Often, but not always. SpamAssassin is quite CPU-intensive; on a busy mail server, the less you have to run through it the better.
The only emails which get rejected outright are ones which are clearly rubbish; if the "From" address is "user@domain_which_does_not_exist.com" then a 550 won't cause much serious harm. Things which get that far but then try to sell viagra to SpamAssassin do get dropped.
Well, it's not going to be the end of the world, that's for sure.
But wait for it - before long, all those spammers using domains which don't exist in the From... address will switch to using.cm addresses which don't exist. A common spam filtering technique (which I employ myself) is to do a lookup of the domain in the From address. If it doesn't exist, the email is bounced. Of course, here it all breaks down horribly because any lookup to a.cm address will succeed - and I can't just block all email from.cm as my employer sells a product which could conceivably have some application in a country which, to be blunt, isn't exactly well known for the fast bandwidth it can offer.
All Trusted Computing provides is a means to verify remotely what software is running on a given system. Cisco have already developed routers which can be set up to only route traffic from something running "approved" software.
If they only way for your software to be "approved" is that it's the version your vendor shipped & signed, then it matters not whether or not you can modify what they shipped and install it yourself - as soon as you do that, the router will drop any packets from your PC and internet access will stop working.
Maybe that's an extreme example - I can't see many ISPs cutting off most of their customers overnight. But I can see banks requiring a "trusted" setup for online banking, government departments requiring a "trusted" setup for interaction (and if the UK is anything to go by, the online systems will sooner or later replace the existing ones so you can't just post them your tax forms). Add this all up and if you think running Linux on a desktop can be awkward and painful now, imagine what it would be like in that vision of the future.
In principle, yes, because it means leaving a workstation unlocked is far less of an issue than it is with NT4/2K/XP.
However, in practise it is typical for Microsoft to copy Apple then balls up the implementation in some fundamental way the first couple of times around. I can think of a few ways this could happen:
1. The user is prompted for their password so often that they don't think twice when they're required to enter it. 2. Malware in 3 parts. The first part is a keylogger to capture the password. The second part automagically "types" the password in when a window demanding it pops up (Windows already makes it possible for a program to do this). The third and final part is the malware proper.
Even when you are running as Administrator, it still requires that you consent when you're running tasks/programs/etc that need superuser status
So, having spent years training normal users that the correct way to get anything done is to click "Yes" on every single dialog box that comes up, regardless of what the dialog actually says, they're now doing the same to sysadmins?
You have clearly never met a type which I shall describe as "agressively pathetic".
By which I mean, "will go to such absurd lengths to avoid doing something new that it would have been less hassle to just do whatever it is they don't want to in the first place".
"I can't use this new PC, I haven't been trained on it!"
"It's exactly the same as the old one, only the case is a different colour."
"Well I still haven't had any training on it!"
Said person refuses to use the computer until such time as they have been trained, causing immense hassle for themselves and everyone in their department. I saw the exact same thing in students when I was at Uni - on a computer science course(!), a vast number did everything in their power to avoid using Unix (where everything had already been set up for them), even though the classes were often taught on Sun boxes.
Now, transfer that exact same attitude across to a Linux PC, or even just OpenOffice. Even if you lock it down and pretty it up to look almost identical to Windows running Microsoft Office, you'll still get that kind of trouble from a large chunk of your staff - some of whom handle nice things like "making sure everyone gets paid" - and your students, and without students it's remarkably hard to get any money out of central government.
True story: I had a neighbour who just could not grasp this concept. They'd heard about a modern car which had crumpled really badly in a relatively minor accident, writing it off. They'd therefore decided that older cars built like brick outhouses were far "better", because you might still have a car after the accident.
Try as I might, complete with diagrams and models, I could not get across the idea that this was a good thing, and that had the car not done the crumpling, the passengers would have - and who cares if the car's repairable when everyone in it's dead?
Along comes a salesman who announces "We specialise in the education market".
Staff say "Buy buy buy!"
The fact that the salesman's product is identical to everyone elses (except for the 30% markup over market rate) is neither here nor there. It was supplied by a "specialist in education", so it must be better, right?
Now, substitude "voting machinery" for "education" and you've got a guaranteed way to sell voting machines.
All I see is a government availing itself of everything possible technologically to do what it believes is the right thing, with technology enabling the kind of massive, omnibus monitoring.
This is a fairly accurate description of 1984, though perhaps the justification is different.
Maybe cheapie little IDE hard disks are under $1/GB. If you want hot-swap, availability of half-decent RAID cards and disks which actually get to see some testing before they leave the factory, then you'll have to spend quite a bit more.
Another couple of things the RIP act does (which the grandparent never mentioned) are:
1. It reverses the burden of proof. So if the government says "Hand over they keys" and you say "I can't, I deleted them", the government can say "Prove it." - and if you can't (how the hell do you prove you deleted something?), you're treated just as if you'd refused to hand over the keys. 2. It makes it a criminal offence to tell anyone that this is happening to you. (Not sure if it extends as far as hiring a solicitor) - so if you sell your story to the newspapers, that's another 2 years in prison.
If I can figure out how to publish my contacts to SquirrelMail, I will have Won.
I cracked that one ages ago. The easiest solution I could find was "Don't use Squirrel Mail" - there are plenty of far more sophisticated webmail clients out there.
Why would you want to run Photoshop on an 800x480 screen or watch movies on something which has a 2.5 hour battery life (probably rather less if the backlight of the LCD is constantly on and the hard disk is running continually, which it would be for a movie)?
If you actually read the article, the Q1 includes much better technology and has a lot of features and capabilities that appeal to the majority of computer users -- Windows users.
I'm going to stick my neck out and speculate wildly here, but IME most palmtop devices are used as glorified filofaxes. If this is going to be the case, then 90% of the "extra features" of the Q1 are "Look Gran, see what I can do!" features of precious little real benefit.
1. Corruption. Someone high-up in the military has connections with someone who produces Trusted Computing chips. Possible. 2. Management. The military rather likes the idea of computers which can be controlled in terms of what software they will run right down to the lowest hardware level, rather than relying on Windows policies. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me in that context.
I cut my teeth on BASIC, and I'm now a sysadmin, so a fairly healthy chunk of my job consists of scripting things.
The thing which I think you should bear in mind is that the tool used is nowhere near as important as the teacher using it. A good teacher can make watching paint dry sound interesting.
If it's any comfort, there's a lot of people in IT who didn't start out there - one of my former managers was originally a tube (subway) driver.
Going from context, I suspect they're referring to the idea that "different people can use the system and person A can't trample over or even read person B's files", not necessarily "at the same time.
A classic machine, and a superb teaching tool. If I had had to learn on PCs, I doubt I would be as interested in computers as I am today.
I worked in a school back in 2000. Even then, there was one program which was used by the science department for demonstrating something (I forget what exactly) which nobody had found an equal to on the PC. So once a year, when the relevant class had got to that point in the syllabus, the BBC was wheeled out, the dust blown off and the program fired up.
I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if the same is true in a number of other schools up and down the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. They're in the firmware of the printer, not the driver, so a free printer driver wouldn't make much difference in this case.
Often, but not always. SpamAssassin is quite CPU-intensive; on a busy mail server, the less you have to run through it the better.
The only emails which get rejected outright are ones which are clearly rubbish; if the "From" address is "user@domain_which_does_not_exist.com" then a 550 won't cause much serious harm. Things which get that far but then try to sell viagra to SpamAssassin do get dropped.
Well, it's not going to be the end of the world, that's for sure.
.cm addresses which don't exist. A common spam filtering technique (which I employ myself) is to do a lookup of the domain in the From address. If it doesn't exist, the email is bounced. Of course, here it all breaks down horribly because any lookup to a .cm address will succeed - and I can't just block all email from .cm as my employer sells a product which could conceivably have some application in a country which, to be blunt, isn't exactly well known for the fast bandwidth it can offer.
But wait for it - before long, all those spammers using domains which don't exist in the From... address will switch to using
Doesn't need to be.
h ronicle/archive/2003/11/19/BUGP6351V31.DTL
All Trusted Computing provides is a means to verify remotely what software is running on a given system. Cisco have already developed routers which can be set up to only route traffic from something running "approved" software.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
If they only way for your software to be "approved" is that it's the version your vendor shipped & signed, then it matters not whether or not you can modify what they shipped and install it yourself - as soon as you do that, the router will drop any packets from your PC and internet access will stop working.
Maybe that's an extreme example - I can't see many ISPs cutting off most of their customers overnight. But I can see banks requiring a "trusted" setup for online banking, government departments requiring a "trusted" setup for interaction (and if the UK is anything to go by, the online systems will sooner or later replace the existing ones so you can't just post them your tax forms). Add this all up and if you think running Linux on a desktop can be awkward and painful now, imagine what it would be like in that vision of the future.
In principle, yes, because it means leaving a workstation unlocked is far less of an issue than it is with NT4/2K/XP.
However, in practise it is typical for Microsoft to copy Apple then balls up the implementation in some fundamental way the first couple of times around. I can think of a few ways this could happen:
1. The user is prompted for their password so often that they don't think twice when they're required to enter it.
2. Malware in 3 parts. The first part is a keylogger to capture the password. The second part automagically "types" the password in when a window demanding it pops up (Windows already makes it possible for a program to do this). The third and final part is the malware proper.
So, having spent years training normal users that the correct way to get anything done is to click "Yes" on every single dialog box that comes up, regardless of what the dialog actually says, they're now doing the same to sysadmins?
You have clearly never met a type which I shall describe as "agressively pathetic".
By which I mean, "will go to such absurd lengths to avoid doing something new that it would have been less hassle to just do whatever it is they don't want to in the first place".
"I can't use this new PC, I haven't been trained on it!"
"It's exactly the same as the old one, only the case is a different colour."
"Well I still haven't had any training on it!"
Said person refuses to use the computer until such time as they have been trained, causing immense hassle for themselves and everyone in their department. I saw the exact same thing in students when I was at Uni - on a computer science course(!), a vast number did everything in their power to avoid using Unix (where everything had already been set up for them), even though the classes were often taught on Sun boxes.
Now, transfer that exact same attitude across to a Linux PC, or even just OpenOffice. Even if you lock it down and pretty it up to look almost identical to Windows running Microsoft Office, you'll still get that kind of trouble from a large chunk of your staff - some of whom handle nice things like "making sure everyone gets paid" - and your students, and without students it's remarkably hard to get any money out of central government.
True story: I had a neighbour who just could not grasp this concept. They'd heard about a modern car which had crumpled really badly in a relatively minor accident, writing it off. They'd therefore decided that older cars built like brick outhouses were far "better", because you might still have a car after the accident.
Try as I might, complete with diagrams and models, I could not get across the idea that this was a good thing, and that had the car not done the crumpling, the passengers would have - and who cares if the car's repairable when everyone in it's dead?
http://www.openfirmware.org/
The basic premise is that the interface (eg. video card) contains a chip holding system-independet drivers.
It's been running on most commercial Unix systems with proprietary hardware for years.
I've seen this kind of thing in schools.
Staff decide "We have an IT problem".
Along comes a salesman who announces "We specialise in the education market".
Staff say "Buy buy buy!"
The fact that the salesman's product is identical to everyone elses (except for the 30% markup over market rate) is neither here nor there. It was supplied by a "specialist in education", so it must be better, right?
Now, substitude "voting machinery" for "education" and you've got a guaranteed way to sell voting machines.
All I see is a government availing itself of everything possible technologically to do what it believes is the right thing, with technology enabling the kind of massive, omnibus monitoring.
This is a fairly accurate description of 1984, though perhaps the justification is different.
Maybe cheapie little IDE hard disks are under $1/GB. If you want hot-swap, availability of half-decent RAID cards and disks which actually get to see some testing before they leave the factory, then you'll have to spend quite a bit more.
It's not quite as simple of that.
Another couple of things the RIP act does (which the grandparent never mentioned) are:
1. It reverses the burden of proof. So if the government says "Hand over they keys" and you say "I can't, I deleted them", the government can say "Prove it." - and if you can't (how the hell do you prove you deleted something?), you're treated just as if you'd refused to hand over the keys.
2. It makes it a criminal offence to tell anyone that this is happening to you. (Not sure if it extends as far as hiring a solicitor) - so if you sell your story to the newspapers, that's another 2 years in prison.
I care. I've had to debug some of Hugo's work, and I can tell you we need fewer marmosets in this industry.
Funny, when I went to the US I was asked if I had a store card and when the answer was "no", the checkout clerk swiped their own.
Fairly obviously not being a US citizen may have helped there...
If I can figure out how to publish my contacts to SquirrelMail, I will have Won.
I cracked that one ages ago. The easiest solution I could find was "Don't use Squirrel Mail" - there are plenty of far more sophisticated webmail clients out there.
The "transparent backup" is the glorified bit.
Why would you want to run Photoshop on an 800x480 screen or watch movies on something which has a 2.5 hour battery life (probably rather less if the backlight of the LCD is constantly on and the hard disk is running continually, which it would be for a movie)?
I'm going to stick my neck out and speculate wildly here, but IME most palmtop devices are used as glorified filofaxes. If this is going to be the case, then 90% of the "extra features" of the Q1 are "Look Gran, see what I can do!" features of precious little real benefit.
Let's look at the possible scenarios:
1. Corruption. Someone high-up in the military has connections with someone who produces Trusted Computing chips. Possible.
2. Management. The military rather likes the idea of computers which can be controlled in terms of what software they will run right down to the lowest hardware level, rather than relying on Windows policies. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me in that context.
I prefer 2, myself.
USB attacks? Fix the drivers, even use C# or Java, check those boundaries for once..
FWIW, the USB attacks were "Drop a USB memory stick pre-loaded with an app which phones home in the car park outside a company".
This stops social engineering attacks like that quite nicely.
Oh, and come back to reality. "Fix the drivers"? How many companies you know have that as an option for their desktop PCs?
Heh.
I cut my teeth on BASIC, and I'm now a sysadmin, so a fairly healthy chunk of my job consists of scripting things.
The thing which I think you should bear in mind is that the tool used is nowhere near as important as the teacher using it. A good teacher can make watching paint dry sound interesting.
If it's any comfort, there's a lot of people in IT who didn't start out there - one of my former managers was originally a tube (subway) driver.
Going from context, I suspect they're referring to the idea that "different people can use the system and person A can't trample over or even read person B's files", not necessarily "at the same time.
I ran WindowMaker back then.
By modern standards, WindowMaker is a light window manager. "Light" does not have to mean "hideous".
A classic machine, and a superb teaching tool. If I had had to learn on PCs, I doubt I would be as interested in computers as I am today.
I worked in a school back in 2000. Even then, there was one program which was used by the science department for demonstrating something (I forget what exactly) which nobody had found an equal to on the PC. So once a year, when the relevant class had got to that point in the syllabus, the BBC was wheeled out, the dust blown off and the program fired up.
I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if the same is true in a number of other schools up and down the country.