Sorry, but in this special case, you wouldn't see anything at all. The internet was nearly non-existant in Iraq before the war, mostly because of their bad telephone network infrastructure, and because of the very small ratio of computers per capita.
Why not map Autonomous Systems instead? Routes to AS are being advertised by BGP, and a set of well placed looking glasses would be all it takes to get a big picture. I never saw anything like an AS mapping, with the ASes as nodes and the (BGP announced) routes between them as links.
Of course, some AS span multiple geographical areas, but this is also true of class C networks.
The big advantage of mapping ASes is, that there are not so many of them, compared to class C nets, thus resulting in much simpler graphs. Moreover, the graphs would nicely show the boundaries between institutions/organizations, rather than artificial boundaries based on numerical addresses.
The problem is that there is always a time window before a vuln is published (say on bugtraq). What if an attack occurs before a patch exists? Would the admin be responsible?
This is difficult to determine. Say, you have too many holes in your firewall setting; some intruder slipped in and exploited a 0-day vulnerability to commit some crime. As admin, you're probably not responsible for the 0-day vuln being exploited, but you can be responsible for being lazy, sloppy, perhaps irresponsible by allowing the bad guy through the firewall in the first place.
Isn't there a kind of computer crime insurance for admins or individuals?
... I can only say that I prefer old-fashioned HTML4/XHTML standard based website
Absolutely! Hand-crafted HTML is not only more portable, it forces us to focus more on content. It _is_ possible to design websites that don't hurt everyone's esthetic feelings with the most simple HTML tags.
I've bought 1/8th of the delta quadrant last year, and would like to sell it piecewise. Unfortunatly, no bidders on Ebay offered the minimum required price. Bill Gates was not interested either, because the computers in the delta quadrant are not Micro$oft compatible. I'll have to take my business elsewhere; perhaps to NGC 31231?
This is the reason database transactions exist. A filesystem based on CVS would need the concept of (atomic) transactions: you open(2) the file, therefore starting a transaction. Every access (read(2)) and modification (write(2)) etc... goes in the transaction _only_, and at close(2), the transaction gets commited.
The funny part starts at close() (or commit())-time, when you need to resolve conflicts. Huh...
Me too. I was using CVS for about 3 years on my entire $HOME dir, used ssh to synchronize between 5 machines (of mixed brands, Linux, BSD and Solaris), and I retrieved quite a lot of old sources that way. No backup would have been that flexible.
I'm amazed so few people use remote CVS (:ext: method) for this. It's extremely useful, once you get used to it.
Another source for bias is that open software developers pro-actively seek to find, publicize and then stamp out bugs and security breaches.
Proprietary closed source software vendors generally tend to cover up their tracks, not to publish bugs unless they're caught red-handed, and would at best re-actively handle security.
All in all, the bad guys (pun intended) will always have the advantage of hiding their (coding) mistakes, something open source can't. Advantage w.r.t. biased security benchmarking, that is.
Having the kernel, libraries and all applications's source code, including the ports collection, in CVS is definitively an advantage over the fragmented Linux world. Anyone willing to generate a FreeBSD distribution just needs to cvsup the "official" part and tweak it to the needs of special customers.
Why shouldn't Debian establish a central CVS repo where all developers (kernel, GNU folks, KDE/Gnome/... apps developers) would migrate their programs? Oh, wait, I'm dreaming here.
Having many distros is not necessarily a Good Thing(tm). Nothing against having vendors put different accents now and then, but the base system should IMHO be based on common grounds.
This is exactly what makes the BSD (and esp. FreeBSD) culture so strong: they have a single CVS repo for kernel, libraries and base utilities, and a common ports architecture (also in CVS). Any vendor is free to fork off his own version from that base system, but as soon as they start deviating too much from the official version, they'll have a hard time convincing countless sysadmins who are accustomed to the basic official version.
Debian, being the most free Linux distro out there could very well become the canon version of Linux, from which RedHat, SuSE etc... would derive their own value added products. The biggest advantage would be, that most Linux systems would at least feel the same (or similar), and save customers (end users and sysadmins alike) a lot of trouble and head-scratching when moving from one version to another.
Of course, Debian has shortcomings too. But the more users of other distros gather around a single base system, the more input will help make Debian a still more user-friendly system in the long run.
I'd definitively advocate to give it a try. This is an excellent suggestion.
Just have a look at bugtraq to get a feeling about how many bugs are Windows only, how many Linux/Unix related and how many cross site scripting (XSS).
We shouldn't fear biased comparisions which are made only to spread FUD.
The UN General Assembly voted today, under mounting pressure from the EU and bandwidth-impaired third world countries a ban on Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE), commonly known as 'spam'.
This vote was later overthrown by a veto of the United States of America in the security council. The US strongly oppose any regulation that would prevent marketers from selling their goods and considers the U.N.s general assembly vote as an attack against Freedom of Speech(TM), and deem it "counter-productive".
The Ambassador of the United States to the U.N. announced today that "either, you're with us, or we'll close down all our connections to countries which won't respect the US UCE Protection Act (also known as the opt-out model). Protests from other countries were left unheard.
Seriously: The best Internet should not be run by countries. We'll just be creating a super burocracy here!
Thanks for this hint. With rblcheck, it works like a charm.
However, another problem occurs with fetchmail. When fetchmail downloads from a POP3 server, it drops the mails into local sendmail. Enabling FEATURE dnsbl on this local sendmail doesn't help at all, because all that is checked is the IP address of the ISP pop3 server, not the address of the original spammer.
Any idea how to combine fetchmail, rblcheck and local sendmail in such a way as to redo the dnsbl check, now on _every_ IP/DNS address listed in the Received: headers?
If the extremely well-funded OpenBSD team can do it...
Which reminds us the DARPA support that was withdrawn later for political reasons. But yes, you're right: it is possible to write secure software. It just takes more time and scrutiny, and poor Microsoft can't afford this type of quality control.
This exactly points out Linux's greatest weakness. Had the GNU/Linux community organized itself around a central CVS repository like the BSDs did from the beginning, instead of forking off "standards"-stetting commercial vendors, we wouldn't be affected by a few vendors being bought out of the market by Redmont or anybody else.
Fortunately, thank [L]GPL and other free licenses, it's not too late. Should the Linux market get too fragmented, the community could still gather around a central repo, which would be canon. Vendors would simply draw from that repo and add value at whim.
Is it just a dream? Maybe. Politics tend to negatively influence such (mild) centralization efforts; just look at Debian! But we could learn to direct our efforts toward a common goal: true independance from vendors.
After all, FreeBSD proves us that it can be done, and done quite well. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same? A community supported and sanctioned canon distribution!
Wrong. If someone uses your BSD-licensed code in their own proprietary product, this still doesn't give them more rights than other users of this code.
As was already pointed out earlier in this discussion, you own the rights to the BSD-licensed code, just as you do on GPLed code. Just because someone else incorporates it in their products doesn't give them _more_ rights than other users. And, as long as you don't steal from their proprietary extensions, they won't prevail in court should they sue you here.
The BSD style licenses are just a Bad Idea for open source.
Well, what about the BSDs themselves, Apache, and a lot of other code released under BSD-licenses? Are they suffering just from being released under a non-GPL license?
With all due respect, there's a lot of FUD thrown at BSD-style licenses, just as there is FUD thrown at the GPL. I just didn't expect so much anti BSD-license FUD from open source advocates, considering that the FSF lists BSD-style license as legitimate way to designate free software: Various Licenses and Comments about Them.
We are free to choose whatever license scheme we want, and personally, I'm not an opponent to GPL at all. It just happens, that in the case this discussion was all about, sometimes GPL or even LGPL is incompatible with legal requirements of companies that developed software under another license before.
The downside of strongly suggesting companies that are willing to go open source to use GPL, is that most potential contributors will shy away from this step. I'm glad that they can choose among many licensing schemes, so that we can get more free software on the long run. And, please, BSD-licensed software is just as Free as GPLed software (see link above).
Slashdot Mirror
one could see how badly Iraq was destoryed
Sorry, but in this special case, you wouldn't see anything at all. The internet was nearly non-existant in Iraq before the war, mostly because of their bad telephone network infrastructure, and because of the very small ratio of computers per capita.
Web servers are relatively few compared with other types of hosts on the internet.
Yeah, the number of web clients (mostly Windows machines on dial-up links) is far higher :-)
Unfortunately, the number of spam sources is rapidly catching up too.
Why not map Autonomous Systems instead? Routes to AS are being advertised by BGP, and a set of well placed looking glasses would be all it takes to get a big picture. I never saw anything like an AS mapping, with the ASes as nodes and the (BGP announced) routes between them as links.
Of course, some AS span multiple geographical areas, but this is also true of class C networks.
The big advantage of mapping ASes is, that there are not so many of them, compared to class C nets, thus resulting in much simpler graphs. Moreover, the graphs would nicely show the boundaries between institutions/organizations, rather than artificial boundaries based on numerical addresses.
The problem is that there is always a time window before a vuln is published (say on bugtraq). What if an attack occurs before a patch exists? Would the admin be responsible?
This is difficult to determine. Say, you have too many holes in your firewall setting; some intruder slipped in and exploited a 0-day vulnerability to commit some crime. As admin, you're probably not responsible for the 0-day vuln being exploited, but you can be responsible for being lazy, sloppy, perhaps irresponsible by allowing the bad guy through the firewall in the first place.
Isn't there a kind of computer crime insurance for admins or individuals?
What is weird is visiting the web site of someone who has died.
I experienced this once: tried to contact a person via their e-mail address, and got a reply from an autoresponder:
I thought it was a joke, but the poor guy really died that day. His family decided to keep his online ID alife. Weird.
Absolutely! Hand-crafted HTML is not only more portable, it forces us to focus more on content. It _is_ possible to design websites that don't hurt everyone's esthetic feelings with the most simple HTML tags.
Pen & paper? What a concept! Are they Windows compatible? Where can I download these?
I've bought 1/8th of the delta quadrant last year, and would like to sell it piecewise. Unfortunatly, no bidders on Ebay offered the minimum required price. Bill Gates was not interested either, because the computers in the delta quadrant are not Micro$oft compatible. I'll have to take my business elsewhere; perhaps to NGC 31231?
As to aliens: without proof that they exist, he refuses to care.
That's the purpose of seti@home.
Perhaps NASA shouldn'd have dropped funding of SETI in the first place :)
It was a time machine! It's still there, in another time frame. Or will be there, or was there, ... oh now, I'm all confused about time travels!
This is the reason database transactions exist. A filesystem based on CVS would need the concept of (atomic) transactions: you open(2) the file, therefore starting a transaction. Every access (read(2)) and modification (write(2)) etc... goes in the transaction _only_, and at close(2), the transaction gets commited.
The funny part starts at close() (or commit())-time, when you need to resolve conflicts. Huh...
Me too. I was using CVS for about 3 years on my entire $HOME dir, used ssh to synchronize between 5 machines (of mixed brands, Linux, BSD and Solaris), and I retrieved quite a lot of old sources that way. No backup would have been that flexible.
I'm amazed so few people use remote CVS (:ext: method) for this. It's extremely useful, once you get used to it.
Another source for bias is that open software developers pro-actively seek to find, publicize and then stamp out bugs and security breaches.
Proprietary closed source software vendors generally tend to cover up their tracks, not to publish bugs unless they're caught red-handed, and would at best re-actively handle security.
All in all, the bad guys (pun intended) will always have the advantage of hiding their (coding) mistakes, something open source can't. Advantage w.r.t. biased security benchmarking, that is.
Having the kernel, libraries and all applications's source code, including the ports collection, in CVS is definitively an advantage over the fragmented Linux world. Anyone willing to generate a FreeBSD distribution just needs to cvsup the "official" part and tweak it to the needs of special customers.
Why shouldn't Debian establish a central CVS repo where all developers (kernel, GNU folks, KDE/Gnome/... apps developers) would migrate their programs? Oh, wait, I'm dreaming here.
Having many distros is not necessarily a Good Thing(tm). Nothing against having vendors put different accents now and then, but the base system should IMHO be based on common grounds.
This is exactly what makes the BSD (and esp. FreeBSD) culture so strong: they have a single CVS repo for kernel, libraries and base utilities, and a common ports architecture (also in CVS). Any vendor is free to fork off his own version from that base system, but as soon as they start deviating too much from the official version, they'll have a hard time convincing countless sysadmins who are accustomed to the basic official version.
Debian, being the most free Linux distro out there could very well become the canon version of Linux, from which RedHat, SuSE etc... would derive their own value added products. The biggest advantage would be, that most Linux systems would at least feel the same (or similar), and save customers (end users and sysadmins alike) a lot of trouble and head-scratching when moving from one version to another.
Of course, Debian has shortcomings too. But the more users of other distros gather around a single base system, the more input will help make Debian a still more user-friendly system in the long run.
I'd definitively advocate to give it a try. This is an excellent suggestion.
Just have a look at bugtraq to get a feeling about how many bugs are Windows only, how many Linux/Unix related and how many cross site scripting (XSS).
We shouldn't fear biased comparisions which are made only to spread FUD.
The UN General Assembly voted today, under mounting pressure from the EU and bandwidth-impaired third world countries a ban on Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE), commonly known as 'spam'.
This vote was later overthrown by a veto of the United States of America in the security council. The US strongly oppose any regulation that would prevent marketers from selling their goods and considers the U.N.s general assembly vote as an attack against Freedom of Speech(TM), and deem it "counter-productive".
The Ambassador of the United States to the U.N. announced today that "either, you're with us, or we'll close down all our connections to countries which won't respect the US UCE Protection Act (also known as the opt-out model). Protests from other countries were left unheard.
Seriously: The best Internet should not be run by countries. We'll just be creating a super burocracy here!
Thanks for this hint. With rblcheck, it works like a charm.
However, another problem occurs with fetchmail. When fetchmail downloads from a POP3 server, it drops the mails into local sendmail. Enabling FEATURE dnsbl on this local sendmail doesn't help at all, because all that is checked is the IP address of the ISP pop3 server, not the address of the original spammer.
Any idea how to combine fetchmail, rblcheck and local sendmail in such a way as to redo the dnsbl check, now on _every_ IP/DNS address listed in the Received: headers?
Okay, with a working rblcheck?, a return code != 0 means that the address is filtered. Very good!
If the extremely well-funded OpenBSD team can do it...
Which reminds us the DARPA support that was withdrawn later for political reasons. But yes, you're right: it is possible to write secure software. It just takes more time and scrutiny, and poor Microsoft can't afford this type of quality control.
This exactly points out Linux's greatest weakness. Had the GNU/Linux community organized itself around a central CVS repository like the BSDs did from the beginning, instead of forking off "standards"-stetting commercial vendors, we wouldn't be affected by a few vendors being bought out of the market by Redmont or anybody else.
Fortunately, thank [L]GPL and other free licenses, it's not too late. Should the Linux market get too fragmented, the community could still gather around a central repo, which would be canon. Vendors would simply draw from that repo and add value at whim.
Is it just a dream? Maybe. Politics tend to negatively influence such (mild) centralization efforts; just look at Debian! But we could learn to direct our efforts toward a common goal: true independance from vendors.
After all, FreeBSD proves us that it can be done, and done quite well. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same? A community supported and sanctioned canon distribution!
One feature that Linux lacks in the datacenter is a directory.
Pardon me, but isn't OpenLDAP a directory? Or is eDirectory not based on LDAP? [Admitting ignorance here]
Maple and Mathematica come to mind...
There's a Debian/HURD distribution. You can D/L the ISOs and start hacking.
Wrong. If someone uses your BSD-licensed code in their own proprietary product, this still doesn't give them more rights than other users of this code.
As was already pointed out earlier in this discussion, you own the rights to the BSD-licensed code, just as you do on GPLed code. Just because someone else incorporates it in their products doesn't give them _more_ rights than other users. And, as long as you don't steal from their proprietary extensions, they won't prevail in court should they sue you here.
The BSD style licenses are just a Bad Idea for open source.
Well, what about the BSDs themselves, Apache, and a lot of other code released under BSD-licenses? Are they suffering just from being released under a non-GPL license?
With all due respect, there's a lot of FUD thrown at BSD-style licenses, just as there is FUD thrown at the GPL. I just didn't expect so much anti BSD-license FUD from open source advocates, considering that the FSF lists BSD-style license as legitimate way to designate free software: Various Licenses and Comments about Them.
We are free to choose whatever license scheme we want, and personally, I'm not an opponent to GPL at all. It just happens, that in the case this discussion was all about, sometimes GPL or even LGPL is incompatible with legal requirements of companies that developed software under another license before.
The downside of strongly suggesting companies that are willing to go open source to use GPL, is that most potential contributors will shy away from this step. I'm glad that they can choose among many licensing schemes, so that we can get more free software on the long run. And, please, BSD-licensed software is just as Free as GPLed software (see link above).