Too right. I use a TiVo and I haven't taking in any advertising for over a year. I assume that we will move more towards one of
* pay-to-view programmes
* pay-to-view channels
* blip-verts
* embedded advertising. "
License fees! Expand the BBC to take over america! (RealPlayer broadcasts notwithstanding...)
"Eh? Why is everyone talking about a weak password? The article says sniffed password."
Why talk about passwords at all? The article says there's a local root compromise in GNU, and that nobody knows what it is. It mentions that it's serious enough for them to leave debian servers switched off, for fear that the compromise could be used again.
If their suspicions are correct, then it's very worrying for anyone who runs a multi-user gnu/linux system; ISPs, development boxes, commercial servers. And yes, it would be as serious as one of the Windows bugs.
It's probably not about patch levels either. Although some of the debian boxes were said to have older versions of some software, unless a root compromise can be found in those software, then we have to assume that a fully up-to-date and professionally-secured system is vulnerable. So whatever it is needs to be found.
Again, this is all an interpretation of an article, which in turn is someone's interpretation of the forensics, which itself can be fuzzy. But it sounds like there's stuff needs to be audited, and quickly.
So when are one of us nerds going to invent a better way to tell what geographical location is associated with what IP/URL?"
Geo::IP [cpan.org] is per-country, or per-city if you pay for it and the city's in america.
Google did something using zip-codes it found on websites to identify a country. That's useful, because the location of your webserver has sod-all relevance to the location of anybody using it, whereas zip codes are the company address. Actually it wasn't google, but someone winning a google competition.
If someone wanted to use the WHOIS data, they all have zipcodes too, although you'd have to ask nanog'rs where to get the full list of domain-registrar addresses. (or ask spammers...)
There should be a UK post-code database somewhere, which has geographic regions. It's rather expensive though, especially given that the public paid for it to be compiled.
Even if all you can find is a city name on someone's website, you can compare that against a public-domain database of all cities in the world [xplanet.sourceforge.net], to get a location. If you can tell the difference between namesake towns, that is. I'm in London but not in Canada.
Someone had an extension to Geo::IP, where they were asking website visitors to volunteer their approximate locations, then using that to map end-users.
And of course, many US servers have their lat/long in a database somewhere for precisely this sort of mapping.
"Most likely, these are a bunch of yahoos that simply grabbed some code from the gpl world (perl, gzip, squid/apache/bdb,named/tinyurl), repackaged it, and are busy selling it."
Because they're marketing to IIS people who, by definition don't know about either webservers or free software?
Makes a lot more sense when you see it that way I suppose. I wonder who buys that sort of stuff. (...because we've got some google rankings to sell them;-)
"Paper is better than electronic for long term storage"
And carved stone is even better. I would suggest using a CNC milling machine to backup any data you want to keep for longer than paper allows, but I guess punchcards are probably just as good.
Could be worse I suppose. We could have translated the Rosetta stone to discover it reads: "Content-type: text/DRM-Encrypted\n Note: this material is copyrighted, please purchase an egyptian slave to allow you to legally read it"
The parent poster's point is that their site grabber program can get IIS sites but crashes on some Apache sites
More to the point, if they understand HTTP so badly that they can't even get server headers and parse them correctly, do you really want to trust such a company with HTTP-rewriting, compression, caching, and wildcard-DNS services that's their main product?
Seems to me that those sort of programs require a good deal of knowledge to get working correctly. Maybe a few levels above what you need to implement a webserver or DNS server. It seems odd that someone with so much knowledge would make any errors in handling the internet protocols...
"Well, look at it this way. If prolonged heavy usage is dangerous, the only people that are going to be realistically affected are telemarketers and tech support drones"
All outside appearances suggest they've been using it for years.
"Instead of everyone complaining about the annoying Flash ads and site designs, we'd be complaining about the annoying WVG ads and site designs."
The difference being that it's bloody easy to write a filter to remove XML tags or attribtues you don't like, such as the animation ones.
Besides, by the time SVG becomes common enough that advertisers start using it, Mozilla will have per-site mime-type blocking that'll mean you never have to watch Tom's stupid animated hammer again.
The real question will be, will the next version of mozilla ship with SVG support enabled? If it does, then microsoft's non-standard standard will be dead in the water, as the browser which all technical people use gets support for the vector graphics format natively used by most free software drawing packages (openOffice included, although being able to open SVG as well as export it would be a nice touch...)
"How complete is it? I mean, does it contain a simulated RIAA that will come and sue you for distribution of copyrighted simulated material?"
Anybody who uses genetic algorithms, who 'breeds' computer programs rather than writing them, will tell you that the secret to success is good predators.
So yes, if you wanted to design a system for rating the quality of P2P protocols, one of the most important steps in that simulation is to have evolving predators, who try and intercept others' data, who try to slow the system down, who try to leech without sharing, etc. A system where data can be traced to an originator might score less than a system resiliant to this kind of attack.
The testbed mentioned in the article doesn't contain this sort of capability, but if you're involved in designing such networks, then it would be useful to dedicate a lot of effort to trying to attack the protocol using RIAA methods.
Read more about what a P2P application should have in its design.
"Why do people use Microsoft products? because they're either forced to (at work) or they they find them easy to use (at home)"
Find them easy to use? Have you ever met someone who's tried MacOS, tried KDE, tried Gnome, tried Windows, and then concluded that Windows was easiest to use, went out and bought a copy?
No? Isn't it more likely that home users were forced to use Windows just as the office users?
If they did truly choose, you could imagine people going into the computer shop and hearing"this is the computer running WindowsXP, this is the same computer but running Windows98, and this is the same computer but running Gnome, which would you like to buy"
Most of the computer shops I've been to say "this is the computer, and YOU WILL buy WindowsXP, because otherwise we won't sell you the computer". Say what you like about building your own systems, or going to an Apple shop, but in most cases, somebody buying a computer is forced to use Windows.
Usability doesn't come into it. Full-page adverts in newspapers and consumer magazines, television adverts, and yes, illegal monopolistic action against suppliers who stock alternatives, is what makes people 'choose' Windows. None of these people do so because they've decided it's easy to use, quite the opposite, many people spend their lives cursing the difficulty of using Windows.
"Why don't we setup a sort of unique web page number if articles of interest or knowledge are published there."
Perhaps the content-hash-number of the Freenet system would work? It's just a hash of the text.
Of course, that doesn't work for modified versions, even so small as formatting changes or different titles.
Perhaps it would be possible to have a hash function which generates the same output regardless of such minor changes, and can cope with text regardless of the titles, navbars, etc. on the web-page.
"A team of 5 interesting, friendly people will ALWAYS outperform a lone social outcast barricaded in his single office."
Not always. Some people employ hackers, and they regularly get more done than teams of people socialising.
"Already renowned for his work with Emacs,
Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers--a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself--still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age"
Free as in Freedom - Biography of Richard Stallman, written by Sam Williams
"I'd like to recycle my old notebook's LCD into a secondary monitor for my desktop. Does anyone have any ideas how one could do that?"
Either use PCAnywhere, or XWindows, depending on your operating system, and run the notebook as a graphical client logging on to your main computer?
I know, it's not as easy as plugging in the VGA cable. But you do get to use your laptop's video-card, rather than having to buy a new dual-head card.
Alternatively, you could just use it as a second networked computer, if you only want a web-browser handy in one and your development environment in the other.
Slashdot Mirror
* pay-to-view programmes
* pay-to-view channels
* blip-verts
* embedded advertising. "
42 is the answer. what is the question?
Why do people like to drink tea?
Play a game of noughts and crosses against yourself
Lipread from a video camera
This is an XBox, what is the software signing key?
"Eh? Why is everyone talking about a weak password? The article says sniffed password."
Why talk about passwords at all? The article says there's a local root compromise in GNU, and that nobody knows what it is. It mentions that it's serious enough for them to leave debian servers switched off, for fear that the compromise could be used again.
If their suspicions are correct, then it's very worrying for anyone who runs a multi-user gnu/linux system; ISPs, development boxes, commercial servers. And yes, it would be as serious as one of the Windows bugs.
It's probably not about patch levels either. Although some of the debian boxes were said to have older versions of some software, unless a root compromise can be found in those software, then we have to assume that a fully up-to-date and professionally-secured system is vulnerable. So whatever it is needs to be found.
Again, this is all an interpretation of an article, which in turn is someone's interpretation of the forensics, which itself can be fuzzy. But it sounds like there's stuff needs to be audited, and quickly.
So when are one of us nerds going to invent a better way to tell what geographical location is associated with what IP/URL?"
Geo::IP [cpan.org] is per-country, or per-city if you pay for it and the city's in america.
Google did something using zip-codes it found on websites to identify a country. That's useful, because the location of your webserver has sod-all relevance to the location of anybody using it, whereas zip codes are the company address. Actually it wasn't google, but someone winning a google competition.
If someone wanted to use the WHOIS data, they all have zipcodes too, although you'd have to ask nanog'rs where to get the full list of domain-registrar addresses. (or ask spammers...)
There should be a UK post-code database somewhere, which has geographic regions. It's rather expensive though, especially given that the public paid for it to be compiled.
Even if all you can find is a city name on someone's website, you can compare that against a public-domain database of all cities in the world [xplanet.sourceforge.net], to get a location. If you can tell the difference between namesake towns, that is. I'm in London but not in Canada.
Someone had an extension to Geo::IP, where they were asking website visitors to volunteer their approximate locations, then using that to map end-users.
And of course, many US servers have their lat/long in a database somewhere for precisely this sort of mapping.
"Most likely, these are a bunch of yahoos that simply grabbed some code from the gpl world (perl, gzip, squid/apache/bdb,named/tinyurl), repackaged it, and are busy selling it."
;-)
Because they're marketing to IIS people who, by definition don't know about either webservers or free software?
Makes a lot more sense when you see it that way I suppose. I wonder who buys that sort of stuff.
(...because we've got some google rankings to sell them
"Paper is better than electronic for long term storage"
And carved stone is even better. I would suggest using a CNC milling machine to backup any data you want to keep for longer than paper allows, but I guess punchcards are probably just as good.
Could be worse I suppose. We could have translated the Rosetta stone to discover it reads: "Content-type: text/DRM-Encrypted\n Note: this material is copyrighted, please purchase an egyptian slave to allow you to legally read it"
The parent poster's point is that their site grabber program can get IIS sites but crashes on some Apache sites
More to the point, if they understand HTTP so badly that they can't even get server headers and parse them correctly, do you really want to trust such a company with HTTP-rewriting, compression, caching, and wildcard-DNS services that's their main product?
Seems to me that those sort of programs require a good deal of knowledge to get working correctly. Maybe a few levels above what you need to implement a webserver or DNS server. It seems odd that someone with so much knowledge would make any errors in handling the internet protocols...
"Well, look at it this way. If prolonged heavy usage is dangerous, the only people that are going to be realistically affected are telemarketers and tech support drones"
All outside appearances suggest they've been using it for years.
mikerich... is that a pseudonym for Jeremy Clarkson?
"And you're wise to stay away from PHPNuke."
Not least because its author is violating the GPL [you're not allowed to change the copyright notice on the bottom of each page]
"Right... What's the ASCII code for the Euro sign? Or even accented "a"? How about the russian Gze?"
Simple, just cut-and-paste them from Word, like those fantastically useful ?intelligent quotes? you keep seeing on people?s websites
"You need to perform voodoo and raise the dead to be able to add page numbers to your documents in OpenOffice. In MS Office it's just one click away."
One click away from "page 18 of 3", if I remember MS-Office correctly...
"In fact, I think they should require the disks to take turns in their positions. That would only be fair."
Great, all I needed was a switch hard-drive, as if the software running on it wasn't indecisive enough. Does striped RAID count?
"Instead of everyone complaining about the annoying Flash ads and site designs, we'd be complaining about the annoying WVG ads and site designs."
The difference being that it's bloody easy to write a filter to remove XML tags or attribtues you don't like, such as the animation ones.
Besides, by the time SVG becomes common enough that advertisers start using it, Mozilla will have per-site mime-type blocking that'll mean you never have to watch Tom's stupid animated hammer again.
"My review of the Karma : Excellent."
Now if only they named their next product "+4 funny"
* 1 GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes
Damn well not going to buy an MP3 player from someone who doesn't even know how big a gigabyte is!
Surely this company can't run linux?!? It's unclean!
The real question will be, will the next version of mozilla ship with SVG support enabled? If it does, then microsoft's non-standard standard will be dead in the water, as the browser which all technical people use gets support for the vector graphics format natively used by most free software drawing packages (openOffice included, although being able to open SVG as well as export it would be a nice touch...)
"How complete is it? I mean, does it contain a simulated RIAA that will come and sue you for distribution of copyrighted simulated material?"
Anybody who uses genetic algorithms, who 'breeds' computer programs rather than writing them, will tell you that the secret to success is good predators.
So yes, if you wanted to design a system for rating the quality of P2P protocols, one of the most important steps in that simulation is to have evolving predators, who try and intercept others' data, who try to slow the system down, who try to leech without sharing, etc. A system where data can be traced to an originator might score less than a system resiliant to this kind of attack.
The testbed mentioned in the article doesn't contain this sort of capability, but if you're involved in designing such networks, then it would be useful to dedicate a lot of effort to trying to attack the protocol using RIAA methods.
Read more about what a P2P application should have in its design.
"Why do people use Microsoft products? because they're either forced to (at work) or they they find them easy to use (at home)"
Find them easy to use? Have you ever met someone who's tried MacOS, tried KDE, tried Gnome, tried Windows, and then concluded that Windows was easiest to use, went out and bought a copy?
No? Isn't it more likely that home users were forced to use Windows just as the office users?
If they did truly choose, you could imagine people going into the computer shop and hearing"this is the computer running WindowsXP, this is the same computer but running Windows98, and this is the same computer but running Gnome, which would you like to buy"
Most of the computer shops I've been to say "this is the computer, and YOU WILL buy WindowsXP, because otherwise we won't sell you the computer". Say what you like about building your own systems, or going to an Apple shop, but in most cases, somebody buying a computer is forced to use Windows.
Usability doesn't come into it. Full-page adverts in newspapers and consumer magazines, television adverts, and yes, illegal monopolistic action against suppliers who stock alternatives, is what makes people 'choose' Windows. None of these people do so because they've decided it's easy to use, quite the opposite, many people spend their lives cursing the difficulty of using Windows.
"Why don't we setup a sort of unique web page number if articles of interest or knowledge are published there."
Perhaps the content-hash-number of the Freenet system would work? It's just a hash of the text.
Of course, that doesn't work for modified versions, even so small as formatting changes or different titles.
Perhaps it would be possible to have a hash function which generates the same output regardless of such minor changes, and can cope with text regardless of the titles, navbars, etc. on the web-page.
Not always. Some people employ hackers, and they regularly get more done than teams of people socialising.
Free as in Freedom - Biography of Richard Stallman, written by Sam Williams
"Students want to use it, they sign to say they'll abide by the conditions. And that includes monitoring."
And students who value freedom, will choose a university which doesn't make a point of allowing unscrupulous 'businesses' to search peoples' data.
"I'd like to recycle my old notebook's LCD into a secondary monitor for my desktop. Does anyone have any ideas how one could do that?"
Either use PCAnywhere, or XWindows, depending on your operating system, and run the notebook as a graphical client logging on to your main computer?
I know, it's not as easy as plugging in the VGA cable. But you do get to use your laptop's video-card, rather than having to buy a new dual-head card.
Alternatively, you could just use it as a second networked computer, if you only want a web-browser handy in one and your development environment in the other.
"Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years."
Why do they need top publish this advice on a website? Can't they just email SCO's last remaining customer directly?
"Ok, to start, you will notice that first in order for this surveilence to be activated, they need a cout order. IOW they need a warrant."
FBI agent: Can we have 300 warrants for *these* (holds up printed list) people, and wiretap warrants for *these* people?
Lowly court clerk: wiretap warrants *approved* (stamps warrant and signs it), ask judge james about the others
Judge: warrants *approved* (stamps and signs it), what did you want them for again?
FBI agent: Sorry, can't tell you that
Judge: Okay, good luck