They probably do submit anything notable that they find back to Microsoft, though.
They probably do no such thing. Every patched bug is a bug the NSA can no longer use againt other countries. It is not in their best interest to better secure the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Cubans, or any other nation on earth. That makes intelligence gathering and intentional espionage tougher.
The fact VIA was openly distributing it under the GPL is good enough for me. As for WASTE, the original code this was probably based on, that was also openly distributed by the head of the division that produced it under the GPL.
the creators of such a software package should be allowed to change their mind at the last minute.
No, they shouldn't. There's a huge amount of contract law that says co. It was released under a particular license. There is no changing it after hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded it.
this might damage the fish is some irreparable way
Damage them? They'll simply die. They're fish, not a video card. "Well, we did some damage to the goldfish, had three fail and the other half dizen are intermittant" just doesn't happen.
Sorry, we already apt-get updated those bugs away while we were sipping our morning coffee and never noticed. Unlike Windows, I don't have to worry about a simple bugfix blowing up the box, or causing downtime, nor do I have to reboot the damn thing four times.
Oh, and application bugs are not "Linux" bugs. Linux refers to the kernel and kernel alone. Unlike on a Microsoft product, where they make Outlook/IE the default for everything and unremovable, hence being part of the OS and countable as an OS exploit, the same is not true of Linux systems.
Wading through all these "But this sucks compared to tape!" comments made me think back on some of the late great backup media I've used..
IBM line printer; Dump the program to the printer in case the machine was powercycled.
Sony Walkman and a Dictaphone microcassette recorder with a cable between them
Notching my single sided game discs and copying other games on the back
Seagate 5mb full height tape drive, only took 6 hours a tape!
KERMIT to a Unix shell account at 1200 baud
Seagate 20mb tape drive, half height this time. Still six hours a tape, but you couldn't back up at night because the sucker made too much noise to sleep in the next room.
Software RAID of SCSI CDROM drives; took five hours to burn all 8 discs, but 5.6Gb of storage for about $4 in media ruled.
Cheesy off-brand 8Gb tape drive.. Two hours a tape was great!
Software mirroring in NT; No backup time, but for some queer reason 5% of the time you switched to the "mirror" it was missing data.
I'm currently on the "lending library" system of backups.. I burn a copy of everything as soon as I get it, end up loaning it to someone, and then have to call them and beg them for my discs back..
Toyota and Honda have the highest percentage of US made parts in them last I checked. Plus they're assembled right here in the US. Big Three? Mexican and Canadian parts, lots of Canadian assembly.. There's a federally required paperwork on all new cars that shows where they came from. Go to one of those combo dealers, (You know, one of those Buick/Honda/Chevrolet/BMW megadealers) compare your average Honda Civic with a Chevrolet or Ford..
(An oddity I noticed.. The Big Three only go so far as say "US/Canadian parts content" where the Honda I looked at listed them as seperate entries.)
If someone calls and asks for a password reset, tell them to get stuffed. If it actually needs to be done, you'll get a call from a lead tech or CIO or such. Ask for his name, phone number, and the name of his supervisor before you tell him to get stuffed. Then go into your little customer database, call the guy you sold the hosting to in the first place, ask them to call the lead tech, hand over the info you have on him, and confirm he needs the password reset, etc.
If it's a social engineer, it'll prolly never make it past the first call. Morons that can find the password out on their own are also screened by this call.
The persevering social engineer will also try call #2. But your call back in step #3 to someone not normally involved in a password reset (The purchasing manager, CIO, whomever it was signed on the dotted line for the equipment/service is likely not involved in maintaining it.) will screen all but the worst kind of pasword attempts.
Most companies think their employees will steal anything not bolted down, and as a result put little tags on everything marking it as a company asset, instead of bolting it down. Of course, employees will steal anything not bolted down, but they're usually not too stupid to forget to peel the tag off.
But when the printers are resold, they never take the tags off either. So say you want some juicy tidbits from IBM marketing? Go down to the off-lease reseller, or the junk auction, and buy the two year old machines with the IBM asset tags on them.
But I digress. He probably just noticed the asset tag and asked one of the Salvation Army guys why they got rid of so many.
Unfortunatly you're wrong. I've done board swaps on at least two dozen drives in the last five years, mostly antique Seagate Barracuda (swapped at least 8 of those I can think of off hand), but the line up included everything from a Micropolis full-height MFM through a slew of more modern 2-20Gb IDE drives..
Success rate? 100% on the Barracudas, 100% on the MFM and RLL volumes, probably only 60% on the rest. A lot of the drives will not tolerate a logic board swap, but its always worth a shot if you're not going to warranty RMA the drive. (One of the successes was a recent vintage Western Digital 20G drive, which is why I was compelled to respond)
Of course, I've also de-stuck probably 50 drives with the old "power it up, tap it against the desk during POST" trick.. That nearly always works when it won't spin up.
PLEASE NOTE:
My success rate is tempered by having 15 years of experience. My first recovery efforts were on Seagate 10 meg drives WHEN THEY WERE NEW. Fully 20-30% of the drives I come across are UNRECOVERABLE by any means you or I can do. Send the damn drive to Ontrack if you value your data.
As much as I hate the idea of the government accumulating a dossier on its citizenry, linking the databases and restricting queries could be good for privacy. Cop tells computer he's running a warrant check; Instead of seeing a screen with my entire driving history, all the cars I own, my entire arrest record, he gets a simple "No warrants". No more information than he's requested, and all requests with a reason.
Or I've got an expired registration on me, or an expired proof of insurance. Instead of wasting his time writing the ticket and showing to court, plus mine, plus the courts, because all I have to do is show the current version to the judge, a simple "Is HKR 264 registered?" "Yes."
Would cut down on bullshit rousts too. If you have to give the computer a reason you'll be asked about in court, you'll be less likely to pull someone over just to run them. "Matched description of known local drug offender" works fine after the fact now, but when the cop has to tell the computer up front he thinks the guy is a drug offender and the computer calls him a liar because the owner of the car matches the description of the driver and he is not a drug offender, or that the drivers description doesn't match any local drug offenders, before the car is even to the shoulder, they'll think twice.
Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 1
In this case, what businesses do is monitor the local emissions of cellphones. It's cheaper to buy ten grand in sniffing gear than it is to spend ten times as much on making sure their jammer is not only 100% effective but that it is also 100% harmless once you leave their building, as well as paying the lawyers to fight with the FCC, paying the FCC off for a license, and then having to resurvey for many thousands of dollars every time they make an equipment change or building modification to avoid liability.
And if you're already in a situation where confidential data is worried about so much as to ban cellphones, odds are you have the best line of defense; Good physical security. After all, it's easier to sneak stuff out on a 180mb CD-R in your shoe than over a cell phone.
Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 1
No, but have you ever been on the wrong end of the RCA, err, OFCOM now isn't it? Here you'll eat a sub-$5000 fine and have your equipment seized. In Britain, not only will they take your jammer, they'll nick you for a chunk of change about four times as large.
Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 1
Just because someone is in a bar doesn't mean they're drinking. I spent 10 hours in a bar last week, total number of alcoholic drinks, zero. I was on the clock.
People are fucks for leaving their cells on "Play Backstreet Boys at 90db", sure. Grow some balls and tell them to turn it the hell off. I do that all the time. It works better than you might expect.
And don't you dare try to lump me in with those assholes chatting their heads off in movies. My phone hasn't been off 'vibrate' in months, and the last time it was off was because I had to take it out of my pocket to climb 200 feet of ladder and someone else was answering it for me. If I'm in a movie when it goes off, and it's not something that can wait, I call them back in the car as I'm leaving. Otherwise they sit and stew.
Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Private property owners are well within their rights...and/or jammers
While you see it that way, me, the FCC, and Johnny Law see it another.
You jam my cellphone, or my pager, or my cell-modem, and I'm going to see you get a nice fat fine from the FCC. I'll even come down there with a camera and a frequency analyzer to give my FCC submission some teeth. And if I missed something important? You'll be hearing from a company lawyer before the FCC even knocks on the door. Wasting my time is wasting company time, and company time can run thousands of dollars an hour in an outage.
Remember, some of us carry these accursed things for a reason, and when the boss calls you to let you know half the west coast fiber has gone dead, or the hospital staff calls you to get you to come in and save a car accident victim, "Some bar owner decided I shouldn't be able to use my cellphone because he's too much of a wussy to tell people to turn them to silent" doesn't cut it to save my job or the dying persons life.
Ethiopian is nummy.. Worked next to a Ethiopian place for a long time. As for the 'usually not hot' bit. I once went in and ordered, was told a half hour, they were really busy with a big carry out order. I come back, and there's my food waiting for me. The woman behind the counter apologized for the long wait, then apologized that it was still very warm and I couldn't eat it yet.
Myself, I'm dying to find a decent Lebanese/Syrian place in Seattle. I got addicted to fried kibbeh a long time ago, and haven't been able to feed my lust for a double order of kibbeh with strong ass coffee since leaving Detroit.
Darl: "Yes, your honor.. I was beaten up by hooligans, no doubt in the employ of IBM, seeking to damage me physically as well as in the press. I was helping an old woman cross the street this morning.... How do I know they were IBM hooligans? Well, they were well dressed, and attacked me without the slightest provocation once they realized who I was."
IBM Attorney: "I submit the videotape from camera 3, on the northwest corner of the 7-11 at 202nd Ave and Mormon Way. Here, at 3:12:08, we see Darl exiting the store with a burrito. At 3:12:30, Here we see Darl speaking to an elderly woman carrying a stuffed penguin. At 3:12:57, we see him attempting to take the woman's stuffed toy. By 3:13:09 we see he's given up on trying to steal the penguin, and instead is reaching for the womans purse. At 3:13:26, we see two well dressed gentlemen attempting to stop a robbery. At 3:14:40 the store clerk joins the two gentlemen in suits and the elderly woman, with a baseball bat. Conclusive proof that this man not only lies in front of the court, he tried to steal a penguin and when he couldn't get away with it, tries to steal this poor woman's purse!"
What Vonage actually sends you is a little box made by Cisco that uses DHCP to obtain an address and only communicates with two or three hosts.. (the DNS server, sip.vonage.com, and.. Drawing a blank)
They're pretty dummy proof. Plug one jack into your switch, one jack into a patch cable to a jack on your existing phone wiring, or straight into a phone, and plug in power. They're sent with the info they need to get started already on 'em.
No software required, deals with shitty DHCP and shitty NAT rather well, and if you want to take your number with you, just unplug the Vonage box and stick it in your carry-on.
Her: So anyway, he was such a dick to her.. He said.. Me: Hun, mobs in camp. Mez something. Her: Let me finish. He was a total dick Me: We've got adds. Toss a slow at a goblin miner. Her: He said she needed to.. Me: Up to five in camp. Rooting them off. Her: Spend less time hanging out with.. Me: Getting low on mana, hurry up and mez these before I have to reroot. Her: Her exboyfriend. I think he's jealous or.. Me: Another add. Hun, you there? Me: You have been slain by a goblin miner! Her: OMG, where did these mobs come from? Heal me. Her: You have been slain by a goblin miner! Her: You need to pay more attention to the game. now go rez me while I finish this conversation with...
Slashdot Mirror
They probably do submit anything notable that they find back to Microsoft, though.
They probably do no such thing. Every patched bug is a bug the NSA can no longer use againt other countries. It is not in their best interest to better secure the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Cubans, or any other nation on earth. That makes intelligence gathering and intentional espionage tougher.
The fact VIA was openly distributing it under the GPL is good enough for me. As for WASTE, the original code this was probably based on, that was also openly distributed by the head of the division that produced it under the GPL.
the creators of such a software package should be allowed to change their mind at the last minute.
No, they shouldn't. There's a huge amount of contract law that says co. It was released under a particular license. There is no changing it after hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded it.
Eh.. IR LEDs.. Most "Night vision" rigs are sensitive to IR/UV. Blind him invisibly.
this might damage the fish is some irreparable way
Damage them? They'll simply die. They're fish, not a video card. "Well, we did some damage to the goldfish, had three fail and the other half dizen are intermittant" just doesn't happen.
Sorry, we already apt-get updated those bugs away while we were sipping our morning coffee and never noticed. Unlike Windows, I don't have to worry about a simple bugfix blowing up the box, or causing downtime, nor do I have to reboot the damn thing four times.
Oh, and application bugs are not "Linux" bugs. Linux refers to the kernel and kernel alone. Unlike on a Microsoft product, where they make Outlook/IE the default for everything and unremovable, hence being part of the OS and countable as an OS exploit, the same is not true of Linux systems.
Wading through all these "But this sucks compared to tape!" comments made me think back on some of the late great backup media I've used..
IBM line printer; Dump the program to the printer in case the machine was powercycled.
Sony Walkman and a Dictaphone microcassette recorder with a cable between them
Notching my single sided game discs and copying other games on the back
Seagate 5mb full height tape drive, only took 6 hours a tape!
KERMIT to a Unix shell account at 1200 baud
Seagate 20mb tape drive, half height this time. Still six hours a tape, but you couldn't back up at night because the sucker made too much noise to sleep in the next room.
Software RAID of SCSI CDROM drives; took five hours to burn all 8 discs, but 5.6Gb of storage for about $4 in media ruled.
Cheesy off-brand 8Gb tape drive.. Two hours a tape was great!
Software mirroring in NT; No backup time, but for some queer reason 5% of the time you switched to the "mirror" it was missing data.
I'm currently on the "lending library" system of backups.. I burn a copy of everything as soon as I get it, end up loaning it to someone, and then have to call them and beg them for my discs back..
Toyota and Honda have the highest percentage of US made parts in them last I checked. Plus they're assembled right here in the US. Big Three? Mexican and Canadian parts, lots of Canadian assembly.. There's a federally required paperwork on all new cars that shows where they came from. Go to one of those combo dealers, (You know, one of those Buick/Honda/Chevrolet/BMW megadealers) compare your average Honda Civic with a Chevrolet or Ford..
(An oddity I noticed.. The Big Three only go so far as say "US/Canadian parts content" where the Honda I looked at listed them as seperate entries.)
Also not terribly bright.. I'd imagine a Molson on a stick would serve as motivation.
Use the annoyance factor.
If someone calls and asks for a password reset, tell them to get stuffed. If it actually needs to be done, you'll get a call from a lead tech or CIO or such. Ask for his name, phone number, and the name of his supervisor before you tell him to get stuffed. Then go into your little customer database, call the guy you sold the hosting to in the first place, ask them to call the lead tech, hand over the info you have on him, and confirm he needs the password reset, etc.
If it's a social engineer, it'll prolly never make it past the first call. Morons that can find the password out on their own are also screened by this call.
The persevering social engineer will also try call #2. But your call back in step #3 to someone not normally involved in a password reset (The purchasing manager, CIO, whomever it was signed on the dotted line for the equipment/service is likely not involved in maintaining it.) will screen all but the worst kind of pasword attempts.
It's terribly common for the British (those living outside Manchester, at least), to refer to it as backward.
It's kind of like what the US does with reference to anyone from the Deep South..
Considering that the closest thing to a Slashdot of the 50's and 60's that a geek would have is the letter column of QST magazine, I should say so. :)
This could be a good thing.. I know nothing drives me to chain smoking faster than a malfunctioning Windows machine..
And this is correct, too. NT4 will run in 16M. I remember running NT4 Workstation on a 486-33 with 24M of memory and thinking it pretty usable.
Most companies think their employees will steal anything not bolted down, and as a result put little tags on everything marking it as a company asset, instead of bolting it down. Of course, employees will steal anything not bolted down, but they're usually not too stupid to forget to peel the tag off.
But when the printers are resold, they never take the tags off either. So say you want some juicy tidbits from IBM marketing? Go down to the off-lease reseller, or the junk auction, and buy the two year old machines with the IBM asset tags on them.
But I digress. He probably just noticed the asset tag and asked one of the Salvation Army guys why they got rid of so many.
Unfortunatly you're wrong. I've done board swaps on at least two dozen drives in the last five years, mostly antique Seagate Barracuda (swapped at least 8 of those I can think of off hand), but the line up included everything from a Micropolis full-height MFM through a slew of more modern 2-20Gb IDE drives..
Success rate? 100% on the Barracudas, 100% on the MFM and RLL volumes, probably only 60% on the rest. A lot of the drives will not tolerate a logic board swap, but its always worth a shot if you're not going to warranty RMA the drive. (One of the successes was a recent vintage Western Digital 20G drive, which is why I was compelled to respond)
Of course, I've also de-stuck probably 50 drives with the old "power it up, tap it against the desk during POST" trick.. That nearly always works when it won't spin up.
PLEASE NOTE:
My success rate is tempered by having 15 years of experience. My first recovery efforts were on Seagate 10 meg drives WHEN THEY WERE NEW. Fully 20-30% of the drives I come across are UNRECOVERABLE by any means you or I can do. Send the damn drive to Ontrack if you value your data.
As much as I hate the idea of the government accumulating a dossier on its citizenry, linking the databases and restricting queries could be good for privacy. Cop tells computer he's running a warrant check; Instead of seeing a screen with my entire driving history, all the cars I own, my entire arrest record, he gets a simple "No warrants". No more information than he's requested, and all requests with a reason.
Or I've got an expired registration on me, or an expired proof of insurance. Instead of wasting his time writing the ticket and showing to court, plus mine, plus the courts, because all I have to do is show the current version to the judge, a simple "Is HKR 264 registered?" "Yes."
Would cut down on bullshit rousts too. If you have to give the computer a reason you'll be asked about in court, you'll be less likely to pull someone over just to run them. "Matched description of known local drug offender" works fine after the fact now, but when the cop has to tell the computer up front he thinks the guy is a drug offender and the computer calls him a liar because the owner of the car matches the description of the driver and he is not a drug offender, or that the drivers description doesn't match any local drug offenders, before the car is even to the shoulder, they'll think twice.
In this case, what businesses do is monitor the local emissions of cellphones. It's cheaper to buy ten grand in sniffing gear than it is to spend ten times as much on making sure their jammer is not only 100% effective but that it is also 100% harmless once you leave their building, as well as paying the lawyers to fight with the FCC, paying the FCC off for a license, and then having to resurvey for many thousands of dollars every time they make an equipment change or building modification to avoid liability.
And if you're already in a situation where confidential data is worried about so much as to ban cellphones, odds are you have the best line of defense; Good physical security. After all, it's easier to sneak stuff out on a 180mb CD-R in your shoe than over a cell phone.
No, but have you ever been on the wrong end of the RCA, err, OFCOM now isn't it? Here you'll eat a sub-$5000 fine and have your equipment seized. In Britain, not only will they take your jammer, they'll nick you for a chunk of change about four times as large.
Just because someone is in a bar doesn't mean they're drinking. I spent 10 hours in a bar last week, total number of alcoholic drinks, zero. I was on the clock.
People are fucks for leaving their cells on "Play Backstreet Boys at 90db", sure. Grow some balls and tell them to turn it the hell off. I do that all the time. It works better than you might expect.
And don't you dare try to lump me in with those assholes chatting their heads off in movies. My phone hasn't been off 'vibrate' in months, and the last time it was off was because I had to take it out of my pocket to climb 200 feet of ladder and someone else was answering it for me. If I'm in a movie when it goes off, and it's not something that can wait, I call them back in the car as I'm leaving. Otherwise they sit and stew.
Private property owners are well within their rights...and/or jammers
While you see it that way, me, the FCC, and Johnny Law see it another.
You jam my cellphone, or my pager, or my cell-modem, and I'm going to see you get a nice fat fine from the FCC. I'll even come down there with a camera and a frequency analyzer to give my FCC submission some teeth. And if I missed something important? You'll be hearing from a company lawyer before the FCC even knocks on the door. Wasting my time is wasting company time, and company time can run thousands of dollars an hour in an outage.
Remember, some of us carry these accursed things for a reason, and when the boss calls you to let you know half the west coast fiber has gone dead, or the hospital staff calls you to get you to come in and save a car accident victim, "Some bar owner decided I shouldn't be able to use my cellphone because he's too much of a wussy to tell people to turn them to silent" doesn't cut it to save my job or the dying persons life.
Ethiopian is nummy.. Worked next to a Ethiopian place for a long time. As for the 'usually not hot' bit. I once went in and ordered, was told a half hour, they were really busy with a big carry out order. I come back, and there's my food waiting for me. The woman behind the counter apologized for the long wait, then apologized that it was still very warm and I couldn't eat it yet.
Myself, I'm dying to find a decent Lebanese/Syrian place in Seattle. I got addicted to fried kibbeh a long time ago, and haven't been able to feed my lust for a double order of kibbeh with strong ass coffee since leaving Detroit.
Darl:
"Yes, your honor.. I was beaten up by hooligans, no doubt in the employ of IBM, seeking to damage me physically as well as in the press. I was helping an old woman cross the street this morning.... How do I know they were IBM hooligans? Well, they were well dressed, and attacked me without the slightest provocation once they realized who I was."
IBM Attorney:
"I submit the videotape from camera 3, on the northwest corner of the 7-11 at 202nd Ave and Mormon Way. Here, at 3:12:08, we see Darl exiting the store with a burrito. At 3:12:30, Here we see Darl speaking to an elderly woman carrying a stuffed penguin. At 3:12:57, we see him attempting to take the woman's stuffed toy. By 3:13:09 we see he's given up on trying to steal the penguin, and instead is reaching for the womans purse. At 3:13:26, we see two well dressed gentlemen attempting to stop a robbery. At 3:14:40 the store clerk joins the two gentlemen in suits and the elderly woman, with a baseball bat. Conclusive proof that this man not only lies in front of the court, he tried to steal a penguin and when he couldn't get away with it, tries to steal this poor woman's purse!"
What Vonage actually sends you is a little box made by Cisco that uses DHCP to obtain an address and only communicates with two or three hosts.. (the DNS server, sip.vonage.com, and.. Drawing a blank)
They're pretty dummy proof. Plug one jack into your switch, one jack into a patch cable to a jack on your existing phone wiring, or straight into a phone, and plug in power. They're sent with the info they need to get started already on 'em.
No software required, deals with shitty DHCP and shitty NAT rather well, and if you want to take your number with you, just unplug the Vonage box and stick it in your carry-on.
Naw.. SGI will drop ship to any old no-name so long as their D&B doesn't suck.
Her: So anyway, he was such a dick to her.. He said..
Me: Hun, mobs in camp. Mez something.
Her: Let me finish. He was a total dick
Me: We've got adds. Toss a slow at a goblin miner.
Her: He said she needed to..
Me: Up to five in camp. Rooting them off.
Her: Spend less time hanging out with..
Me: Getting low on mana, hurry up and mez these before I have to reroot.
Her: Her exboyfriend. I think he's jealous or..
Me: Another add. Hun, you there?
Me: You have been slain by a goblin miner!
Her: OMG, where did these mobs come from? Heal me.
Her: You have been slain by a goblin miner!
Her: You need to pay more attention to the game. now go rez me while I finish this conversation with...
*shakes his head*