Comcast is a mix of numerous, smaller and mid-size ISP's, who've been gobbled up and merged together. They're trying to standardize and set general policies, but their choices of those policies are often exceedingly poor. For example, according to their own website configuration notes, they only support POP, and they don't support encrypted POP. Uploading to their individual websites is done entirely by FTP.
The result is that their security for their customers is a sad, sad joke: anyone at Comcast with access to the connections, whether a Comcast employee or a federal snooper with no warrant required under Patriot Act policies, can snoop a customer's entire email traffic by copying the unencrypted password.
For Comcast to claim someone else is insedure is an even sadder joke. Frankly, most VOIP solutions apply security as an afterthought, like holding up a dragging muffler with a coat hanger. A few services, like Skype, seem to take it seriously. But Skype is probably also vulnerable to sophisticated man-in-the-middle attacks with Skype's collaboration, since the software is closed source. It's just much better than many of the alternatives.
It's not the technical issue of boundary overflaws that doom the script parser, it's the inability to predict the scripts that will be submitted. As soon as you limit the scripting power enough to make it safe, you throw out the very flexibility and extensibility for which the scripting language was created. The reverse is also true: as soon as you provide the scripting language t be client-configuratin sensitive, or to manipulate the client at all, security is massively imperiled.
Excuse me, but making scripted languages secure is always in futility. As soon as you provide enough power for the parser to actually do anything, and any way to modify arguments for it, security is an attempt to store water in a paper towel.
One may as well say "keeping passwords in clear-text is OK if you only keep them in your home directry". It displays such a deep failure to understand how things actually work.
Also notice that the millions came from Microsoft, through "partnerships" in setting up trade deals to keep SCO afloat for the past few years. SCO actually used ot have some useful products, but they've languished and decayed as their intellectual talent fled for the hills and the lawyers hopiing for a windfall win against IBM became more important to the company than actually writing software.
Simply working a 16 hour work day today doesn't prove anything about the quality of your code. Maybe if you'd gotten enough sleep last week, and weren't being so "personally motivated", you wouldn't have written that bug in the first place and would have saved yourself a whole workday this week.
He does if he's been breaking into the boss's email, or getting called in the middle of the night to get the laptop of the CEO of the purchasing company hooked into the local VPN on orders from his own boss. (I've actually had that happen.)
Doesn't that depend on the law? Someone convicted of writing the libdvdcss tools and making it possible to duplicate DVD's might be very good to hire, since those authors tried very hard to do things legitimately, and the law they violated is pretty screwball and prevents otherwise completely legal behavior such as making backup copies.
But some script kiddy who releases a destructive email worm that disables people's machines worldwide should only be employed in a local prison to pick up people's soap iin the shower.
Whine for them or not, Microsoft has a long history of putting in poor-man's versions of commercial tools to undercut competitors in ways that are illegal for such a monopoly to do. Symantec and Adobe just got handed the same deal that Netscape did, and the authors of the commercial TCP stacks for Windows 3.x.produ
Andn as far as PDF conversion goes, it's been free as part of PDFcreator for ages. Adobe's commercial versions are in fact more fragile, bulkier, produce less reliable PDF, and have a terrible tendency to stuff your system with "features" that you never asked for. The free PDFcreator, riding on top of Ghostscript's history of robustness and reliability rather than pursuing "business plans" that break features, has been outperforming it in automatic print services for years.
I mostly agree. Such neat bundling is handy for backtracking a specific failure to a specific location, but when reconfigurations are necessary they're painful to handle. And when one class of rackmount unit has 8 ports, and another has 24 usable ports, and another has 2 fiber-optic ports going somewhere else, it can get pretty odd pretty fast.
Rather than tightly bundling and anallyy overspecifying each connection, a huge benefit comes from using a conventional label-maker, a bit of color-coding, some thought about keeping the network cables away from power cables, and investing in lots of medium size Velcro strips rather than hundreds of precisely cut plastic Ty-wraps. The ease of reconfiguration and the the time saved more than justify the costs. Even more important is a policy of providing spare connections, so that *when* one fails, or when someone needs a spare connection in their office, you don't have to spend lots of money on extra power strips and expanders. A bit of investment is priceless in allowing people to easily handle an extra plug for a laptop or a debugging port.
It's also priceless when the original installer is unavailable, and some after-hours support person is asked to look for the dead port to check the failed machine, or to slip in a debugging connection to monitor the traffic.
True. Expect it to happen as new office sites are built or as companies move, as a lot of new hardware will come with Vista pre-installed. And expect it to happen as antique desktops and servers with Windows 2000 fall off the support list: forced upgrades to use new products from Microsoft and from their partners will help drive migrations to Visat.
This has actually happened, a few years ago when Microsoft's core DNS servers got re-routed by a backhoe without warning and without a good off-site failover. Every Microsoft dependent desktop idiot in the world starting doing ping and nslookup and webpage refreshes to try and access the site, and the servers had serious problems coming back up under the massive load. People worldwide trying to check security patches, look up Microsoft product information, or open their default Microsoft webpages kept re-trying.
And for the person who said "I don't research", this exact scenario and the problems of fixing it, and the suggestion of "Use Akamai!" and Microsoft's quiet protest of "but they use Linux, we don't consider that reliable" was a serious point of contention in the meeting with Microsoft sales and technical staff. It became quite clear they were unwilling to consider it: they use Akamai and Akamai's Linux servers when they have to, but they obviously hate doing it and would love to woo Akamai away from Linux. I'd *love* to be a fly on the wall at *those* meetings.
Linux and MacOS tend to be a lot saner about caching behavior, and are often properly configured with a local caching DNS server in more sane setups than the millions of Vista machines expected to be built when Vista is finally released. And as corporate environments switch hundreds or thousands of updated or new machines to Vista, the load on upstream DNS servers, especially the root servers, can be expected to climb quite drastically at some very odd times.
The DNS for Microsoft itself is one of the most vulnerable possibilities: if that goes down for an hour or so, as all the Internet Explorer servers and mis-programmed default Internet Explorer search settings hit microsoft.com for their default web page, those servers are going to take very large loads. And spreading out the load for such hits on the root servers for.com is not a small task: they may have to get services from Akamai to survive the hits.
I'm sure that Microsoft also *hates* having to use Akamai servers for anything, due to Akamai's understandable reliance on Linux for core services.
Because supporting multiple package managers is normally a complete waste of everybody's time, especially the author. You need only look at the craziness SuSE has managing both RPM's and non-RPM packages, which have dependencies on each other's components which have to be massaged and managed by hand, to see the resulting insanity of trying to merge multiple systems. And software authors should not have to work with multiple build or package management tools: it encourages way too much re-invention of the wheel, most of which will look very pretty and work very well on one tiny problem but will lack vital features built into the more experienced tools over the years.
Figure that writing a new package manager setup for a well-written software package takes one hour of work, by someone familiar with it. Now multiply that by 4, for RPM, pkg, apt, and ports, plus the up-front time learning all those different systems. We've got way too much real work to do to waste with duplicating package managers and chasing down dependencies for different package layouts.
Mod this guy up. Between the MP3 patent problems (where the MP3 patent owners will not allow you to pay an individual user license, only an authorized software license), and the pending DRM problems with so-called "Trusted Computing", which should actually be named "Only Our Software Can Open Your Data(tm" Computing, it's going to continue to be a problem.
Yes, and if we all clap together Tinkerbell will come back to life. Seriously, many lawyer's and judge's careers are based on fraudulent lawsuits keeping them employed to the detriment of more realistic lawsuits. Take a look at SCO and their lawsuit against IBM over the last few years for a prize example. The judge should have said "show me the code that they infringed" three years ago.
Better yet, why not just post the names, addresses, phone numbers, and personal information of all these women on Slashdot? That'll show them how wonderful you are to hang around. (And it'll give those of us who bathe and brush our teeth a chance to meet them: it's a win-win situation!)
Or governor of Massachusetts. There doesn't seem to be much differenc between that and running the losing campaign for president over the last few campaigns.
Look back at the SunOS/Solaris architecture and open source flip-flops, from BSD to AT&T SysV. It's taken them years to recover from the chaos that created.
Several projects hosted at Mac OS Forge use Subversion. Subversion is not available by default on Mac OS X Tiger, but you can download and install it from Mac OS Forge with the following commands from Terminal:
Notice the complete lack of any checksums or PGP signatures of the software: you're just supposed to slap it on top of your root filesystem and never look back. And since Subversion by default stores user passwords locally, in cleartext, for any servers using HTTP or HTTPS or svnserve access, and even if you use svnserve+ssh it could be programmed to steal your password free SSH keys or information about your SSH keyring setup and mail them to the mothership, it represents a serious risk to the Subversion user, and a risk to any software repository at MacOS Forge.
Subversion is vastly preferable to CVS for a lot of reasons, but these people should not be trying to re-invent the wheel this way without noticing that previous wheel inventors already invented brakes and axles.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast is a mix of numerous, smaller and mid-size ISP's, who've been gobbled up and merged together. They're trying to standardize and set general policies, but their choices of those policies are often exceedingly poor. For example, according to their own website configuration notes, they only support POP, and they don't support encrypted POP. Uploading to their individual websites is done entirely by FTP. The result is that their security for their customers is a sad, sad joke: anyone at Comcast with access to the connections, whether a Comcast employee or a federal snooper with no warrant required under Patriot Act policies, can snoop a customer's entire email traffic by copying the unencrypted password. For Comcast to claim someone else is insedure is an even sadder joke. Frankly, most VOIP solutions apply security as an afterthought, like holding up a dragging muffler with a coat hanger. A few services, like Skype, seem to take it seriously. But Skype is probably also vulnerable to sophisticated man-in-the-middle attacks with Skype's collaboration, since the software is closed source. It's just much better than many of the alternatives.
It's not the technical issue of boundary overflaws that doom the script parser, it's the inability to predict the scripts that will be submitted. As soon as you limit the scripting power enough to make it safe, you throw out the very flexibility and extensibility for which the scripting language was created. The reverse is also true: as soon as you provide the scripting language t be client-configuratin sensitive, or to manipulate the client at all, security is massively imperiled.
Excuse me, but making scripted languages secure is always in futility. As soon as you provide enough power for the parser to actually do anything, and any way to modify arguments for it, security is an attempt to store water in a paper towel.
One may as well say "keeping passwords in clear-text is OK if you only keep them in your home directry". It displays such a deep failure to understand how things actually work.
Also notice that the millions came from Microsoft, through "partnerships" in setting up trade deals to keep SCO afloat for the past few years. SCO actually used ot have some useful products, but they've languished and decayed as their intellectual talent fled for the hills and the lawyers hopiing for a windfall win against IBM became more important to the company than actually writing software.
Simply working a 16 hour work day today doesn't prove anything about the quality of your code. Maybe if you'd gotten enough sleep last week, and weren't being so "personally motivated", you wouldn't have written that bug in the first place and would have saved yourself a whole workday this week.
He does if he's been breaking into the boss's email, or getting called in the middle of the night to get the laptop of the CEO of the purchasing company hooked into the local VPN on orders from his own boss. (I've actually had that happen.)
Doesn't that depend on the law? Someone convicted of writing the libdvdcss tools and making it possible to duplicate DVD's might be very good to hire, since those authors tried very hard to do things legitimately, and the law they violated is pretty screwball and prevents otherwise completely legal behavior such as making backup copies.
But some script kiddy who releases a destructive email worm that disables people's machines worldwide should only be employed in a local prison to pick up people's soap iin the shower.
Whine for them or not, Microsoft has a long history of putting in poor-man's versions of commercial tools to undercut competitors in ways that are illegal for such a monopoly to do. Symantec and Adobe just got handed the same deal that Netscape did, and the authors of the commercial TCP stacks for Windows 3.x.produ
Andn as far as PDF conversion goes, it's been free as part of PDFcreator for ages. Adobe's commercial versions are in fact more fragile, bulkier, produce less reliable PDF, and have a terrible tendency to stuff your system with "features" that you never asked for. The free PDFcreator, riding on top of Ghostscript's history of robustness and reliability rather than pursuing "business plans" that break features, has been outperforming it in automatic print services for years.
I mostly agree. Such neat bundling is handy for backtracking a specific failure to a specific location, but when reconfigurations are necessary they're painful to handle. And when one class of rackmount unit has 8 ports, and another has 24 usable ports, and another has 2 fiber-optic ports going somewhere else, it can get pretty odd pretty fast.
Rather than tightly bundling and anallyy overspecifying each connection, a huge benefit comes from using a conventional label-maker, a bit of color-coding, some thought about keeping the network cables away from power cables, and investing in lots of medium size Velcro strips rather than hundreds of precisely cut plastic Ty-wraps. The ease of reconfiguration and the the time saved more than justify the costs. Even more important is a policy of providing spare connections, so that *when* one fails, or when someone needs a spare connection in their office, you don't have to spend lots of money on extra power strips and expanders. A bit of investment is priceless in allowing people to easily handle an extra plug for a laptop or a debugging port.
It's also priceless when the original installer is unavailable, and some after-hours support person is asked to look for the dead port to check the failed machine, or to slip in a debugging connection to monitor the traffic.
True. Expect it to happen as new office sites are built or as companies move, as a lot of new hardware will come with Vista pre-installed. And expect it to happen as antique desktops and servers with Windows 2000 fall off the support list: forced upgrades to use new products from Microsoft and from their partners will help drive migrations to Visat.
This has actually happened, a few years ago when Microsoft's core DNS servers got re-routed by a backhoe without warning and without a good off-site failover. Every Microsoft dependent desktop idiot in the world starting doing ping and nslookup and webpage refreshes to try and access the site, and the servers had serious problems coming back up under the massive load. People worldwide trying to check security patches, look up Microsoft product information, or open their default Microsoft webpages kept re-trying.
And for the person who said "I don't research", this exact scenario and the problems of fixing it, and the suggestion of "Use Akamai!" and Microsoft's quiet protest of "but they use Linux, we don't consider that reliable" was a serious point of contention in the meeting with Microsoft sales and technical staff. It became quite clear they were unwilling to consider it: they use Akamai and Akamai's Linux servers when they have to, but they obviously hate doing it and would love to woo Akamai away from Linux. I'd *love* to be a fly on the wall at *those* meetings.
Linux and MacOS tend to be a lot saner about caching behavior, and are often properly configured with a local caching DNS server in more sane setups than the millions of Vista machines expected to be built when Vista is finally released. And as corporate environments switch hundreds or thousands of updated or new machines to Vista, the load on upstream DNS servers, especially the root servers, can be expected to climb quite drastically at some very odd times.
.com is not a small task: they may have to get services from Akamai to survive the hits.
The DNS for Microsoft itself is one of the most vulnerable possibilities: if that goes down for an hour or so, as all the Internet Explorer servers and mis-programmed default Internet Explorer search settings hit microsoft.com for their default web page, those servers are going to take very large loads. And spreading out the load for such hits on the root servers for
I'm sure that Microsoft also *hates* having to use Akamai servers for anything, due to Akamai's understandable reliance on Linux for core services.
Because supporting multiple package managers is normally a complete waste of everybody's time, especially the author. You need only look at the craziness SuSE has managing both RPM's and non-RPM packages, which have dependencies on each other's components which have to be massaged and managed by hand, to see the resulting insanity of trying to merge multiple systems. And software authors should not have to work with multiple build or package management tools: it encourages way too much re-invention of the wheel, most of which will look very pretty and work very well on one tiny problem but will lack vital features built into the more experienced tools over the years.
Figure that writing a new package manager setup for a well-written software package takes one hour of work, by someone familiar with it. Now multiply that by 4, for RPM, pkg, apt, and ports, plus the up-front time learning all those different systems. We've got way too much real work to do to waste with duplicating package managers and chasing down dependencies for different package layouts.
Mod this guy up. Between the MP3 patent problems (where the MP3 patent owners will not allow you to pay an individual user license, only an authorized software license), and the pending DRM problems with so-called "Trusted Computing", which should actually be named "Only Our Software Can Open Your Data(tm" Computing, it's going to continue to be a problem.
Sounds like he's hiding from an ex-wife to me. In fact, that's probably how she became an ex-wife.
OK, I want some of the mushrooms this guy's been eating. Then I want to give them to my next blind date.
Yes, and if we all clap together Tinkerbell will come back to life. Seriously, many lawyer's and judge's careers are based on fraudulent lawsuits keeping them employed to the detriment of more realistic lawsuits. Take a look at SCO and their lawsuit against IBM over the last few years for a prize example. The judge should have said "show me the code that they infringed" three years ago.
Getting in a boxing match with Jack Thompson and the referee forgetting to list all the rules makes me violent. See this URL for the result:
0 621
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=2006
Only if either of them actually get a date.
Oh, you're right. John Kerry was a senator from Massachusetts, not a governor.
And to level up your character, get him crucified on a national holiday.
Better yet, why not just post the names, addresses, phone numbers, and personal information of all these women on Slashdot? That'll show them how wonderful you are to hang around. (And it'll give those of us who bathe and brush our teeth a chance to meet them: it's a win-win situation!)
Or governor of Massachusetts. There doesn't seem to be much differenc between that and running the losing campaign for president over the last few campaigns.
Look back at the SunOS/Solaris architecture and open source flip-flops, from BSD to AT&T SysV. It's taken them years to recover from the chaos that created.
Not really. Take a look at http://macosforge.org/subversion.html, where it says:
a r.gz
Several projects hosted at Mac OS Forge use Subversion. Subversion is not available by default on Mac OS X Tiger, but you can download and install it from Mac OS Forge with the following commands from Terminal:
$ curl -O http://www.macosforge.org/files/Subversion.root.t
$ sudo tar xzf Subversion.root.tar.gz -C /
Notice the complete lack of any checksums or PGP signatures of the software: you're just supposed to slap it on top of your root filesystem and never look back. And since Subversion by default stores user passwords locally, in cleartext, for any servers using HTTP or HTTPS or svnserve access, and even if you use svnserve+ssh it could be programmed to steal your password free SSH keys or information about your SSH keyring setup and mail them to the mothership, it represents a serious risk to the Subversion user, and a risk to any software repository at MacOS Forge.
Subversion is vastly preferable to CVS for a lot of reasons, but these people should not be trying to re-invent the wheel this way without noticing that previous wheel inventors already invented brakes and axles.