical journalism
on
Double Pulsar Discovered
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
ECC ram typically is just made with faster internals. As an example most ECC comodity ram is CAS2 latency whereas most generic ram is CAS3, so the ECC ram will perform exactly the same as the non-ECC ram. You can buy CAS2 non-ECC ram but it's nearly as expensive as the ECC ram. If you have a simple idiot check at the end of a complex calculation then saving the cost of going with ECC may be worth it but most clusters this large will be used on too many different projects to assume that all of them will have such checks. For an idea of how important ECC is read (a href="http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/c ampaigns/chipkill.pdf">This IBM whitepaper on their chipkill ECC scheme. Even normal SEC ECC ram (what most ECC ram is today) will have aproximately 900 failures per 10TB per three years. I think that IBM is right and that eventually all ram will be RAID-M, that is a RAID5 style array of redundant memory banks that are composed of ECC banks. At future densities this will be necessary because a single high energy particle will have the ability to scramble an entire memory word including it's ECC checking bits.
Somewhere in California, in a seamless ivory tower that slowly glows, then fades.
Steve: "Well, we'll just give all the G5 people the free upgrade, the powerbooks are shit out of luck."
Lackey: "What if the angry powerbook owners storm the building, and take it?"
Steve: "How much damage can they do? Those powerbooks wouldn't even dent my skull. Now, if the G5 owners got pissed, wielding their G5s like clubs, then I might shit my pants. Those things are big. Let's keep them happy."
Lackey: "Good thinking, master. I will alert your minions."
Steve (to self): "Yes... Angry G5 owners...damn....Shit my pants..."
If I'm going to have some stupid something sitting my windows toolbar section, it might as well do some useful stuff--search google, block pop-ups, and give me pagerank.
I love free software.
Davak
Manned spaceflight: Why risk it? (not for science)
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
The article gives a number of good reasons, mostly to do with security and communications, but not one of this "top ten" gives any reason why we should send men into space, even less than having the most expensive hotel in the world, except that it's always all-expenses paid by you, the taxpayer.
I don't think many people think that near space and upper atmosphere research is a waste, nor the observation of distant stars and galaxies for their obvious scientific use in comparing our environment with others, and understanding our origins. NASA is an important precursor to a lot of the work, and defence technology often spaws useful commercial tech - satellite TV, GPS, international telecoms, weather stations...
If you made this a top ten of reasons to send men into space, you'd have a harder time justifying it, but the debate would be more interesting. Especially since current Reuters news asks that very question today, with mixed conclusions. An allusion in general to space left us with this interesting quote, which ties in with what I said about military tech:
O'Keefe acknowledged NASA lacks the sense of urgent mission that prevailed in its Cold War years
Everybody's thought about automobile systems that drive for you, and I think most of us suspect it will simply be a matter of time before it happens.
Think about it: Doing a similar system in the air is a great place to learn about how to do this with cars...since asside from takeoff and landing, there's a much bigger tollerance for error in the wide blue skys.
For those bound to complain re: NASA's performance
on
Explore Mars with Maestro
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem is that NASA doesn't have the same backing as it did back in the 60's. We went to the moon because it was a priority, and a lot of money and effort was thrown at it. Now NASA is constantly struggling to make as much as they can out of a diminishing budget. I believe that this, more than anything else caused the accident.
If you are an administrator at NASA and you are told that their might be a problem with the age of the fleet and you know the odds of getting funding for a new project are near zero, do you keep that fleet flying? Of course. That's hardly the safest thing to do, but it's either that or close up shop and go work the chinese space program.
NASA puts safety as first as it can afford to. You can argue that NASA is an inefficent bureaucracy, but we seem to have no trouble financing the inefficent military bureaucracy. It's the nature of government, cope.
I got tivo four years ago and instantly fell deeply in love with it. That love continues to this day, but has changed form. About a year ago, I realized that my giddy passion had given way to serenity, by which I mean that I realized that I just didn't want to watch tv any more, even on tivo. It was tivo that got me to this state of mind. It started by seeing how intrusive commercials were, and how much better tv was without it. The next phase for me was the realization of how manipulative the networks were with their program timing and scheduling; how wonderful to be free of that too! And then last summer I found I had dined at the table of paradise enough. I had actually watched enough episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and tons of other shows. To borrow an analogy from another slashdot writer, it was like the weekly trip to the hardware store after you've bought a new house, where one day you get there and you realize that you just don't need anything else, and you turn around and leave.
This has been a profound experience for me. And I don't think I could have gotten here without Tivo. Maybe I would have and it would have taken longer, but I like to think it was tivo.
Now I keep tivo around for the kid (Sesame St, etc).
.to the desire for household robots. Once upon a time, the very thought of a lawn mowing robot filled people with fear. You're not installing a robot lawn mower near my Fifi. (I'm looooking overrrrr, my dead dog Roverrrrrrr...) But robots are getting pretty good at recognizing objects, so there is hope that while mowing the lawn they won't mutilate your pets.
Of course people don't tend to realize that robotics is in use all around them, all the time. A robot is "A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance", or alternately, "a mechanism that can move automatically".
Besides the mechanical aspect necessary for something to be robotic, there is the usual criteria for a useful electronic circuit. It must sense, decide, and act. Even a door-opening device at your local supermarket can do this; it senses that something has entered sensor range, it decides whether the signal is strong enough to warrant opening the door (partly based on its sense of what its function switch is set to) and then decides whether or not to open it. The act stage in this case causes motion, which is what makes it a robot.
While we often hope to see robots become more useful around the house, I believe that it is in major industrial scenarios that they will take off first. This is not a shocking prediction given that this is where they currently enjoy their greatest successes, but I am referring to more autonomous robots than those which currently paint cars and so on. For instance, large earthmoving projects could be carried out with little to no human intervention simply because the problem domain is so simple. Through use of a combination of sensors (including visual/optical, radar, sonar, lidar, and others) a sophisticated map of geometry can be built. If you're not moving very quickly, this can be done with sufficient accuracy using current technology to carry out moderately complicated tasks.
I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring.
The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem. It's bad enough when the jobs leave your country, but only the corporations (and of course the consumers - but they have to have jobs in order to consume!) benefit when the jobs go to robots.
Switch from drinking 5 cups of coffee everyday to drinking 4, and have one cup of apple cider or hot chocolate. Go down in one day increments, but still have a hot beverage as a replacement. Once you get to about a week or so off caffeine, there should be no headache problems. If you start to get a real bad urge, drink tea instead (not as addictive to me as coffee, I don't know about others).
WARNING: When you start drinking coffee again, use moderation. It is very easy to fall off the wagon.
Okay, for the 1000th time, let's get this straight people:
WE NEED space exploration. Just because some people died, doesn't mean we should completely stop space exploration. People who think like this should be shot. Following that logic, Spain, France, etc shouldn't have tried to sail "around the world" and find a new way to get to India. A lot of explorers died then, should we say that the discovery of America should never have happened because explorers died? Boo hoo. Cry me a river. Damn it, the human race will ALWAYS look for more adventures. WE will always try to search for new lands. WE will always keep researching new and better technologies. It's built into the human psyche; to always want for something new.
For you people who don't want to explore space, fine. Stay home and cower. Build a tinfoil hat manufacturing facility. The rest of us, the ones whose blood runs hot, will go out a blaze new trails for the rest of you to follow.
I don't know about you, but I would be happy to go up into space. Damn straight I would be more than happy to put my life in NASA's hands, because those people are doing the best they can. If they make mistakes, so what? Lots of astronauts died during the space race, but we NEVER gave in. If I died going up into space, I wouldn't blame NASA, and if anyone of my family did, I'd haunt them.
I got annoyed at the slashdot comments last time there was security hole in OpenSSH and wrote this page (copy pasted below). I count OpenSSL as insecure software - we need a secure replacement. GNUTLS looks somewhat better, but I don't trust it too much either.
Why is some software more secure than others?
How do you measure software security?
Here's my definition on what is secure software.
Intro
I get really tired of seeing these kinds of comments every time some widely used software has security holes:
No software is secure. The difference is how quickly they fix it.
It's good that they were found. Now we have less security holes.
Popular software gets more security audits which is why they seem to have more security holes.
While they may be partially true, I think they're also very misleading and disparages the hard work that some secure software authors have
done.
Simplicity Is Security
The difference between secure and insecure software is really the coding techniques being used by it's authors. Authors of secure software do everything they can to prevent accidental mistakes from ever happening.
Authors of insecure software just fixes the accidental mistakes.
There are very few secure software authors.
Auditing insecure software doesn't make it secure. Sendmail is a good example of this. It's been audited countless times by competent people. The simplest mistakes were catched easily long time ago, but a few very
difficult to find vulnerabilities were found only recently.
How do secure software authors then avoid the kind of security holes that
are difficult to find? By keeping the code simple. The code doesn't get secure by polluting it with tons of security checks. It gets secure by
keeping the security checks in as few places as possible.
Auditing secure software is easy. You can just quickly browse through most of the sources without having to stop and look at it carefully.
Everything just looks clean, simple and correct. vsftpd is a good example
of this.
Sure, it's still possible that secure software has some security holes
occationally. It just happens a lot less often (if ever) and usually the
problems are less critical. For example none of the security holes in
Postfix have lead to arbitrary code execution or being able to read other
peoples mails. Denial of Service attacks are nothing compared to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Decreasing the s/n ratio helps to publicaly discredit slashdot as a news site. This, in turn, helps lower the commercial value of slashdot, which will hopefully liberate slashdot of the censorship and other bullshit.
Read more at anti-slash
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force /.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force /.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force /.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Slashdot's editors are absoluetely committed **TO** censorship! Read more at anti-slash (not associated with gnaa.)
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force /.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force /.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
Are you tired of slashdot's editors? Check out anti-slash!
/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force /.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
While you're there, check out the database tool here. With the database tool, you can quickly gain karma by reposting highly-moderated slashdot posts, and secure the +1 bonus for future jihad operations.
By decreasing
Thank you for your support,
jihadi_31337
ECC ram typically is just made with faster internals. As an example most ECC comodity ram is CAS2 latency whereas most generic ram is CAS3, so the ECC ram will perform exactly the same as the non-ECC ram. You can buy CAS2 non-ECC ram but it's nearly as expensive as the ECC ram. If you have a simple idiot check at the end of a complex calculation then saving the cost of going with ECC may be worth it but most clusters this large will be used on too many different projects to assume that all of them will have such checks. For an idea of how important ECC is read (a href="http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/c ampaigns/chipkill.pdf">This IBM whitepaper on their chipkill ECC scheme. Even normal SEC ECC ram (what most ECC ram is today) will have aproximately 900 failures per 10TB per three years. I think that IBM is right and that eventually all ram will be RAID-M, that is a RAID5 style array of redundant memory banks that are composed of ECC banks. At future densities this will be necessary because a single high energy particle will have the ability to scramble an entire memory word including it's ECC checking bits.
Somewhere in California, in a seamless ivory tower that slowly glows, then fades.
Steve: "Well, we'll just give all the G5 people the free upgrade, the powerbooks are shit out of luck."
Lackey: "What if the angry powerbook owners storm the building, and take it?"
Steve: "How much damage can they do? Those powerbooks wouldn't even dent my skull. Now, if the G5 owners got pissed, wielding their G5s like clubs, then I might shit my pants. Those things are big. Let's keep them happy."
Lackey: "Good thinking, master. I will alert your minions."
Steve (to self): "Yes... Angry G5 owners...damn....Shit my pants..."
It just so happens that somebody wrote a head-on comparason of the two over at tubgirl tech archive.
My favorite pop-up blocker is google's toolbar. ,
If I'm going to have some stupid something sitting my windows toolbar section, it might as well do some useful stuff--search google, block pop-ups, and give me pagerank.
I love free software.
Davak
The article gives a number of good reasons, mostly to do with security and communications, but not one of this "top ten" gives any reason why we should send men into space, even less than having the most expensive hotel in the world, except that it's always all-expenses paid by you, the taxpayer.
I don't think many people think that near space and upper atmosphere research is a waste, nor the observation of distant stars and galaxies for their obvious scientific use in comparing our environment with others, and understanding our origins. NASA is an important precursor to a lot of the work, and defence technology often spaws useful commercial tech - satellite TV, GPS, international telecoms, weather stations...
If you made this a top ten of reasons to send men into space, you'd have a harder time justifying it, but the debate would be more interesting. Especially since current Reuters news asks that very question today, with mixed conclusions. An allusion in general to space left us with this interesting quote, which ties in with what I said about military tech:
O'Keefe acknowledged NASA lacks the sense of urgent mission that prevailed in its Cold War years
I've got my car speedometer, plus the tach, plus freaking police radar signs telling me to slow down...I get the message!
Everybody's thought about automobile systems that drive for you, and I think most of us suspect it will simply be a matter of time before it happens.
Think about it: Doing a similar system in the air is a great place to learn about how to do this with cars...since asside from takeoff and landing, there's a much bigger tollerance for error in the wide blue skys.
--
Written in the name of sacred jihad
The problem is that NASA doesn't have the same backing as it did back in the 60's. We went to the moon because it was a priority, and a lot of money and effort was thrown at it. Now NASA is constantly struggling to make as much as they can out of a diminishing budget. I believe that this, more than anything else caused the accident.
If you are an administrator at NASA and you are told that their might be a problem with the age of the fleet and you know the odds of getting funding for a new project are near zero, do you keep that fleet flying? Of course. That's hardly the safest thing to do, but it's either that or close up shop and go work the chinese space program.
NASA puts safety as first as it can afford to. You can argue that NASA is an inefficent bureaucracy, but we seem to have no trouble financing the inefficent military bureaucracy. It's the nature of government, cope.
TiVo: You love it or you haven't met it.
I got tivo four years ago and instantly fell deeply in love with it. That love continues to this day, but has changed form. About a year ago, I realized that my giddy passion had given way to serenity, by which I mean that I realized that I just didn't want to watch tv any more, even on tivo. It was tivo that got me to this state of mind. It started by seeing how intrusive commercials were, and how much better tv was without it. The next phase for me was the realization of how manipulative the networks were with their program timing and scheduling; how wonderful to be free of that too! And then last summer I found I had dined at the table of paradise enough. I had actually watched enough episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and tons of other shows. To borrow an analogy from another slashdot writer, it was like the weekly trip to the hardware store after you've bought a new house, where one day you get there and you realize that you just don't need anything else, and you turn around and leave.
This has been a profound experience for me. And I don't think I could have gotten here without Tivo. Maybe I would have and it would have taken longer, but I like to think it was tivo.
Now I keep tivo around for the kid (Sesame St, etc).
just wanted to say a quick congrats to all the hard working people at nasa. keep up the good work.
.to the desire for household robots. Once upon a time, the very thought of a lawn mowing robot filled people with fear. You're not installing a robot lawn mower near my Fifi. (I'm looooking overrrrr, my dead dog Roverrrrrrr...) But robots are getting pretty good at recognizing objects, so there is hope that while mowing the lawn they won't mutilate your pets.
Of course people don't tend to realize that robotics is in use all around them, all the time. A robot is "A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance", or alternately, "a mechanism that can move automatically".
Besides the mechanical aspect necessary for something to be robotic, there is the usual criteria for a useful electronic circuit. It must sense, decide, and act. Even a door-opening device at your local supermarket can do this; it senses that something has entered sensor range, it decides whether the signal is strong enough to warrant opening the door (partly based on its sense of what its function switch is set to) and then decides whether or not to open it. The act stage in this case causes motion, which is what makes it a robot.
While we often hope to see robots become more useful around the house, I believe that it is in major industrial scenarios that they will take off first. This is not a shocking prediction given that this is where they currently enjoy their greatest successes, but I am referring to more autonomous robots than those which currently paint cars and so on. For instance, large earthmoving projects could be carried out with little to no human intervention simply because the problem domain is so simple. Through use of a combination of sensors (including visual/optical, radar, sonar, lidar, and others) a sophisticated map of geometry can be built. If you're not moving very quickly, this can be done with sufficient accuracy using current technology to carry out moderately complicated tasks.
I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring.
The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem. It's bad enough when the jobs leave your country, but only the corporations (and of course the consumers - but they have to have jobs in order to consume!) benefit when the jobs go to robots.
Switch from drinking 5 cups of coffee everyday to drinking 4, and have one cup of apple cider or hot chocolate. Go down in one day increments, but still have a hot beverage as a replacement. Once you get to about a week or so off caffeine, there should be no headache problems. If you start to get a real bad urge, drink tea instead (not as addictive to me as coffee, I don't know about others).
WARNING: When you start drinking coffee again, use moderation. It is very easy to fall off the wagon.
Sincerely,
Starbucks Anonymous
--
Posted in the name of sacred jihad
I've gone five and a half years now without drinking caffine. And, yeah, it's hard, but it wasn't as hard as quitting coke (the other kind).
I did have some rather severe stomach problems at the time, so stopping was a matter of some very basic health issues.
My best advice is just to hole yourself up and be really, really busy. That's been my plan for all my addiction-kicking.
Grin, bear it, be productive.
Speak of the devil, I just saw something on this over at tubgirl tech archive.
--
get the message
Okay, for the 1000th time, let's get this straight people:
WE NEED space exploration. Just because some people died, doesn't mean we should completely stop space exploration. People who think like this should be shot. Following that logic, Spain, France, etc shouldn't have tried to sail "around the world" and find a new way to get to India. A lot of explorers died then, should we say that the discovery of America should never have happened because explorers died? Boo hoo. Cry me a river. Damn it, the human race will ALWAYS look for more adventures. WE will always try to search for new lands. WE will always keep researching new and better technologies. It's built into the human psyche; to always want for something new.
For you people who don't want to explore space, fine. Stay home and cower. Build a tinfoil hat manufacturing facility. The rest of us, the ones whose blood runs hot, will go out a blaze new trails for the rest of you to follow.
I don't know about you, but I would be happy to go up into space. Damn straight I would be more than happy to put my life in NASA's hands, because those people are doing the best they can. If they make mistakes, so what? Lots of astronauts died during the space race, but we NEVER gave in. If I died going up into space, I wouldn't blame NASA, and if anyone of my family did, I'd haunt them.
--
7333716
I got annoyed at the slashdot comments last time there was security hole in OpenSSH and wrote this page (copy pasted below). I count OpenSSL as insecure software - we need a secure replacement. GNUTLS looks somewhat better, but I don't trust it too much either.
Why is some software more secure than others?
How do you measure software security?
Here's my definition on what is secure software.
Intro
I get really tired of seeing these kinds of comments every time some widely used software has security holes:
While they may be partially true, I think they're also very misleading and disparages the hard work that some secure software authors have done.
Simplicity Is Security
The difference between secure and insecure software is really the coding techniques being used by it's authors. Authors of secure software do everything they can to prevent accidental mistakes from ever happening. Authors of insecure software just fixes the accidental mistakes. There are very few secure software authors.
Auditing insecure software doesn't make it secure. Sendmail is a good example of this. It's been audited countless times by competent people. The simplest mistakes were catched easily long time ago, but a few very difficult to find vulnerabilities were found only recently.
How do secure software authors then avoid the kind of security holes that are difficult to find? By keeping the code simple. The code doesn't get secure by polluting it with tons of security checks. It gets secure by keeping the security checks in as few places as possible.
Auditing secure software is easy. You can just quickly browse through most of the sources without having to stop and look at it carefully. Everything just looks clean, simple and correct. vsftpd is a good example of this.
Sure, it's still possible that secure software has some security holes occationally. It just happens a lot less often (if ever) and usually the problems are less critical. For example none of the security holes in Postfix have lead to arbitrary code execution or being able to read other peoples mails. Denial of Service attacks are nothing compared to them.
(some examples in the web page not included)
--Brought to you by the DB tool
7098931