"Fixing the compromises on major linux servers is one thing, but why has nobody mentioned finding the perpetrators?"
Like the sort of thing microsoft would do. Let's have a bounty...
Serious answer, the FBI doesn't give a damn about crackers and never will. $5000 damages? Sounds like a public-funded private police force for big business to me.
"The Tramp rescues a baby abandoned by its despairing mother, brings it up to become his partner in a window-repair business - although it is the Kid's business to break the windows first"
Glad to see the Roman fire brigade still alive and well, and doing business...
Now try to find a team of lawyers that can successfully prosecute such a case in Romania, China or Russia! These sorts of scams generally do not originate in places like the US or UK.
"Yeah... apparently, people are still STUPID enough to open these things"
Strange isn't it. You have an email address, you write it on your job application, and a week later you get an email with "Re: your job application". How can people be so STUPID as to open these things?
I'm pretty stupid, I open most of the letters I receive at home. It would be nice if I could just bin them like you do with your email, but last time that happened, the council came asking where was their tax cheque?
Email is better, because it doesn't matter if you delete anything that looks suspicious. Like, I can delete the "Renew your website NOW" email because it's spam and only stupid people click on it, but I know that I should read the "Renew your website NOW" email, otherwise my domain name doesn't get renewed.
"I wonder if moving that fast causes problems with train-land wi-fi and cell networks due to the doppler effect? Imagine you're screaming toward a cell tower at 167 m/s (600 km/h) - that's a doppler shift of 500Hz at 900MHz, which I imagine could cause some problems."
"All an ISP needs to do is institute a policy whereby if someone is caught spamming, the cleanup charge is $20,000. They already have their credit card, all they need to do is charge it."
"It's perfetcly possible to have a free market without scarcity of information."
Indeed it's required...
If price, quality, and history information isn't perfectly and universally available, it's not a free market.
So for example, trying to prevent the publishing of a shop's price list is an attempt to destroy a free market. People don't know enough to make a perfect choice, so the best supplier doesn't necessarily make the sales.
I often post anonymously when dealing with morons.
Thankyou. I'm almost tempted to leave it there, as proof that there's no technical counter-argument left in you.
it's almost funny to hear you claim that Mandrake "works the first time" when they just had to pull an entire release because of a patch they added to the kernel
Why? It did work first time. I installed it and it worked, which is a *lot* more than you can say for slackware. (or Windows, for that matter, which took a few reboots to get any drivers working)
So I don't own a broken CD-ROM drive. What's your point? If you solder the power-supply pins together on your computer, Mandrake won't work on that either. There's a line between having a good, tested operating system, and having one which magically fixes your hardware. Would you like it to paint the case blue as well?
"GPS gets jammed all the time, is not 100% reliable and no critical transportation application ever uses it as it's sole navigation system."
From my reading of Galileo news, I thought the idea was: "GPS isn't reliable enough for planes, so let's build something that is".
The system was being designed with the sort of sub-centimetre* accuracy that would allow the system to be licensed to people who had plans to use it for landing systems.
* about the width of a beer-bottle lid, for people in imperial-units
What I meant to say was, that if Galileo can't be guaranteed to give that accuracy (for example, if there's a chance of the americans jamming it), then the cargo-aircraft manufacturers won't be able to rely on it, so it'll be like GPS. And then they have no need to pay for it, so it doesn't get built.
As you say, putting it on the same frequency as GPS only gives protection from american abuse of the system, and doesn't help with somebody prepared to jam both systems equally. So maybe nobody *is* planning to use it for autonomous aircraft. Or maybe they're doing something clever with upward-pointing aerials, inertial navigation backups, and abort-landing-on-galileo-fail programs.
Oh, and the north korean missile is apparently a modified mig-21 with a lego mindstorms set to control the rudder. So if it reaches the korean coast they'll be doing well.
One wonders whether the galileo team are good enough at encryption that they will continue to get paid for use of the system though... Didn't GPS prove that no DRM system can remain uncracked forever?
"Are you trolling, or have you already forgot the "let's apply an experimental kernel patch and kill all the LG cdrom drives" incident? I didn't see any other distributions with that problem."
Am I trolling, or did you just post anonymously?
My view of Mandrake was only enhanced by the LG incident -- previously I didn't realise just how much hardware testing they did, that even a CD unit that I'd never heard of, Mandrake had tested for compatibility with their operating-system. Granted, a different version of the CD firmware caused a problem, but to be honest, I'm more worried about somebody writing a Windows worm to send that "cough up your skull" code to the CD drive.
"There's a real use for an accurate positioning system that can't be disabled on a whim"
The reason for launching Galileo (or his namesake satellite) is that it's reliable enough to land aircraft by, to do train collision-detection by, to navigate ships automatically, etc.
Now imagine the effects of jamming that galilieo-guided korean missile over europe (or over america)
Then imagine the economic effects of making a system vulnerable to this. If galileo doesn't survive US action, it's not reliable enough, and the CAA doesn't give licenses to use it for navigation. So the people who would have paid for it suddenly have no use for it. So then what use is the project?
When the project is launched, it needs to be reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why not just hire contractors to do this if you have the cash?"
Have you ever worked with contractors?
"Fixing the compromises on major linux servers is one thing, but why has nobody mentioned finding the perpetrators?"
Like the sort of thing microsoft would do. Let's have a bounty...
Serious answer, the FBI doesn't give a damn about crackers and never will. $5000 damages? Sounds like a public-funded private police force for big business to me.
"Now where did I put my tin-foil hat?"
Right here
"The Tramp rescues a baby abandoned by its despairing mother, brings it up to become his partner in a window-repair business - although it is the Kid's business to break the windows first"
Glad to see the Roman fire brigade still alive and well, and doing business...
Now try to find a team of lawyers that can successfully prosecute such a case in Romania, China or Russia! These sorts of scams generally do not originate in places like the US or UK.
Course not!
"Yeah... apparently, people are still STUPID enough to open these things"
Strange isn't it. You have an email address, you write it on your job application, and a week later you get an email with "Re: your job application". How can people be so STUPID as to open these things?
I'm pretty stupid, I open most of the letters I receive at home. It would be nice if I could just bin them like you do with your email, but last time that happened, the council came asking where was their tax cheque?
Email is better, because it doesn't matter if you delete anything that looks suspicious. Like, I can delete the "Renew your website NOW" email because it's spam and only stupid people click on it, but I know that I should read the "Renew your website NOW" email, otherwise my domain name doesn't get renewed.
"Trusted Computing" basically means "you TRUST us, we don't trust you."
"Trusted Computing" means that you have to trust it, not that you should trust it, nor that it's trustworthy, nor that it won't abuse that trust.
GNU is trustworthy, Windows is trusted. Big difference.
"that we're all hobbyists and only do OSS in our spare time (the description often made in news articles)."
;-)
You must be one of those foreign people working in the middle of the night... Commies I tell ya!
"I wonder if moving that fast causes problems with train-land wi-fi and cell networks due to the doppler effect? Imagine you're screaming toward a cell tower at 167 m/s (600 km/h) - that's a doppler shift of 500Hz at 900MHz, which I imagine could cause some problems."
Put the towers further from the tracks?
Gotta love google's calculator here
"All an ISP needs to do is institute a policy whereby if someone is caught spamming, the cleanup charge is $20,000. They already have their credit card, all they need to do is charge it."
Whose credit card do they have?
(Hint: spammers are also credit card thieves)
Are you sure there's not a Perl module and barcode database somewhere to do this?
"It's perfetcly possible to have a free market without scarcity of information."
Indeed it's required...
If price, quality, and history information isn't perfectly and universally available, it's not a free market.
So for example, trying to prevent the publishing of a shop's price list is an attempt to destroy a free market. People don't know enough to make a perfect choice, so the best supplier doesn't necessarily make the sales.
Rest of world:
Left | Center | Right
U.S.
- | - | - | "Far Left" | "Left-leaning" | Reasonable
"Then nobody can copy the yellow/white pages either"
Worse than that. Try drawing a map when Harveys claims protection on the position of Washington...
"What I want is a cheap pad that I can read eBooks on"
GPS-connected moving map for your car, with a collaborative map that gets more accurate every time you drive down a road, mapping the road's position.
I often post anonymously when dealing with morons.
Thankyou. I'm almost tempted to leave it there, as proof that there's no technical counter-argument left in you.
it's almost funny to hear you claim that Mandrake "works the first time" when they just had to pull an entire release because of a patch they added to the kernel
Why? It did work first time. I installed it and it worked, which is a *lot* more than you can say for slackware. (or Windows, for that matter, which took a few reboots to get any drivers working)
So I don't own a broken CD-ROM drive. What's your point? If you solder the power-supply pins together on your computer, Mandrake won't work on that either. There's a line between having a good, tested operating system, and having one which magically fixes your hardware. Would you like it to paint the case blue as well?
"GPS gets jammed all the time, is not 100% reliable and no critical transportation application ever uses it as it's sole navigation system."
From my reading of Galileo news, I thought the idea was: "GPS isn't reliable enough for planes, so let's build something that is".
The system was being designed with the sort of sub-centimetre* accuracy that would allow the system to be licensed to people who had plans to use it for landing systems.
* about the width of a beer-bottle lid, for people in imperial-units
What I meant to say was, that if Galileo can't be guaranteed to give that accuracy (for example, if there's a chance of the americans jamming it), then the cargo-aircraft manufacturers won't be able to rely on it, so it'll be like GPS. And then they have no need to pay for it, so it doesn't get built.
As you say, putting it on the same frequency as GPS only gives protection from american abuse of the system, and doesn't help with somebody prepared to jam both systems equally. So maybe nobody *is* planning to use it for autonomous aircraft. Or maybe they're doing something clever with upward-pointing aerials, inertial navigation backups, and abort-landing-on-galileo-fail programs.
Oh, and the north korean missile is apparently a modified mig-21 with a lego mindstorms set to control the rudder. So if it reaches the korean coast they'll be doing well.
One wonders whether the galileo team are good enough at encryption that they will continue to get paid for use of the system though... Didn't GPS prove that no DRM system can remain uncracked forever?
"Are you trolling, or have you already forgot the "let's apply an experimental kernel patch and kill all the LG cdrom drives" incident? I didn't see any other distributions with that problem."
Am I trolling, or did you just post anonymously?
My view of Mandrake was only enhanced by the LG incident -- previously I didn't realise just how much hardware testing they did, that even a CD unit that I'd never heard of, Mandrake had tested for compatibility with their operating-system. Granted, a different version of the CD firmware caused a problem, but to be honest, I'm more worried about somebody writing a Windows worm to send that "cough up your skull" code to the CD drive.
Congratulations to the debian team.
"why don't do a Linux DVD Live distro? ..just wondering."
Chug...
Chug...
Status bar on Openoffice splash screen illuminates another pixel...
Windows user: "is Linux always this slow?"
"Also sounds like the 'Slackware Live' cd.
Can you create your own in mandrake like you can with slackware?"
That statement gives me a picture of going to buy a television, only to be offered an electronics book and a soldering iron...
We Mandrake users buy our software in boxes. And it works first time.
As you say, when one-person companies are paying 50 cents per click, the idea of somebody clicking away at their advert can get quite insulting.
Not, of course, that anybody is above "spending" their competitors' money with the occasional click on a google ad-word for a competitive query.
Note to google: you need to download the list of open proxies every day, and refuse adwords impressions from IP addresses on that list!
Or just respond to a click with a portscan. If you don't mind being a little unpopular...
"There's a real use for an accurate positioning system that can't be disabled on a whim"
The reason for launching Galileo (or his namesake satellite) is that it's reliable enough to land aircraft by, to do train collision-detection by, to navigate ships automatically, etc.
Now imagine the effects of jamming that galilieo-guided korean missile over europe (or over america)
Then imagine the economic effects of making a system vulnerable to this. If galileo doesn't survive US action, it's not reliable enough, and the CAA doesn't give licenses to use it for navigation. So the people who would have paid for it suddenly have no use for it. So then what use is the project?
When the project is launched, it needs to be reliable.
"Odd how China releases these 'cyber dissidents' less than a week before Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visits the US."
Good thing the USA released their own cyber-dissidents in time for the meeting