Perhaps your next computer purchase should be a system (such as a computer from System76) that comes with Ubuntu rather than Windows. It will be fully supported.
Is there any way I can determine what technologies may be in use here?
From a networking perspective, you could try visiting a site that displays request headers, which may reveal certain proxy headers, such as X-Forwarded-For.
If you see a X-Forwarded-For, you can be sure that your connection is being routed through a proxy. However, you don't know if the proxy is logging your requests, if it's just caching the results and so on.
If you don't see it, there could still be a proxy there, as it's just as easy to configure a proxy to not send these headers to servers, making it more difficult to reveal if you are infact behind some kind of proxy. This also doesn't help against transparent monitoring devices as they do not modify/handle requests.
That said, whenever I use networks I don't trust (usually due to poor security -- free and pay hotspots that provide no encryption), I ssh to my server which listens on the HTTPS port (443) and route all my connections over SSH. This would make all your requests hidden, as one can only see that a connection was made to some server on a HTTPS port.
A lot of monitoring hardware reports such traffic as HTTPS traffic, providing no real information about it other than how much data was sent/received to/from it. If there is a HTTPS filter in place to watch HTTPS content, it will make such SSH connections impossible on port 443.
If I'm using a personal laptop on the company network, is it possible for them to monitor what sites I visit?
Somewhat... If you visit HTTPS sites, provided you're not given a certificate that they have read access to, they can only see you made a connection to a specific IP address.
What technologies are used for monitoring web surfing?
Usually the gateway server will have some protocol inspection, passing connection information for connections on port 80 to a internal proxy server or monitoring program.
We don't use proxies here, but It's not explicit what they may be monitoring over our network.
There's still a problem as not all the files are dual licensed (eg drivers/net/wireless/ath5k_regdom.c). They can't strip the entire license text from those files which are licensed BSD only and relicense as GPL.
It is extremely fortunate then that GNU/Linux is based on the enormous body of prior art in ideas, methods, concepts and technology from POSIX, ancient Unix and the BSDs, all of which are liberally licensed and well over 20 years old, all of which are described in detail in many hundreds of textbooks and all of which pre-date by a long period any patents that Microsoft may have dreamed up since.
That's only useful if GNU/Linux wants to stop developing new technologies and features in the OS.
GPL is not a bad idea, heck its genius for such a unique license even if a large portion of people hate its viral tendencies, but honestly picking fights with no chance of winning with it makes the entire open source community look bad not just the FSF.
You should see Windows' viral license, it's so far more restrictive and annoying.
but honestly picking fights with no chance of winning with it makes the entire open source community look bad not just the FSF.
Plenty of people have won court cases against Microsoft in the past. I wouldn't say they have no chance.
...when all they want to do is business.
If the FSF succeeds with this lawsuit, this will invalidate some of Microsoft's attacks methods against FOSS, allowing people to do just business without having to worry about other matters.
It's enough to run games like World of Warcraft, Oblivion, Half life 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
The implementation of the "Direct3D 8/9 infrastructure" may not be complete, but it's pretty close to it. The majority of other DLLs (beyond dsound.dll) aren't as important as game installers tend to come with a DirectX installer that provides those DLLs (which don't require reimplementation since they would work fine under Wine).
I have a network that can't touch the Internet. So it takes for ever to install software because I have to track down all dependencies. If a program needs a dependency it should tell me what it is and where to get it. I shouldn't have to search all over rpmfind or other search engines to install one piece of software.
So, why can't you just mirror the repository for the distribution you're using on this closed network?
It wouldn't be too hard to download it to a portable harddrive.
One piece (collection) of software Linux really isn't competing with is Microsoft's Active Directory.
I actually found Novell's eDirectory to be quite comparable actually. It even has more neat little features such as integrating with the identity manager, which unifies every login you need, despite requirements for different passwords and so on. Not requiring people to know the passwords and secured cryptographically. Allowing you to share webbrowser passwords between the webbrowser of your choice at that time.
setting up your own Repositories
I'll admit that setting up a WSuS server is easier.
Never seen the preloader under Linux. Don't see anything like it in my process list either.
Feel free to try 5.2 and let me know what you think.
I can't seem to find any trials of it on Google.
I'm not sure which distros are using LSB at all.
LSB is generally 'supported' by most desktop Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Redhat, Fedora, SuSE and so on. The only major distribution I can think of that does not support LSB is Gentoo -- Although that shouldn't be too surprising.
The smaller distributions that deal with just a single specific problem like a mini-router-firewall, livecd desktop system and so on, do not likely support LSB.
Please note, just because a distribution supports LSB, does not mean that it's packages are LSB (generally packages that come with the distributions are distribution specific for obvious reasons).
The biggest problem with LSB however is mainly very few developers use it. Many OSS projects tend to rather make only the source available or some very simple.tar.gz file that contains some compiled binaries. Even bigger OSS projects like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org choose to ignore it.
That said, one of the most insane? LSB things I've seen was, StarOffice 8. It is in LSB, but due to the fact Sun decided that it wasn't enough to make sure the suite would install, they included parts of a LSB environment with the packages. Wrapping it all in a java based installer which comes with it's own JRE (really overkill).
It shows how little you know about security. There's more in/etc/passwd than hidden passwords.
There are no passwords in/etc/passwd in modern Linux distributions, it's in/etc/shadow.
There's a list of system users, which can indicate specific SW installed on that system.
Of course determining what is a system user can become difficult since different distributions have different values. Some stop at UIDs at 0, 10, 100 and 1000 etc.
Some of which has specific vulnerabilities.
Which is why one should keep their system upto date against known exploits.
So an attacking app like Skype (or something that exploits Skype) can detect SW to attack without other tests that can trigger an alarm.
In theory, yes. However as we've seen with Windows, most malware tends to perform the attack without checking since it's more efficient. Discovering services instead of immediately attempting a attack of sorts is more likely to be useful to a 'cracker' getting said information, since (s)he can work on setting up methods to exploit.
Before you go shooting off your mouth with insults about security, make sure you know what you're talking about.
You haven't given told me anything I didn't know already, and you again implied that encrypted passwords lived in/etc/passwd when they do not.
Don't piss off people with superior security-fu to whom you've given your website's URL.
Personally, I'd focus on Multimedia authoring, it's always been Linux's weak point.
Agreed.
First, audio composition and editing, as well as a Virtual DJ studio. The backend (ALSA + Jack) is brilliant, but the lack of synths, mixers and whatnot of the caliber of Absynth and Traktor (from Native Instruments) and Live (from Ableton) makes ALSA/Jack fairly useless.
Indeed, the Linux desktop is also very heavily in decent video editing software (if you ignore the fact you can run some decent software under Wine).
raster graphics. As much as people keep repeating that Gimp is as complete as Photoshop, it isn't. CMYK support, 24 and 32-bit colour support, support for excessively large files, better tablet support, are all very much needed in a bitmap editor. I'd certainly throw much resources in Mr. kanzelsberger's direction, for work on Pixel Editor, which is a truly brilliant application.
Vector graphics. There really hasn't been a truly top-tier vector drawing application for Linux since Corel Draw 9 was briefly ported. Inkscape is neat, but it's far, far more useful as a GUI frontend to SVG editing than a full fledged Vector drawing application. Xara Xtreme has promise and potential, the Windows version of Xara was ever even quite close to being on par with Illustrator, Freehand, or Corel Draw, but it has promise and it's probably the best bet right now.
From the same software suite as above, there is Karbon, I'm also aware that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have vector art capabilities, but I haven't managed to look at that yet. There is also sodipodi.
I've been using linux for 7 yrs now and after 5 yrs of hardcore use and then one yr of moderate use, I'm now finding myself also using Windows more often and here's why...
I've been pretty much using most modern OSes everyday for the past ten years.
Before you go out and tell me about apt, synaptic, etc - I'm aware. Each and every one of these tools relies on a developer to create the package and add it to the repo - this is another obstacle. Remember, in Windows - I go directly to the developer and take the package and install. In linux, I'm waiting and hoping that a developer will hear my plea to add the package to the repo before I can install it. Sure, I could build it myself BUT that's provided my distro doesn't do anything funky with file locations, versions, etc.
1) SOOO - my vote goes to the linux distros unify how their distros work so that developers can build packages.
LSB has already done a lot to help this, LSB type packages have worked quite well for me.
2) decent filesystem - looking in/mnt for partitions isn't intuitive; having to go "here" for the executable and "there" for the config file is pretty lame too. Oh, you want a config file - go check in/etc/, you wan't a networking config file, go to/etc/sysconfig/netwo.... - It's not THAT bad but it's not nearly as easy as it could be.
I've used Linux distributions that used self contained application directories (like C:\Program Files\App name\) for everything. This isn't a Linux issue, Linux can do this. This is a distribution/POSIX userland specific issue.
3) get ACPI/APM to just work and stop forking around! There are so many tools out there and each with their own special niche - it's maddening. What does my distro do? Add them all and hope the user figures them out! Just maddening.
Sounds like Mandriva Linux with it's insane amount of 3rd party kernel module support. Majority of Linux distributions don't go to that extent.
4) updating the look of programs - the old unix X-window styling is still around on many programs. XFig for 1 but it isn't alone; great program but being ignored due to the ugly interface. It would be nice if X took care of updating the interface.
Feel free to contribute that suggestion to the maintainers.
I'm praying that someone comes along and rewrites OO such that it performs only twice as slow as MS Word - as opposed to the 5-7x slowdown currently enjoyed.
I've noticed StarOffice 8 (Based on OOo) opens up pretty instantly. Looks like you have your wish.
this is something that I have been saying for a long time. But as long as there are 20+ different versions of Linux it will never get more that a fragment of the market share.
I can apply this to windows too:
this is something that I have been saying for a long time. But as long as there are 20+ different versions of Windows (Vista versions, XP versions, 2003 versions etc)
Upper level management are not interested into why we use this or that and "what do you mean it does not run as easily on our infrastructure".
I have seen many examples of where Windows does not run as easily and as well on Windows infrastructures as Linux servers and Linux workstations in certain circumstances (such as poor I/O in Windows making the throughput rather horrendous compared to Linux running on the same hardware, effecting the use of high traffic services such as fileservers - including webservers, database software etc) and vice versa.
Oracle/DB2/SAP or what ever future applications, it has to run and it has to run on what I bought.
Would be nice if XP SP2 ran on my 'corporate grade' laptop which was "designed for Windows XP" (according to the sticker) -- graphic card drivers do not work, sound card drivers do not work, internal wireless does not work (they did under SP1, but there have been no future driver updates).
I am sorry, I really don't see anything that holds water in your arguments.
Corporations pay taxes too and get tax returns, you know. Also consider that people actually serve corporations perhaps even corporations like the RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps your next computer purchase should be a system (such as a computer from System76) that comes with Ubuntu rather than Windows. It will be fully supported.
If you see a X-Forwarded-For, you can be sure that your connection is being routed through a proxy. However, you don't know if the proxy is logging your requests, if it's just caching the results and so on.
If you don't see it, there could still be a proxy there, as it's just as easy to configure a proxy to not send these headers to servers, making it more difficult to reveal if you are infact behind some kind of proxy. This also doesn't help against transparent monitoring devices as they do not modify/handle requests.
That said, whenever I use networks I don't trust (usually due to poor security -- free and pay hotspots that provide no encryption), I ssh to my server which listens on the HTTPS port (443) and route all my connections over SSH. This would make all your requests hidden, as one can only see that a connection was made to some server on a HTTPS port.
A lot of monitoring hardware reports such traffic as HTTPS traffic, providing no real information about it other than how much data was sent/received to/from it. If there is a HTTPS filter in place to watch HTTPS content, it will make such SSH connections impossible on port 443.
The implementation of the "Direct3D 8/9 infrastructure" may not be complete, but it's pretty close to it. The majority of other DLLs (beyond dsound.dll) aren't as important as game installers tend to come with a DirectX installer that provides those DLLs (which don't require reimplementation since they would work fine under Wine).
It wouldn't be too hard to download it to a portable harddrive.
The smaller distributions that deal with just a single specific problem like a mini-router-firewall, livecd desktop system and so on, do not likely support LSB.
Please note, just because a distribution supports LSB, does not mean that it's packages are LSB (generally packages that come with the distributions are distribution specific for obvious reasons).
The biggest problem with LSB however is mainly very few developers use it. Many OSS projects tend to rather make only the source available or some very simple
That said, one of the most insane? LSB things I've seen was, StarOffice 8. It is in LSB, but due to the fact Sun decided that it wasn't enough to make sure the suite would install, they included parts of a LSB environment with the packages. Wrapping it all in a java based installer which comes with it's own JRE (really overkill).
From the same software suite as above, there is Karbon, I'm also aware that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have vector art capabilities, but I haven't managed to look at that yet. There is also sodipodi.
I can apply this to windows too:
this is something that I have been saying for a long time. But as long as there are 20+ different versions of Windows (Vista versions, XP versions, 2003 versions etc)I have seen many examples of where Windows does not run as easily and as well on Windows infrastructures as Linux servers and Linux workstations in certain circumstances (such as poor I/O in Windows making the throughput rather horrendous compared to Linux running on the same hardware, effecting the use of high traffic services such as fileservers - including webservers, database software etc) and vice versa.Would be nice if XP SP2 ran on my 'corporate grade' laptop which was "designed for Windows XP" (according to the sticker) -- graphic card drivers do not work, sound card drivers do not work, internal wireless does not work (they did under SP1, but there have been no future driver updates).
I am sorry, I really don't see anything that holds water in your arguments.
It shows that you and the article writer don't know much about Linux.
/etc/shadow, not /etc/passwd. You can't even read /etc/shadow from default user accounts.
Passwords on modern Linux systems are stored in
It's stored in