Such distinctive equipment as an expensive Cisco router is tougher to sell. But hot-swap hard drives are easily sold on the grey market, as are modest 1U and 2U servers: few people would bother to carefully register them. Moreover, if there was credit card data on some of the servers, that's another pool of potential profit higher than a Cisco router.
But 4 times? That's ridiculous, and screams of inside job, or covering for a "Patriot Act" raid.
And especially if it's near a few racks of servers, AC, etc. All that pumping of cooling air through a real data center is very, very noisy. It's why I often wear earplugs or good ear protectors in such environments, and recommend them to staff I work with.
Is it easier to believe that the data center was actually robbed, or that federal agents showed up for a "Patriot Act" search and left behind physical evidence to allay suspicions?
It would explain why no prosecutions occurred after the first 3 raids.
I've done deep Cisco work directly in IOS, and loath the Oracle work I've done for its painful interfaces. I throw them out as fast as possible for interfaces that let me get on with my work.
VNC is unnecessary, and its password handling and user authentication is a security issue. SSH with X capability provides a superior interface. However, when you need console access to a remote server, look at how many of the remote KVM devices are actually VNC wrapped into a web access utility, so I don't discard it completely.
I've done quite a lot of work with the command line, thank you very much. When life was too restricted to use vi, I've worked directly with ed and other more primitive tools, so I'd suggest you not compare your stone rock skill with *me*, thank you very much. Ogg know how to use rock, Ogg know how to chip rock, Ogg know how to chip rocks into arrowheads and shoot tiger from tree where is safe.
I'm sorry, but I disagree with you. I have several vanity domains and don't have the personal infrastructure, to provide proper domain registration services. My servers are corporate, and keeping a few vanity domains for email and webhosting with built-in domain registration is very useful to me and people like me. The domain hosting is very useful, along with SSL key management and basic DNS services.
Oh, my. You've clearly not followed the history of the EFF. Their ability to do real work, versus their ability to sell their name for corporate sponsors, depends greatly on who is in charge. (I remember when Mr. Berman ran the place: that was nasty.)
But this isn't a clear-cut issue for them. The privacy of domain holders, versus the ability to track abusers back to someone actually responsible for the registration, is a clear policy argument that does not involve the sort of clearly cruel and abusive that the EFF fights at its best. In fact, given the use of domain-squatting and fraudulent domain hosting provided, I'd expect the current EFF to be on the side of ICANN. Privacy is fine, but the irresponsibility and abuse fostered by total anonymity at the WHOIS level is ridiculous.
I do it regularly with spammers' and scammers' and virus senders' hosting domains. Actually getting a human on the phone, rather than sending a complaint to the bitbucket that is "abuse@domain.com" is much more effective in getting the abuse stopped.
Because third-party domains are so very often abused and abusive. Domain squatting, slightly misnamed names for fraudulent bank sites, and spammer-hosting ISP's all need to be trackable back to whoever signed the checks for them.
Ahh. Ogg have better tool for making bearskins. Is called flatter rock. Ogg need to upgrade tool for bearskins? Use bigger rock! Makes flatter bearskin!
There are reasons people learned to use knives and other tools to skin bears, for the same reason we use good good GUI's or tools for editing sensitive configuration files. It leaves us time to stop chipping rocks into the shape we want and get on with our lives.
No, it runs twice as fast on the limited amount of hardware that it runs on. Broadcom is hardly the only GigE or high-end network component manufacturer, but they're extremely common. And hardware manufacturers go out of business or discard product lines on a regular basis, so you can't necessarily rely on those old, known good device manufacturers to still be available in a few years time.
To extend your analogy, a rocket engine that is beautiful and fuel efficient but has to be aimed by getting out and rebolting the fins is not a good use of engineering time, no. The configuration tools I've seen for OpenBSD were limited. Is there a better management tool for packetfilter in the last few years? Because a filtering tool that is 20% faster doesn't matter if I can't hand off configuring it to reasonably competent engineer and go do more useful work.
Unfortunately, that "purity of essence" approach prevents it from operating on laptops for network probing applications, or on relatively new hardware platforms. So you get fascinating network purity, that runs twice as fast, on hardware that's 3-5 years old and therefore half the speed. Getting the "packetfilter" tools improved is great, but when you can't use it with the latest Broadcom drivers because key parts of the drivers were GPL licensed and Theo threw a hissy fit when the actual author noticed and tried to work it out, all that speed is wasted. And without good GUI's, or at least more usable interfaces, for systems people who are not quite so experienced, those tools will not be broadly used.
You're building X windows, various window managers, and the more useful X GU's like Firefox in less than an hour? Or is that a relatively small "userland" you're using there?
The binary blobs are a problem: they're a nasty compromise. Even the cites you provide, however, do not say the Linux developers don't mind! Where do you get this?
And that doesn't refute the difference between the BSD and GPL licenses where BSD permits those software programs to be proprietized and closed. So it's OK if a BSD developer does it, but not OK if an upstream hardware vendor does it? That's.... unfortunately common among the BSD fans I've worked with.
Goodness, sir or madam: you've apparently been reading Chomsky or his followers of linguistics. It's not really clear, from my casual glances at the literature and actually watching people, that language is genetically ingrained. The benefits of learning it and using it are very real, but there's no need for language itself to be ingrained, any more than reading is.
I agree with you that English is an open set, though.
No. There are stacks of hardware that are in use in the open source world that do not work well under OpenBSD, if at all. 3d graphics cards, anyone? USB->serial adapters? Wacom graphics tablets? External USB DVD burners? I've seen reports of all of them failing with OpenBSD, where they work well under Linux, even with live Linux CD's.
Unless there's been a huge influx of driver support, which seems unlikely with Theo in charge and insulting polite GPL developers, I see it stuck in supporting network security applicances, not desktop use.
Theo ranted at the actual copyright owner, who'd been extremely open and polite and had offered up-front to consider dual-licensing:
> No, your message offered that he can come begging, because that is the best that thieves may do. > > Come little dog, come beg for forgiveness.
You can't expect people to work well with that: this is why Theo lost his write access to the NetBSD CVS repositories, and it's a big reason people don't develop for OpenBSD. The direct result is a lack of, or loss of, drivers for OpenBSD.
I'm afraid not for practical as well as political reasons:
1) Theo de Raadt, historically, does not play nice with others in the free software community. That shoots down OpenBSD right there. 2) The license issues are very serious: the BSD licenses allow developers to build on other's work and proprietize it, the GPL insists that it remain available to all customers. That's a big, big deal with the proprietary information and NDA's on new hardware.
Getting Theo to accept a tool, or set of tools, that are not built to the OpenBSD standard of incredible efficiency and cleanness of code is extremely unlikely: I don't think Xen is there yet.
Mind you, that cleanness of code and incredible efficiency comes at the cost of having a usable interface and key features that push people away from OpenBSD into something that will actually do the job they need done, and will do it now.
You're in London, right? With the world's highest prevalence of video cameras, but no way for citizens to get the records of where they lost their bag of groceries, and no way to know when the authorities use it to track protesters to get warrants to keep them away from the protests at Heathrow?
It's a whole set of responses to Cover Your Ass, ranging from getting everything on paper and documented, to automatically notifying your superiors that you questioned someone, to automatically following whatever procedures were published no matter how inapplicable or in fact not for this situation.
Its complementary twin is Plausible Deniability, where you very carefully avoid writing down orders that might be illegal, destroy expired records before they can be subpoenaed, and avoid calling their lawyer until the last possible deniable moment.
Amen. Unfortunately, we not only have a litigious society, we have a denser one. More people, closer living conditions, less place outside to play with the stuff safely, more likelihood of ticking off a neighbor with the smell of burning stuff, and sadly enough, no medical coverage for ordinary childhood accidents.
Scars are part of growing up, and the accidental contact with 120 Volt teaches you things about similar activities like soldering and handling electrical equipment that was crucial to my childhood and later safety practices. We have similar restrictions on violence, drinking, sexual discussion, and marijuana that do seem to create even more severe problems.
Such distinctive equipment as an expensive Cisco router is tougher to sell. But hot-swap hard drives are easily sold on the grey market, as are modest 1U and 2U servers: few people would bother to carefully register them. Moreover, if there was credit card data on some of the servers, that's another pool of potential profit higher than a Cisco router.
But 4 times? That's ridiculous, and screams of inside job, or covering for a "Patriot Act" raid.
And especially if it's near a few racks of servers, AC, etc. All that pumping of cooling air through a real data center is very, very noisy. It's why I often wear earplugs or good ear protectors in such environments, and recommend them to staff I work with.
If I were a thief in that case, I'd set off the Halon and wear an oxygen mask myself.
Is it easier to believe that the data center was actually robbed, or that federal agents showed up for a "Patriot Act" search and left behind physical evidence to allay suspicions?
It would explain why no prosecutions occurred after the first 3 raids.
It could be worse. They could have been defamed by revealing that they were French.
I've done deep Cisco work directly in IOS, and loath the Oracle work I've done for its painful interfaces. I throw them out as fast as possible for interfaces that let me get on with my work.
VNC is unnecessary, and its password handling and user authentication is a security issue. SSH with X capability provides a superior interface. However, when you need console access to a remote server, look at how many of the remote KVM devices are actually VNC wrapped into a web access utility, so I don't discard it completely.
I've done quite a lot of work with the command line, thank you very much. When life was too restricted to use vi, I've worked directly with ed and other more primitive tools, so I'd suggest you not compare your stone rock skill with *me*, thank you very much. Ogg know how to use rock, Ogg know how to chip rock, Ogg know how to chip rocks into arrowheads and shoot tiger from tree where is safe.
I'm sorry, but I disagree with you. I have several vanity domains and don't have the personal infrastructure, to provide proper domain registration services. My servers are corporate, and keeping a few vanity domains for email and webhosting with built-in domain registration is very useful to me and people like me. The domain hosting is very useful, along with SSL key management and basic DNS services.
Oh, my. You've clearly not followed the history of the EFF. Their ability to do real work, versus their ability to sell their name for corporate sponsors, depends greatly on who is in charge. (I remember when Mr. Berman ran the place: that was nasty.)
But this isn't a clear-cut issue for them. The privacy of domain holders, versus the ability to track abusers back to someone actually responsible for the registration, is a clear policy argument that does not involve the sort of clearly cruel and abusive that the EFF fights at its best. In fact, given the use of domain-squatting and fraudulent domain hosting provided, I'd expect the current EFF to be on the side of ICANN. Privacy is fine, but the irresponsibility and abuse fostered by total anonymity at the WHOIS level is ridiculous.
I do it regularly with spammers' and scammers' and virus senders' hosting domains. Actually getting a human on the phone, rather than sending a complaint to the bitbucket that is "abuse@domain.com" is much more effective in getting the abuse stopped.
Because third-party domains are so very often abused and abusive. Domain squatting, slightly misnamed names for fraudulent bank sites, and spammer-hosting ISP's all need to be trackable back to whoever signed the checks for them.
Ahh. Ogg have better tool for making bearskins. Is called flatter rock. Ogg need to upgrade tool for bearskins? Use bigger rock! Makes flatter bearskin!
There are reasons people learned to use knives and other tools to skin bears, for the same reason we use good good GUI's or tools for editing sensitive configuration files. It leaves us time to stop chipping rocks into the shape we want and get on with our lives.
No, it runs twice as fast on the limited amount of hardware that it runs on. Broadcom is hardly the only GigE or high-end network component manufacturer, but they're extremely common. And hardware manufacturers go out of business or discard product lines on a regular basis, so you can't necessarily rely on those old, known good device manufacturers to still be available in a few years time.
To extend your analogy, a rocket engine that is beautiful and fuel efficient but has to be aimed by getting out and rebolting the fins is not a good use of engineering time, no. The configuration tools I've seen for OpenBSD were limited. Is there a better management tool for packetfilter in the last few years? Because a filtering tool that is 20% faster doesn't matter if I can't hand off configuring it to reasonably competent engineer and go do more useful work.
Unfortunately, that "purity of essence" approach prevents it from operating on laptops for network probing applications, or on relatively new hardware platforms. So you get fascinating network purity, that runs twice as fast, on hardware that's 3-5 years old and therefore half the speed. Getting the "packetfilter" tools improved is great, but when you can't use it with the latest Broadcom drivers because key parts of the drivers were GPL licensed and Theo threw a hissy fit when the actual author noticed and tried to work it out, all that speed is wasted. And without good GUI's, or at least more usable interfaces, for systems people who are not quite so experienced, those tools will not be broadly used.
That's not a good investment of engineering time.
You're building X windows, various window managers, and the more useful X GU's like Firefox in less than an hour? Or is that a relatively small "userland" you're using there?
The binary blobs are a problem: they're a nasty compromise. Even the cites you provide, however, do not say the Linux developers don't mind! Where do you get this?
And that doesn't refute the difference between the BSD and GPL licenses where BSD permits those software programs to be proprietized and closed. So it's OK if a BSD developer does it, but not OK if an upstream hardware vendor does it? That's.... unfortunately common among the BSD fans I've worked with.
Goodness, sir or madam: you've apparently been reading Chomsky or his followers of linguistics. It's not really clear, from my casual glances at the literature and actually watching people, that language is genetically ingrained. The benefits of learning it and using it are very real, but there's no need for language itself to be ingrained, any more than reading is.
I agree with you that English is an open set, though.
Or if you have some wrist issues with repetitive stress injuries: On bad days, your login would be unusable.
Actually, that might be a good thing.
No. There are stacks of hardware that are in use in the open source world that do not work well under OpenBSD, if at all. 3d graphics cards, anyone? USB->serial adapters? Wacom graphics tablets? External USB DVD burners? I've seen reports of all of them failing with OpenBSD, where they work well under Linux, even with live Linux CD's.
Unless there's been a huge influx of driver support, which seems unlikely with Theo in charge and insulting polite GPL developers, I see it stuck in supporting network security applicances, not desktop use.
Oh, my goodness. You need to go look at the Broadcom driver issue, where GPL code was apparently included directly in a BSD driver.
http://threadgmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general/1558
Theo ranted at the actual copyright owner, who'd been extremely open and polite and had offered up-front to consider dual-licensing:
> No, your message offered that he can come begging, because that is the best that thieves may do.
>
> Come little dog, come beg for forgiveness.
You can't expect people to work well with that: this is why Theo lost his write access to the NetBSD CVS repositories, and it's a big reason people don't develop for OpenBSD. The direct result is a lack of, or loss of, drivers for OpenBSD.
I'm afraid not for practical as well as political reasons:
1) Theo de Raadt, historically, does not play nice with others in the free software community. That shoots down OpenBSD right there.
2) The license issues are very serious: the BSD licenses allow developers to build on other's work and proprietize it, the GPL insists that it remain available to all customers. That's a big, big deal with the proprietary information and NDA's on new hardware.
Welcome to the (lack of) driver support for OpenBSD.
Getting Theo to accept a tool, or set of tools, that are not built to the OpenBSD standard of incredible efficiency and cleanness of code is extremely unlikely: I don't think Xen is there yet.
Mind you, that cleanness of code and incredible efficiency comes at the cost of having a usable interface and key features that push people away from OpenBSD into something that will actually do the job they need done, and will do it now.
You're in London, right? With the world's highest prevalence of video cameras, but no way for citizens to get the records of where they lost their bag of groceries, and no way to know when the authorities use it to track protesters to get warrants to keep them away from the protests at Heathrow?
It's a whole set of responses to Cover Your Ass, ranging from getting everything on paper and documented, to automatically notifying your superiors that you questioned someone, to automatically following whatever procedures were published no matter how inapplicable or in fact not for this situation.
Its complementary twin is Plausible Deniability, where you very carefully avoid writing down orders that might be illegal, destroy expired records before they can be subpoenaed, and avoid calling their lawyer until the last possible deniable moment.
Amen. Unfortunately, we not only have a litigious society, we have a denser one. More people, closer living conditions, less place outside to play with the stuff safely, more likelihood of ticking off a neighbor with the smell of burning stuff, and sadly enough, no medical coverage for ordinary childhood accidents.
Scars are part of growing up, and the accidental contact with 120 Volt teaches you things about similar activities like soldering and handling electrical equipment that was crucial to my childhood and later safety practices. We have similar restrictions on violence, drinking, sexual discussion, and marijuana that do seem to create even more severe problems.