Simply using a NAT router DOES NOT protect your machine from e-mail worms (like Sober, for example).
Right. But running a properly-engineered browser (like Firefox) and a properly-engineered email client (like Thunderbird) and not being a complete moron who opens up executable attachments that haven't been virus scanned yet will accomplish that far more effectively than merely updating your system, since the latter is only temporary (until the next exploit is inevitably found).
Step two is to immediately update your system.
No, step two is to enable the firewall on the OS.
Step three is to run as a restricted user and to never run with administrative privileges except to install software. Being forced to explicitly log in as administrator forces you to think about what you're doing. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Virus scanning everything you download from the internet prior to executing it, combined with running a firewall both on the machine and right in front of the internet connection, will eliminate most of the risk. Running as a restricted user on top of that will eliminate almost all of it.
Remember: the reason all of this is an issue to begin with is that Microsoft is a piece of shit software company that doesn't give a flying fuck about real security, and only cares in passing about even the appearance of security. The threat level would be order of magnitude less if it weren't for their idiocy. They are, after all, the morons who decided that users should get administrative privileges by default, and that ACLs are for "professionals", not home users.
And they will at least promise to fix popular complaints, or risk not being elected. Corporations don't have to wait until election time, but they won't be bribing you if you're not in office.
Yes, they will promise to do so. But they won't actually do so, because what matters to them is what their corporate masters want, not what the people want.
Why? Because while they might not be reelected if they ignore what the people want, it's guaranteed that they won't be reelected if they ignore what their corporate masters want. Their corporate masters make their election possible in the first place. You can't win an election if the media ignores you or paints you in a bad light, and the media is owned by some very large corporations indeed (that of course are going to do deals with other large corporations). And that's on top of the corporate sponsorship that politicians have to have just to be able to pay for the media spots that they can't get through backroom deals and the like (which also obviously generally require corporate sponsorship).
No, sorry, but the corporations own politicians the way they might own slaves. Almost all politicians today will do whatever their corporate masters tell them to because they must. They won't be reelected otherwise -- guaranteed.
Don't worry too much, this can't last forever, the worse it gets the more people will complain. Not that I'm against ending this nonsense here and now.
In case you haven't noticed, complaining doesn't influence anything in government anymore. Witness the huge number of complaints and general opposition to the U.S. actions in Iraq by U.S. citizens, even prior to those actions being taken. What did that end up doing? Not a fucking thing.
It's not how many people complain that counts. It's how many big corporations complain. Until they start complaining loudly, nothing will change.
A Business' sole goal is to maximize profit for its shareholders, and nothing else.
Really? Says who? You? That's fine for your business, but don't confuse your own priorities with a general rule.
No, the only real rule here is that it's necessary for a business to at least break even in the long run (breaking even here means that all expenses are paid, all employees get paid their agreed upon salary, and all investors get their money back plus some reasonable return). If you own and run the business, you're basically an employee as well and your salary counts. That salary obviously has to be at least high enough to pay your living expenses, which is ultimately the reason you're working.
Anything beyond that is gravy.
The fact that most people don't understand that is what's responsible for many of the ills facing our economy and our society today.
You miss the whole point of reporting. They're not
supposed to be experts. They're not supposed to put their own
knowledge in the article at all. They're supposed to go out and find
experts,
This is fine, except that without some knowledge of the field:
You can't tell the difference between an expert and a
charlatan
You can't even know what questions to ask. The questions you
ask are more likely to be inane
You aren't likely to be able to critically examine the
answers.
No, given all that I think knowledge of the field is a necessity for someone like a reporter who is (well, used to be, anyway) trusted to get the story right.
A North Carolina judge ruled that Diebold may not be protected from criminal prosecution if it fails to disclose the code behind its voting machines as required by law. In response, Diebold has threatened to pull out of North Carolina.
Gee, that would be such a shame if that were to happen. I mean, North Carolina needs voting machines that are compromised by design, made by a company that has a vested interest in who wins the election, right?
Oh, whatever is North Carolina to do without voting machines made by an upstanding company like Diebold? Why, their voters might have to use the old paper ballot system instead! The horror!
Please stay, Diebold! Only a good rigged election can give us confidence in democracy!
There is too many reports citing scientists on global warming doom and gloom and next to nothing being published about our progress in using hydrogen as the source of energy.
Repeat the following until you Get It:
Hydrogen is a source of energy only in fusion.
And fusion's nowhere near ready, and won't be for a long time.
So right now, hydrogen can only be used as an energy transport. The actual energy will have to come from someplace else. And the only atmospherically clean and reasonably workable energy generating solution we have right now that will scale high enough is nuclear fission. If it weren't for those fucking moron "environmentalists" who don't know shit about anything but who are plenty quick to vehemently oppose anything that doesn't perfectly match their fucked up version of utopia, we'd either likely have much more power being generated with nuclear (and thus less coal and oil, and thus less in the way of a greenhouse effect to worry about) or we'd at least be able to switch over to it without too much trouble. But noooooo...
Fucking morons. I only hope that they suffer the most from the climate change, since they're the ones that brought it on themselves.
By the way, I am not expecting to hire anyone who has a family to feed (though I have in the past.) These are really entry-level Linux systems administrator positions (and yes, we train, and offer RHCE certification to all of our employees.) But you have to be able to pass the questions I listed in my original post to work here -- that is, you have to have some experience with Linux, even if it's just at home, before we will hire you. Show the first bit of initiative and we'll take it from there.
If you're willing to train the person in question, then you don't need someone with experience. You need someone with fundamentals. Don't ask questions of them that require experience, ask them questions that require understanding. Don't ask them how something works, ask them why it works.
If you get someone who really understands the fundamental underpinnings of computer science, chances are good that they'll be able to figure out the rest. If you have to hire on the cheap, your best bet for this is to hire a recent college grad.
That said, there is one more qualification you want them to meet: they have to have a passion for computers. Ask them what kind of computing setup they have at home and what they do with it.
Has it ever occurred to you that your attitude is exactly WHY we need laws, lawyers and courts?
Laws, yes. Courts, yes. But lawyers? What the hell for??
If the law is so complicated that people have to hire law specialists (lawyers) just to get decent representation in court, then the law needs to be thrown out and rewritten. And yes, that goes for the various court procedures and rules as well.
For it is pure idiocy to expect people to fully understand and adhere to the law outside the court while simultaneously expecting them to not fully understand the law when in court. You can't have both. You have to choose.
Everyone believes they are absolutely right and the other side is absolutely wrong: legal representation creates a systematic process for determining who is actually right.
No, legal representation by interested third parties (lawyers) does no such thing. A rational court system which considers all evidence brought before it does.
The system we have in the U.S. comes nowhere close to this. One need only examine the jury selection process to determine this. The lawyers on either side of the case should have no real power to decide who stays on a jury. Because if you give them that power, as they have right now, the end result is that the people who are left on the jury are likely to be people who know nothing about that which they are asked to render judgement and who likely aren't capable of learning (example: my colleague's friend, who also happens to be a professor of engineering, was rejected from the jury because he truthfully told the court, when asked, that he would reject evidence presented by an "expert witness" if it contradicted the laws of physics as he understands them).
Hell, the entire idea that the truth is always the halfway point between the two extremes that are represented in an adversarial system is idiotic. The truth is independent of viewpoint and can most effectively be discovered by something like the scientific method, which relies on an objective examination of all the evidence. The U.S. court system gets at the real truth only by chance. It is a laughable sham that amplifies the power of the wealthy. You know -- those who can afford good legal represenation.
You should really read up on legal ethics before you post. Lawyers do have a duty, to the Court, to uphold the integrity of the legal process above all other interests. A lawyer may not knowingly engage in unfair or illegal activities for a client. For example, a lawyer is absolutely forbidden to lie in court, or allow a client to lie in court, or to institute legal proceedings for a client with the objective of gaining some collateral commercial advantage. And so on.
Bwahahaha! Man, when were you born, yesterday?
The "legal ethics" you speak of are a lofty ideal, apparently ignored by just about everyone who matters. This is the real world, where actions and consequences are the only things that really count in the end.
And the actions we see are those of people who obviously don't give a flying fuck about "legal ethics", except to the degree that they can claim, based on some legal technicality or other, that they haven't violated them. They've been trained very well by their schooling and by the legal system that what counts isn't the intent of the law but the technicalities of the law. Why should the "legal ethics" standards they're supposed to adhere to be any different? And why would they behave any differently when there are no negative consequences for their behaviour? After all, as far as they and their lawyer colleagues are concerned, if it isn't strictly illegal then it's not unethical. Right?
I think that perhaps the MPAA's lawyers are breaching these ethical rules quite seriously. But if that is the case, you should blame the system that lets them get away with it: they should be punished for abuse of process and contempt of court if they truly have no case against these people.
Yes. And just who do you think is responsible for the fact that the system lets them get away with it? Who crafted the rules the legal system itself follows? Who defined the legal procedures that everyone who participates in the legal system has to follow? Who defines the penalties for violating those rules? Who decides whether or not the rules have been violated? The answer is: the lawyers did. Whether they were acting as lawyers or as judges or as politicians is irrelevant, because judges are merely lawyers with a different job (how many judges without a law background have you met?), and most politicians are former lawyers.
If you want to know who's responsible for the mess the legal system is today, just look in the mirror.
Perhaps you're an exception to all of the above. But if so, then that makes you, well, an exception. And there aren't enough exceptions to make a difference. How does the joke go? The good lawyers complain that the other 95% makes them look bad. I believe there's a lot of truth in that.
Re:If you can't patent it...
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I thank God that there are still some idealists in the government who are trying to make the right decisions; it is they who help to counteract the creep of power and those it affects.
Unfortunately, I believe their numbers are dwindling, as corporate sponsorship (what else can you call the necessity of corporate "campaign contributions") continues to become more necessary for one to be elected.
It seems there are actually examiners at the USPTO that are willing to call bullshit on a bogus patent. That offers a bit of encouragement.
Until one realizes, as with this fiasco, that such willingness isn't enough if the USPTO isn't willing to back them on it.
I think the USPTO made it very clear today: they will approve any patent whatsoever, as long as it either doesn't conflict with a prior patent or the submitter has enough political clout (they'll ignore prior patents, too, if the submitter has enough influence).
If you want to remove politics from science then we should eliminate government funding for science. science should be about producing useful research not about whatever the current administration feels like funding this week.
The very nature of science is such that you can't predict with any real accuracy which threads of research will prove useful and which ones won't. That's why it's called research and not development. Additionally, what isn't useful now may prove useful much later.
No, science itself should be about figuring out the universe. Period.
Dunno why that's modded as "informative". It's a very funny page he links to.
For instance:
Mike Trainor writes, "Just because we don't have the technology to destroy the planet doesn't mean no one else in the universe does. What you need to do is to point our most powerful radio-telescope transmitters at likely solar systems and taunt them. 'The girly-beings in your miserable solar system could never destroy a planet as cool as this one...'" Thanks, Mike. We'll get SETI on it.
It USED to be true, with older drives, and it's just spooky-sounding enough to be intriguing, so people want to believe it.
Which goes to illustrate that technology, and thus what can and can't be done, changes over time.
And just because recover of modern drives that have been overwritten in a simple fashion cannot be done now doesn't imply that the same will be true in the future. That could easily change again, either because of changes to hard drive technology or because of improvements in recovery techniques.
So while it might be true *now* that a simple erase of the drive is sufficient, that only holds if you're concerned about a relatively small time window. Otherwise, you're safest in assuming that you have to take stronger measures.
And then there's always the possibility that the recovery techniques that are capable of working on today's hard drives are, if they exist at all, classified.
What we need is a way to detect that the screensaver is a trojan and warn me that this is a bad thing.
Well, no. What we need is for programs to have very specific sets of permissions that they operate under. Screensavers, for instance, generally should have permissions to do nothing but write to the screen and (depending on how the screensaver system works) read from the keyboard/mouse. They shouldn't be able to read or write any files, and they shouldn't be able to connect to the network.
That's the only reasonable way you can prevent trojans in that specific set of circumstances, and that only works for programs that can easily be restricted that way. If the installer itself is compromised then it's all over, because of the capabilities installers generally need in order to do their job.
In the more general case, there is no good way to prevent a trojan, because a trojan is, quite simply, code the user doesn't want to be executed being piggybacked onto code the user thinks he does.
The best you can do is minimize the damage, by providing a clean separation between the user who installs the code and the user who executes it, and by limiting the access rights of the user who executes it to a small subset of the system.
Viruses occur because the foundation of the system the users are using isn't secure. The same is true (perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree) of worms.
To illustrate, ask yourself this question: why do most corporate computer users have permissions on their computer to download and execute arbitrary programs?
Now, it should be noted that even Linux gives the average user this capability. But that needn't be so.
Antivirus programs are a bandaid, not a solution. But most people treat them as a solution, and therein lies the problem.
If you really want to take care of security issues, you have to do so at the foundation.
He needs to nail down his requirements a bit more, but for his situation, it sounds like a mainframe solution would make a LOT of sense:
It can handle the sheer amount of data he'll need in one place (a million users' email, at a measly 10 megabytes of storage each, comes to 10 terabytes of storage, and he should probably regard that as a minimum)
It can handle the data moving capability he needs (out of a million users, he should probably count on spikes of 1% or more of them hitting the system at a time -- so 10,000 users or more at a time)
If he wants 99.9% uptime for the service, then he'll need something like 4 times (I'd shoot for an order of magnitude myself) better uptime out of the OS and hardware, so now we're talking something like 99.99% uptime from the OS and hardware. That's 52 minutes a year of downtime for the OS and hardware. A mainframe should be able to do that without breaking a sweat -- they typically have uptimes of years, from what I've been told.
It gives you centralized administration and control, which includes things like doing backups.
Because it's a highly reliable machine in a central location, reliability now becomes primarily an issue of network reliability. With a distributed solution, you have to worry about network reliability and the total reliability of all nodes put together -- the reliability of the multinode solution isn't likely to be as good, depending on your network topology.
The downside, of course, might be the expense. I say "might" because it may end up being the cheapest solution after you factor in everything.
So whether or not the mainframe is a good solution depends primarily on the company's network. If the company is spread all over the globe, then a distributed solution may make more sense. Setting up a widely-distributed solution, where the mailboxes themselves are distributed, so that any given user can get at his email from any location is likely to take some custom programming (the user database would, for instance, have to be replicated everywhere and would have to store the user's "home site" location so that the connector would know where to connect the IMAP request, for instance).
I will say this: a distributed solution is almost certainly going to require more in the way of administrative manpower to manage than a centralized solution (like a mainframe).
This sounds like it would be a very interesting project to work on...
Microsoft can't keep buying the U.S. government off forever; eventually, someone is going to assume the U.S. presidency who will actually allow the department of justice to enforce antitrust law and hold it for long enough for a case against Microsoft to be litigated.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue how the election system in the U.S. really works.
Here's the clue: the electoral system is controlled by those who control the mass media, because those who control the mass media are essentially in direct control of what the people see and thus learn about. You won't vote for someone you've never heard of, so until your primary source of information is something other than the mass media, the mass media will control how you vote. This is why the mass media is so keen to control the internet.
The mass media is owned by a small number of very large corporations. You're a fool if you think they don't do deals under the table with other corporations to determine which candidates get what kind of media exposure. Between that and "direct" campaign "contributions" (plus additional under-the-table deals), corporations have almost complete control over who makes it into office and what they do once they're there.
Microsoft is one of the biggest, richest, most powerful corporations in the U.S. Other corporations may have more capital but Microsoft is close to (if not at) the top when it comes to pure profit, and thus money and power available to buy legislators and legislation, whether directly or from the media corporations.
The end result of all this is that there will be no antitrust proceedings from now on that will have any real effect on Microsoft, unless the media corporations decide that it is in their best interests to damage Microsoft somehow. That won't happen. You see, the corporations that own the media are multinational corporations just like Microsoft is. That means they don't have to care about the U.S. economy any more than Microsoft does, at least as long as they retain the kind of power over the U.S. government they currently have.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. But running a properly-engineered browser (like Firefox) and a properly-engineered email client (like Thunderbird) and not being a complete moron who opens up executable attachments that haven't been virus scanned yet will accomplish that far more effectively than merely updating your system, since the latter is only temporary (until the next exploit is inevitably found).
No, step two is to enable the firewall on the OS.
Step three is to run as a restricted user and to never run with administrative privileges except to install software. Being forced to explicitly log in as administrator forces you to think about what you're doing. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Virus scanning everything you download from the internet prior to executing it, combined with running a firewall both on the machine and right in front of the internet connection, will eliminate most of the risk. Running as a restricted user on top of that will eliminate almost all of it.
Remember: the reason all of this is an issue to begin with is that Microsoft is a piece of shit software company that doesn't give a flying fuck about real security, and only cares in passing about even the appearance of security. The threat level would be order of magnitude less if it weren't for their idiocy. They are, after all, the morons who decided that users should get administrative privileges by default, and that ACLs are for "professionals", not home users.
Yes, they will promise to do so. But they won't actually do so, because what matters to them is what their corporate masters want, not what the people want.
Why? Because while they might not be reelected if they ignore what the people want, it's guaranteed that they won't be reelected if they ignore what their corporate masters want. Their corporate masters make their election possible in the first place. You can't win an election if the media ignores you or paints you in a bad light, and the media is owned by some very large corporations indeed (that of course are going to do deals with other large corporations). And that's on top of the corporate sponsorship that politicians have to have just to be able to pay for the media spots that they can't get through backroom deals and the like (which also obviously generally require corporate sponsorship).
No, sorry, but the corporations own politicians the way they might own slaves. Almost all politicians today will do whatever their corporate masters tell them to because they must. They won't be reelected otherwise -- guaranteed.
In case you haven't noticed, complaining doesn't influence anything in government anymore. Witness the huge number of complaints and general opposition to the U.S. actions in Iraq by U.S. citizens, even prior to those actions being taken. What did that end up doing? Not a fucking thing.
It's not how many people complain that counts. It's how many big corporations complain. Until they start complaining loudly, nothing will change.
Really? Says who? You? That's fine for your business, but don't confuse your own priorities with a general rule.
No, the only real rule here is that it's necessary for a business to at least break even in the long run (breaking even here means that all expenses are paid, all employees get paid their agreed upon salary, and all investors get their money back plus some reasonable return). If you own and run the business, you're basically an employee as well and your salary counts. That salary obviously has to be at least high enough to pay your living expenses, which is ultimately the reason you're working.
Anything beyond that is gravy.
The fact that most people don't understand that is what's responsible for many of the ills facing our economy and our society today.
Oh, yeah, guess I forgot a step: flee the country, because they'll be after your ass now!
This is fine, except that without some knowledge of the field:
You can't tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan
You can't even know what questions to ask. The questions you ask are more likely to be inane
You aren't likely to be able to critically examine the answers.
No, given all that I think knowledge of the field is a necessity for someone like a reporter who is (well, used to be, anyway) trusted to get the story right.
What, you mean if all print media articles were outsourced?
Hmm...yes, that would be quite a savings! Although, compared with Hemos' Yellow Box review, it might be an improvement...
Gee, that would be such a shame if that were to happen. I mean, North Carolina needs voting machines that are compromised by design, made by a company that has a vested interest in who wins the election, right?
Oh, whatever is North Carolina to do without voting machines made by an upstanding company like Diebold? Why, their voters might have to use the old paper ballot system instead! The horror!
Please stay, Diebold! Only a good rigged election can give us confidence in democracy!
Repeat the following until you Get It:
Hydrogen is a source of energy only in fusion.
And fusion's nowhere near ready, and won't be for a long time.
So right now, hydrogen can only be used as an energy transport. The actual energy will have to come from someplace else. And the only atmospherically clean and reasonably workable energy generating solution we have right now that will scale high enough is nuclear fission. If it weren't for those fucking moron "environmentalists" who don't know shit about anything but who are plenty quick to vehemently oppose anything that doesn't perfectly match their fucked up version of utopia, we'd either likely have much more power being generated with nuclear (and thus less coal and oil, and thus less in the way of a greenhouse effect to worry about) or we'd at least be able to switch over to it without too much trouble. But noooooo...
Fucking morons. I only hope that they suffer the most from the climate change, since they're the ones that brought it on themselves.
The link gives the following error:
Maybe they need to hire a good IT student? :-)
If you're willing to train the person in question, then you don't need someone with experience. You need someone with fundamentals. Don't ask questions of them that require experience, ask them questions that require understanding. Don't ask them how something works, ask them why it works.
If you get someone who really understands the fundamental underpinnings of computer science, chances are good that they'll be able to figure out the rest. If you have to hire on the cheap, your best bet for this is to hire a recent college grad.
That said, there is one more qualification you want them to meet: they have to have a passion for computers. Ask them what kind of computing setup they have at home and what they do with it.
FUKOOOOOOOV!!!!
Laws, yes. Courts, yes. But lawyers? What the hell for??
If the law is so complicated that people have to hire law specialists (lawyers) just to get decent representation in court, then the law needs to be thrown out and rewritten. And yes, that goes for the various court procedures and rules as well.
For it is pure idiocy to expect people to fully understand and adhere to the law outside the court while simultaneously expecting them to not fully understand the law when in court. You can't have both. You have to choose.
No, legal representation by interested third parties (lawyers) does no such thing. A rational court system which considers all evidence brought before it does.
The system we have in the U.S. comes nowhere close to this. One need only examine the jury selection process to determine this. The lawyers on either side of the case should have no real power to decide who stays on a jury. Because if you give them that power, as they have right now, the end result is that the people who are left on the jury are likely to be people who know nothing about that which they are asked to render judgement and who likely aren't capable of learning (example: my colleague's friend, who also happens to be a professor of engineering, was rejected from the jury because he truthfully told the court, when asked, that he would reject evidence presented by an "expert witness" if it contradicted the laws of physics as he understands them).
Hell, the entire idea that the truth is always the halfway point between the two extremes that are represented in an adversarial system is idiotic. The truth is independent of viewpoint and can most effectively be discovered by something like the scientific method, which relies on an objective examination of all the evidence. The U.S. court system gets at the real truth only by chance. It is a laughable sham that amplifies the power of the wealthy. You know -- those who can afford good legal represenation.
Bwahahaha! Man, when were you born, yesterday?
The "legal ethics" you speak of are a lofty ideal, apparently ignored by just about everyone who matters. This is the real world, where actions and consequences are the only things that really count in the end.
And the actions we see are those of people who obviously don't give a flying fuck about "legal ethics", except to the degree that they can claim, based on some legal technicality or other, that they haven't violated them. They've been trained very well by their schooling and by the legal system that what counts isn't the intent of the law but the technicalities of the law. Why should the "legal ethics" standards they're supposed to adhere to be any different? And why would they behave any differently when there are no negative consequences for their behaviour? After all, as far as they and their lawyer colleagues are concerned, if it isn't strictly illegal then it's not unethical. Right?
Yes. And just who do you think is responsible for the fact that the system lets them get away with it? Who crafted the rules the legal system itself follows? Who defined the legal procedures that everyone who participates in the legal system has to follow? Who defines the penalties for violating those rules? Who decides whether or not the rules have been violated? The answer is: the lawyers did. Whether they were acting as lawyers or as judges or as politicians is irrelevant, because judges are merely lawyers with a different job (how many judges without a law background have you met?), and most politicians are former lawyers.
If you want to know who's responsible for the mess the legal system is today, just look in the mirror.
Perhaps you're an exception to all of the above. But if so, then that makes you, well, an exception. And there aren't enough exceptions to make a difference. How does the joke go? The good lawyers complain that the other 95% makes them look bad. I believe there's a lot of truth in that.
Unfortunately, I believe their numbers are dwindling, as corporate sponsorship (what else can you call the necessity of corporate "campaign contributions") continues to become more necessary for one to be elected.
Until one realizes, as with this fiasco, that such willingness isn't enough if the USPTO isn't willing to back them on it.
I think the USPTO made it very clear today: they will approve any patent whatsoever, as long as it either doesn't conflict with a prior patent or the submitter has enough political clout (they'll ignore prior patents, too, if the submitter has enough influence).
The very nature of science is such that you can't predict with any real accuracy which threads of research will prove useful and which ones won't. That's why it's called research and not development. Additionally, what isn't useful now may prove useful much later.
No, science itself should be about figuring out the universe. Period.
Yeah, but do they own the patent on Magic Smoke?
For instance:
Which goes to illustrate that technology, and thus what can and can't be done, changes over time.
And just because recover of modern drives that have been overwritten in a simple fashion cannot be done now doesn't imply that the same will be true in the future. That could easily change again, either because of changes to hard drive technology or because of improvements in recovery techniques.
So while it might be true *now* that a simple erase of the drive is sufficient, that only holds if you're concerned about a relatively small time window. Otherwise, you're safest in assuming that you have to take stronger measures.
And then there's always the possibility that the recovery techniques that are capable of working on today's hard drives are, if they exist at all, classified.
Well, no. What we need is for programs to have very specific sets of permissions that they operate under. Screensavers, for instance, generally should have permissions to do nothing but write to the screen and (depending on how the screensaver system works) read from the keyboard/mouse. They shouldn't be able to read or write any files, and they shouldn't be able to connect to the network.
That's the only reasonable way you can prevent trojans in that specific set of circumstances, and that only works for programs that can easily be restricted that way. If the installer itself is compromised then it's all over, because of the capabilities installers generally need in order to do their job.
In the more general case, there is no good way to prevent a trojan, because a trojan is, quite simply, code the user doesn't want to be executed being piggybacked onto code the user thinks he does.
The best you can do is minimize the damage, by providing a clean separation between the user who installs the code and the user who executes it, and by limiting the access rights of the user who executes it to a small subset of the system.
To illustrate, ask yourself this question: why do most corporate computer users have permissions on their computer to download and execute arbitrary programs?
Now, it should be noted that even Linux gives the average user this capability. But that needn't be so.
Antivirus programs are a bandaid, not a solution. But most people treat them as a solution, and therein lies the problem.
If you really want to take care of security issues, you have to do so at the foundation.
Uh, well, not any language.
Here's a counterexample: Intercal
The downside, of course, might be the expense. I say "might" because it may end up being the cheapest solution after you factor in everything.
So whether or not the mainframe is a good solution depends primarily on the company's network. If the company is spread all over the globe, then a distributed solution may make more sense. Setting up a widely-distributed solution, where the mailboxes themselves are distributed, so that any given user can get at his email from any location is likely to take some custom programming (the user database would, for instance, have to be replicated everywhere and would have to store the user's "home site" location so that the connector would know where to connect the IMAP request, for instance).
I will say this: a distributed solution is almost certainly going to require more in the way of administrative manpower to manage than a centralized solution (like a mainframe).
This sounds like it would be a very interesting project to work on...
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue how the election system in the U.S. really works.
Here's the clue: the electoral system is controlled by those who control the mass media, because those who control the mass media are essentially in direct control of what the people see and thus learn about. You won't vote for someone you've never heard of, so until your primary source of information is something other than the mass media, the mass media will control how you vote. This is why the mass media is so keen to control the internet.
The mass media is owned by a small number of very large corporations. You're a fool if you think they don't do deals under the table with other corporations to determine which candidates get what kind of media exposure. Between that and "direct" campaign "contributions" (plus additional under-the-table deals), corporations have almost complete control over who makes it into office and what they do once they're there.
Microsoft is one of the biggest, richest, most powerful corporations in the U.S. Other corporations may have more capital but Microsoft is close to (if not at) the top when it comes to pure profit, and thus money and power available to buy legislators and legislation, whether directly or from the media corporations.
The end result of all this is that there will be no antitrust proceedings from now on that will have any real effect on Microsoft, unless the media corporations decide that it is in their best interests to damage Microsoft somehow. That won't happen. You see, the corporations that own the media are multinational corporations just like Microsoft is. That means they don't have to care about the U.S. economy any more than Microsoft does, at least as long as they retain the kind of power over the U.S. government they currently have.