Because when selecting among competing packages, unless you do it with perfect prescience, you are going to get many of them wrong. Your choices will be the default and get the most support, but there will be friction between the standard you set and what users know to be best.
Besides, for you to decide which package is best is not the Open way, is it? Far better to let several competing sub-distros go at it, all under your banner.
(I want to make clear my admiration for your work, so that you know I'm not trying to discourage you. I think this is a great thing you are doing, and want it to bear abundant fruit for us all).
This could be your 15 minutes. You have a chance to change history, or merely to agrandize yourself, or anything in between.
Bruce Perens , of Perens LLC wrote:
(from "UserLinux: Repairing the Economic Paradigm of Enterprise Linux")
Play Favorites
I think it makes sense for an enterprise project to make choices among
the two complete GUIs available on Debian, the dozen web servers, and so on.
Having a bounded set of packages to collectively support and improve is important, especially at the beginning. Additions to that list can be driven by what customers are willing to pay for. Expect the initial choosing to be painful. Of course any of the service providers can make their own support choices from the full set of software in Debian, for their pwn paying customers, overriding our choices.
Why make the choices from Olympus?
Create a framework under which a service provider can assert "UserLinux Compliance" or somesuch. A distro within the UserLinux (Debian) framework that contains only a proper subset of the full UserLinux would be UserLinux Compliant.
Let the market decide the best balance between security, stability, utility, compactness, completeness, and gee-whiz-feature-creep. Obviously, there may be several winners.
I believe it's possible to defeat spam on the Internet. It will take some bitter medicine, but I think it would help a lot more than it would hurt.
Anti-spam efforts historically have focused on alleviating symptoms. We've mostly used a "greedy algorithm", trying to limit spam's effects on the local environment, hoping that this will change the global situation. It obviously has not.
Spam is an error condition, and should be treated as such. It should not be ignored, but ruthlessly searched out and debugged. We should not distinguish between hardcore professional criminal spammers, 'legitimate email marketers', unwitting ISPs, or unfortunate virus victims who send spam. All are generating errors, and the problem should be debugged and eradicated.
The optimistic nature of SMTP allows the spam error to occur. Spammers send thousands of messages at a time. No response to a message means to the spammer that the address is viable. A bounce message means the address should be culled from the spammer's list. The protocol design thus assists the spammer in his work.
The method I propose should cause spam to reflect back as close as possible to the sender, while removing the ability to improve his list from response data.
RFC on Spam Reduction
Compliant MTAs must honor an email header "X-Spam-Alert".
The format of the header is
X-Spam-Alert: yourhostname.message-id-you-sent
where yourhostname is the SMTP server's name and message-id-you-sent is the message ID as it appears in the headers that server sent.
Spam alerts must be addressed to 'abuse@servername'
On receipt of a message containing a valid "X-Spam-Alert" header, the spam alert may be delivered to 'abuse'. The MTA must then remove all references to the previous alerting site and forward a new spam alert to the next server listed in the headers. If the alert indicates that a spam message originated from this server, the spam alert must be delivered to 'abuse', and the site may also choose to notify the user who apparently sent the original spam message.
On receipt of a message containing an invalid "X-Spam-Alert" header, the MTA can do any of
deliver the message to 'abuse'
send a standard bounce message
silently drop the message.
How Spam Alerts are Generated
Sites have considerable latitude as to their definition of incoming spam. Spam detection must be done by the MTA, and should also be done by individual users (with the help of anti-spam filters). Some mandatory spam indicators are DNS errors (No DNS entry, PTR/A mismatch, etc.). Other techniques for spam detection (e.g., use of blacklists, content pattern matching, invalid sender or recipient address) may be used.
The spam alert must not indicate whether or not a recipient address is valid.
Users with anti-spam filters may generate spam alerts. A user-generated spam alert may arm the spammer with more information, by letting him see which messages are returned with spam alerts and how.
Sites may set limits on the number of spam alerts they will send.
Re:Two minds about it
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If systems supported it, I'd require medium-long sentences for passwords
That was the point of the article, I thought.
What would happen if you did require medium long sentences? Users would find a way to avoid typing them. They would leave their sessions open all the time. Time them out? OK, they'll find a fancy keyboard driver insertion utility that makes the system think they're typing. And so on.
There is a balance between security and usability. You ignore it at your peril.
There is no substitute for training users. Until we see them as our allies and not our enemies or our chattel, we're condemned to these tail-chasing security games.
...the function of technology is always to "remove the middle"...
That'a a corollary to, or a foundational fact for, what I call the Green Tennis Shoes Principle:
Somewhere there is a person whose very favorite thing is green tennis shoes.
They think they're alone. Someone else has a steady supply of green tennis shoes, but no one they know wants green tennis shoes. The Internet allows these people to communicate and find more people who are interested in their prize footwear.
You have to have standing WRT the case. You can sue anyone, but the first hurdle is finding the right jurisdiction, then comes your standing in the matter, and then establishing that you have been wronged somehow.
If you sue GM saying their steering wheels are too slick and could be dangerous if you leave your sunroof open in the rain, the questions the Court will ask are
Why are you asking me about this, and not a lower court or the one in Detroit?
Are you the legal representative for a GM customer, or are you claiming to be endangered by the existence of these vehicles?
Sometimes you have to show that there is a reason why the court should step in at all, but that's based on the actual content of the dispute in the case. Judges would generally rather not rule; there has to be some reason their power is needed to resolve the dispute.
In the case of a class action, the original entity bringing the suit has to show cause, and that other people have been harmed in the same way. Class actions are ostensibly intended to streamline the court system, not give opportunistic lawyers a chance to pilfer the Fortune 500.
It looks, on its face, to be carefully crafted to keep people from taking large chunks of other people's databases and selling them as their own.
In effect, it gives copyright-like protection to formatting information into a database. It's the format, and the particular collection of the data that is owned, not the information itself.
You must to yield now. We have own all your databases.
For years and years, Hayes defined modem technology. Far from being "too hardassed to profit", they were too profit-oriented to meet the market. They failed to make their products cheap enough for the home user, so USRobotics and other clonemakers won the modem wars.
Of course, it's X Windows plus the GNU tools that make Linux look/quack/swim like Unix.
It's the Unix API. That's how software such as X and the GNU tools gets ported to Linux so easily. Not only is the API there, but it's native, so I know it's there, without checking.
I often use my 4.3 BSD Virtual VAX-11 (1984) and AT&T 3B2 Computer UNIX (TM) System V (dumpster dive booty ca 1990) manuals to investigate the details of some obscure system call. The real importance of that is that when writing a program to run under Linux, I don't have to learn anything extra, usually. Linux leverages the environment, the abundant Unix documentation and years of Unix experience for programmers.
All vendors and site administrators should take note of the openness with which the problem was dealt.
When I go to buy a car, a computer, or a stereo, and the saleslizard is cagey about any problems that come up, my trust level goes down. If they tell me all about all the problems with the thing they're selling before I even notice them, my trust level goes up. It's like a cool drink on a hot summer day.
Contrasting with Debian, how long did it take to find out that Diebold ATMs had been hit by the Nachi worm?
I'm now more inclined to trust Debian, and less inclined to trust Diebold.
I'd be happy to learn the "President Bush is firmly in the pockets of Computer Hardware and Software manufacturers", but I don't have any evidence for that.
In his bid for reelection, for example, he has raised (or lowered himself to) $84 million (totally dwarfing the $25M for Howard Dean, the richest Demokraut). Basically all of that is from individuals. Less than 0.5% is from any one group. All are presumably people with sufficient spare change, but hey, it's their money, right?
From opensecrets.org:
Updated 10/17/03 -- Merrill Lynch, the financial services giant, tops the list of contributors to President Bush's re-election campaign through September of this year, with $364,000 in donations from employees and their immediate family members, according to a preliminary study of third-quarter campaign finance filings by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The Contributors are on the opposite side of the drawing from the Marketplace;
it's important to say that the Contributors are a part of the Marketplace
There are no lawyers anywhere in the poster -- how does that work?
No one will even suspect the dolphins because they are supposed to be, like, higher mammals or something.
We at the Dolphin Workers Union protest the thinly-veiled insinuation that we are responsible for this problem. While we dolphins are experts at undersea communication, humans have promised us fish only for finding the big shiny balls marked "Death to Infidels".
It's comments like those that deter better interspecies relations.
The worm may have gotten on the machine by a service tech laptop. Somehow I don't think the ATM would have a direct link to the Internet to phone home with the info.
It doesn't matter how the worm gets in. It's the same code whether it arrives on a laptop, as an email attachment, or via smoke signals. That's the trouble with relying on firewalls: they encourage a false sense of security and that leads to sloppiness.
The ATMs obviously were internetted, since Diebold points out that the machines were noticed by IDS and their outbound traffic was stopped. If you read the fine article, it says:
At both affected institutions the ATMs began aggressively scanning for other vulnerable machines, generating anomalous waves of network traffic that tripped the banks' intrusion detection systems, resulting in the infected machines being automatically cut off, Diebold executives said.
"The outbound traffic from the ATM was stopped -- limited, from a network standpoint -- and effectively isolated," said Nick Billett, Diebold's director of software engineering. "In many cases, the machines were cleaned up that day."
A virus like this bypasses zero levels of account security.
What color is the sky in your world?
This worm was caught because it wasn't expecting to be on an ATM. It thought it was on just another XP box on some network and started scanning. Suppose the next worm is patient, stealthily looking for ATMs?
Malignant code could potentially monitor any device I/O it wanted. How about grabbing the bits on your ATM card swipe and saving them in an arrary with the PIN you just typed? No need to decipher anything, just send a day's worth in a batch and self-destruct.
The attacker can then recreate your ATM card from the bits on the stripe.
In other news, AOL/TimeWarner (TWX) has sued Microsoft (MSFT) over the use of the word "Longhorn", claiming it interferes with recognition of their "Longhorn Leghorn" character.
A source at AOL/TimeWarner, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "They're trying to choke our chicken, and not doing it very well."
Furthermore, you can't be offended unless you WANT to be. Language is symbolic: all meaning is decoded by the receiver. There is no intrinsic meaning to any word, only the extrinsic ones we apply ourselves. Thus, if you are offended, it's YOUR fault: not mine.
I understand that point. People try to make it. I disagree with it.
Language is symbolic. We use it to convey meaning. While there is no intrinsic meaning to a given set of letters or sounds, by speaking the same language we've agreed a priori on the meaning associated with the words in that language.
We choose words to pass ideas along to others. We even try to use words to convince people that we have no power to convince them of anything, that it is they who are convincing themselves. We use words to alter the emotional state of others. Mothers, cheerleaders, bosses, and lovers all use words to alter the emotions of other people.
We use words that we know will have the desired effect. That's the point of having a language. To claim otherwise is willful disregard of reality.
But changing words because they offend someone when used in an otherwise innocent context is at the other extreme, a deliberate attempt to make abstractions real.
I'd say whoever complained ought to be whipped and sold at the market.
The Internet is supposed to be free. Free as in freedom free.
The model in microcosm is this: I have a cable modem and a wireless access point. You have a DSL and a wireless network, too. We agree to share the wireless network to route data on each other's landline. If one of our landlines is down, the other takes the load. If you get impolite with your usage of my network, I block your access, and vice versa. Each of us polices the Internet at our own router.
The power-hungry politicians and small-minded bean counters think my Internet needs "governance". They worry, "Someone will make a profit!" or "Someone will send spam!" or "Someone will have access to {information|music|software} without paying for it!" Someone will charge too much, or not enough, or not let people with green hair use their ftp site, or whatever. Or someone will go untaxed.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not both?
Because when selecting among competing packages, unless you do it with perfect prescience, you are going to get many of them wrong. Your choices will be the default and get the most support, but there will be friction between the standard you set and what users know to be best.
Besides, for you to decide which package is best is not the Open way, is it? Far better to let several competing sub-distros go at it, all under your banner.
(I want to make clear my admiration for your work, so that you know I'm not trying to discourage you. I think this is a great thing you are doing, and want it to bear abundant fruit for us all).
This could be your 15 minutes. You have a chance to change history, or merely to agrandize yourself, or anything in between.
What do you want?
Create a framework under which a service provider can assert "UserLinux Compliance" or somesuch. A distro within the UserLinux (Debian) framework that contains only a proper subset of the full UserLinux would be UserLinux Compliant.
Let the market decide the best balance between security, stability, utility, compactness, completeness, and gee-whiz-feature-creep. Obviously, there may be several winners.
Note: this document is available here.
I believe it's possible to defeat spam on the Internet. It will take some bitter medicine, but I think it would help a lot more than it would hurt.
Anti-spam efforts historically have focused on alleviating symptoms. We've mostly used a "greedy algorithm", trying to limit spam's effects on the local environment, hoping that this will change the global situation. It obviously has not.
Spam is an error condition, and should be treated as such. It should not be ignored, but ruthlessly searched out and debugged. We should not distinguish between hardcore professional criminal spammers, 'legitimate email marketers', unwitting ISPs, or unfortunate virus victims who send spam. All are generating errors, and the problem should be debugged and eradicated.
The optimistic nature of SMTP allows the spam error to occur. Spammers send thousands of messages at a time. No response to a message means to the spammer that the address is viable. A bounce message means the address should be culled from the spammer's list. The protocol design thus assists the spammer in his work.
The method I propose should cause spam to reflect back as close as possible to the sender, while removing the ability to improve his list from response data.
RFC on Spam Reduction
Compliant MTAs must honor an email header "X-Spam-Alert".
The format of the header is
where yourhostname is the SMTP server's name and message-id-you-sent is the message ID as it appears in the headers that server sent.Spam alerts must be addressed to 'abuse@servername'
On receipt of a message containing a valid "X-Spam-Alert" header, the spam alert may be delivered to 'abuse'. The MTA must then remove all references to the previous alerting site and forward a new spam alert to the next server listed in the headers. If the alert indicates that a spam message originated from this server, the spam alert must be delivered to 'abuse', and the site may also choose to notify the user who apparently sent the original spam message.
On receipt of a message containing an invalid "X-Spam-Alert" header, the MTA can do any of
How Spam Alerts are Generated
Sites have considerable latitude as to their definition of incoming spam. Spam detection must be done by the MTA, and should also be done by individual users (with the help of anti-spam filters). Some mandatory spam indicators are DNS errors (No DNS entry, PTR/A mismatch, etc.). Other techniques for spam detection (e.g., use of blacklists, content pattern matching, invalid sender or recipient address) may be used.
The spam alert must not indicate whether or not a recipient address is valid.
Users with anti-spam filters may generate spam alerts. A user-generated spam alert may arm the spammer with more information, by letting him see which messages are returned with spam alerts and how.
Sites may set limits on the number of spam alerts they will send.
That was the point of the article, I thought.
What would happen if you did require medium long sentences? Users would find a way to avoid typing them. They would leave their sessions open all the time. Time them out? OK, they'll find a fancy keyboard driver insertion utility that makes the system think they're typing. And so on.
There is a balance between security and usability. You ignore it at your peril.
There is no substitute for training users. Until we see them as our allies and not our enemies or our chattel, we're condemned to these tail-chasing security games.
That'a a corollary to, or a foundational fact for, what I call the Green Tennis Shoes Principle:
They think they're alone. Someone else has a steady supply of green tennis shoes, but no one they know wants green tennis shoes. The Internet allows these people to communicate and find more people who are interested in their prize footwear.
You have to have standing WRT the case. You can sue anyone, but the first hurdle is finding the right jurisdiction, then comes your standing in the matter, and then establishing that you have been wronged somehow.
If you sue GM saying their steering wheels are too slick and could be dangerous if you leave your sunroof open in the rain, the questions the Court will ask are
Sometimes you have to show that there is a reason why the court should step in at all, but that's based on the actual content of the dispute in the case. Judges would generally rather not rule; there has to be some reason their power is needed to resolve the dispute.
In the case of a class action, the original entity bringing the suit has to show cause, and that other people have been harmed in the same way. Class actions are ostensibly intended to streamline the court system, not give opportunistic lawyers a chance to pilfer the Fortune 500.
We are regretting that the Slash Dot web hosting has made these informations public available.
These informations should be kept private just for North Korean free viewing.
We have own all your bases.
IANAL, but this law looks OK.
It looks, on its face, to be carefully crafted to keep people from taking large chunks of other people's databases and selling them as their own.
In effect, it gives copyright-like protection to formatting information into a database. It's the format, and the particular collection of the data that is owned, not the information itself.
You must to yield now. We have own all your databases.
It's hubris to say that your code is "rock solid secure". You can say it, but you'd better not think it.
Say (or think) instead:The brk(2) call is about as mundane a system call as there is. Maybe the C library calls feof(3) or abs(3) are more boring.
Every program has its metaphorical brk(2) call. Who would look there for an exploit?
Calling your code "rock solid secure" is a sure path to complacency. Besides, it'll look really bad when someone finds a hole in your brk(2).
"Get your Zoom 1200 bps speed burner! Fully Hayes compatible!*"
* Compatibility claims subject to change without notice.
For years and years, Hayes defined modem technology. Far from being "too hardassed to profit", they were too profit-oriented to meet the market. They failed to make their products cheap enough for the home user, so USRobotics and other clonemakers won the modem wars.
Of course it's unfair. Welcome to geopolitics.
It's the Unix API. That's how software such as X and the GNU tools gets ported to Linux so easily. Not only is the API there, but it's native, so I know it's there, without checking.
I often use my 4.3 BSD Virtual VAX-11 (1984) and AT&T 3B2 Computer UNIX (TM) System V (dumpster dive booty ca 1990) manuals to investigate the details of some obscure system call. The real importance of that is that when writing a program to run under Linux, I don't have to learn anything extra, usually. Linux leverages the environment, the abundant Unix documentation and years of Unix experience for programmers.
All vendors and site administrators should take note of the openness with which the problem was dealt.
When I go to buy a car, a computer, or a stereo, and the saleslizard is cagey about any problems that come up, my trust level goes down. If they tell me all about all the problems with the thing they're selling before I even notice them, my trust level goes up. It's like a cool drink on a hot summer day.
Contrasting with Debian, how long did it take to find out that Diebold ATMs had been hit by the Nachi worm?
I'm now more inclined to trust Debian, and less inclined to trust Diebold.
In his bid for reelection, for example, he has raised (or lowered himself to) $84 million (totally dwarfing the $25M for Howard Dean, the richest Demokraut). Basically all of that is from individuals. Less than 0.5% is from any one group. All are presumably people with sufficient spare change, but hey, it's their money, right?
From opensecrets.org:
Ah, that's better.
Also:We at the Dolphin Workers Union protest the thinly-veiled insinuation that we are responsible for this problem. While we dolphins are experts at undersea communication, humans have promised us fish only for finding the big shiny balls marked "Death to Infidels".
It's comments like those that deter better interspecies relations.
It doesn't matter how the worm gets in. It's the same code whether it arrives on a laptop, as an email attachment, or via smoke signals. That's the trouble with relying on firewalls: they encourage a false sense of security and that leads to sloppiness.
The ATMs obviously were internetted, since Diebold points out that the machines were noticed by IDS and their outbound traffic was stopped. If you read the fine article, it says:
Do I have egg on my face, or what. ACK! is that chicken egg? Get a napkin quick - I'm hemorrhaging karma here!
What color is the sky in your world?
This worm was caught because it wasn't expecting to be on an ATM. It thought it was on just another XP box on some network and started scanning. Suppose the next worm is patient, stealthily looking for ATMs?
Malignant code could potentially monitor any device I/O it wanted. How about grabbing the bits on your ATM card swipe and saving them in an arrary with the PIN you just typed? No need to decipher anything, just send a day's worth in a batch and self-destruct.
The attacker can then recreate your ATM card from the bits on the stripe.
You're right, we're still safe.
A new, secure, manageable BIOSwould fix their problem.
It's really Phoenix's fault.
In other news, AOL/TimeWarner (TWX) has sued Microsoft (MSFT) over the use of the word "Longhorn", claiming it interferes with recognition of their "Longhorn Leghorn" character.
A source at AOL/TimeWarner, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "They're trying to choke our chicken, and not doing it very well."
I understand that point. People try to make it. I disagree with it.
Language is symbolic. We use it to convey meaning. While there is no intrinsic meaning to a given set of letters or sounds, by speaking the same language we've agreed a priori on the meaning associated with the words in that language.
We choose words to pass ideas along to others. We even try to use words to convince people that we have no power to convince them of anything, that it is they who are convincing themselves. We use words to alter the emotional state of others. Mothers, cheerleaders, bosses, and lovers all use words to alter the emotions of other people.
We use words that we know will have the desired effect. That's the point of having a language. To claim otherwise is willful disregard of reality.
But changing words because they offend someone when used in an otherwise innocent context is at the other extreme, a deliberate attempt to make abstractions real.
I'd say whoever complained ought to be whipped and sold at the market.
and try to enjoy it.
The Internet is supposed to be free. Free as in freedom free.
The model in microcosm is this: I have a cable modem and a wireless access point. You have a DSL and a wireless network, too. We agree to share the wireless network to route data on each other's landline. If one of our landlines is down, the other takes the load. If you get impolite with your usage of my network, I block your access, and vice versa. Each of us polices the Internet at our own router.
The power-hungry politicians and small-minded bean counters think my Internet needs "governance". They worry, "Someone will make a profit!" or "Someone will send spam!" or "Someone will have access to {information|music|software} without paying for it!" Someone will charge too much, or not enough, or not let people with green hair use their ftp site, or whatever. Or someone will go untaxed.
Hands off.