This article doesn't fully describe what MyDoom does, omits evidence contrary to it's conclusion, and misrepresents the open source community.
As well as the DDoS attack on Microsoft, the MyDoom virus opens a backdoor on port 3127, which would be of great use to spammers and phishers, but of little use to angry zealots.
It also leaves out what little evidence there is: a Russian security firm said it was 80% confident that the attack came from Russian spammers. And the virus is a variant of MiMail, also used by spammers.
Most programmers have at least heard of the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit and the controversy it has produced. I think it's highly likely that a spammer or worse added the SCO DDoS as a red herring. And it worked: your article and many others have totally ignored the greater danger, the backdoor which will provide spammers with thousands of zombie computers.
Finally, I'd like to make it clear that the "internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all (open source)" make up only the fringe of open source developers and users, despite SCO's spin to the contrary. Almost all of us think open and proprietary software can and should coexist.
These omissions, I think, led you to an unfair conclusion - in fact, I don't see anything in the article that didn't come from one of SCO's press releases. You owe it to your readers to look deeper into the topic before speaking authoritatively.
As others have said, shutting down solid fuel rockets is difficult. But it's not impossible. See here:
You can shut down most solids by blowing open vents in the casing, because
modern solid fuels don't burn well except at high pressure. In fact, most
solid-fuel ICBMs do shut down their solid stages that way, to minimize
trajectory errors.
The shuttles don't do this because it's too violent, as the SRBs are right next to the tank and the orbiter's wings. But if you could do this reversibly in space, it might be possible. You would need to be a pretty big valve. Or maybe you could just dialate the nozzle.
Stacking many small solid fuel engines could also be helpful. If the mission design is such that energy is more important than power, it might be useful. It might also be more reliable than one big liquid fuel rocket - if one doesn't light, just jettison it and light the next. (As long as it never explodes, and the top of the stack could take the compression.)
Well, one argument is that there are could be a catastrophe. ("The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.") But another argument is, what's the point of a species' existance, if not to grow? ("Go west, young man!")
There's now two choices for sound, the nifty ALSA or the obselete OSS. If you're really lazy, then in make menuconfig, just go one level deeper and enable whatever OSS driver you used before (or build them all) as modules. For alsa goodness, don't go as deep and choose whatever ALSA drivers you want. ALSA can emulate OSS, but make sure that's enabled when configuring the kernel. On next boot, it should sound should work (but make sure you unmute everything). You may need to do some config file stuff, check a howto. And for complete alsa goodness, install the userspace libs.
Yes, this is quite complex. It's much easier if your distro is already set up for ALSA, though.
One solution to that problem is to eject the device, which causes a rescan of the partition table. Find the device node (I can't remember if disc or generic) under/dev, and run "eject/dev/foo/bar" I think you do this after inserting the next media.
When will the slashbot crowd realize that their Free software pipe dream will completely destroy the programming profession?
Allow me to explain capitalism. Many different entities produce products. They compete with each other. This drives prices down. Jobs are lost. For an individual organization, in the short term, competition is bad.
But for an industry, in the long term, competition is the only way to move forward. More efficient production methods are favored. To whatever extent Linux's development model is more efficient, it will succeed, even at the expense of Microsoft's OS business, however painful that may be (and vice versa). This is good because cheaper capital goods (eg. operating systems) make it possible for others to produce more (eg. custom apps).
Not paying high license fees allows companies to employ more programmers to write their custom software.
You can see a video of the transcript at http://media.law.harvard.edu:8888/ramgen/jolt/spri ng_04/2004-02-02_an_0630-0830.rm While I watched it, I took these very rough notes. Enjoy.
superbowl - playing feild analogy us vs ibm combatants david-goliath ibm=10000lb, sco=200lbs
importance of ip
sco owns unix - my view
defend ip
side-show - mydoom - largest virus, largest ddos
i was working with oss leader, listened to his speech, i'm not a student he said - copyrights in us are outdated, out of sync with digital age
lobby congress to overturn current copyright laws and DMCA
dmca is a disaster, get it out i have importants copyrights he attacked copyrights
he said: we sell linux, it's free, we go out and displace SCO and Sun
i took that personally
stuff happened between us and ibm, hence lawsuit
take a hard look at the importance of copyrights
dilbert cartoon - i created kazza, wouldn't society collapes? yeah, but it's cool
statistics about ip - copyrighted works drive industry,.5 trillion, exports, jobs, sales. ip assets are becoming more inportant in 20 years, ip is becoming significant, see nifty chart
eldred vs. ashcroft - copyright extension act.
congress promotes progress with exclusive rights - initial investment is based on roi. ability to license, ensure value for you and customers. we see in digital age, question "how do you deal with easily available digital works." how do you deal with free dl'd copyrighted works over internet.
who uses napster? ok. 40 million napster dl's. it was exciting. like shoplifting (it's great!) seems not a good thing. now itunes, legit napster, not for free. video industry says it can't compete with a free model - film piracy, (don't send messages) drug industry, patents.
how do free models work in protectable industries? congress said, fair compensation, incentive, let's move on. stevens said, rewarding author is secondary to progress of science. he was minority, majority said "economic philosophy - encourage individual effort by personal gain to help public" You will shape this argument - which side will win? (19min) 7 justices ruled in favor that copyrighted works are extendable, protectable, progress is best favoring individual artists. minority (that's you) progress of science is key determiner of how this plays on. battle ongoing, despite decision.
SCO Owns The UNIX OS. Two OS's - windows (bill gates, billions, desktop -> server); UNIX, not desktop, really for businesses. servers behind businesses are geared around unix. started at atnt -> novell -> sco. center is ip / contract rights. we paid 100M for these rights. at the center of attention.
People have many opionions. Winding road is one question, second question is what do we have? in simple terms (not details), basics. first things is SysV, commercialized unix, atnt gave to us. We own the source code. (object, binary, source...etc) (crown jewels). SCO owns agreement to all unix vendors. MS is monolithic. They own it lock stock barrel, singularaly as one company. Unix was partnered and licensed 1000's of times by atnt. how common is it to license source this broadly? not very. we also own SysV copyrights. APA says, 8 pages of copyrights are ours. Ammendment reinforces we own them. Novell has claimed ownership. We got it from them, and in last 6 months Novell said we didn't sell you them. We disagree violently, so we filed a lawsuit. why? we went to copyright office, registered. audience:"you provide them with a copy, fill out forms, pay a fee. We received additional legal protection." it's cool, you get it, and "wow". "
key part - copyright office granted us certain legal protections. sontag was responsible for that. it was like, "cool". We got word that Novell had filed for regisrations on the same works. And guess what? CO granted them a
So if such hardware exists (and it could certainly be made), this is yet another obstacle to a "secure" PC. Do other standards for connecting displays have Macrovision-style restrictions? Would Palladium hardware obselete all those monitors?
Sco never sued Linux users. They sued IBM for contract violations involving trade secrets, methods, and concepts, (not copyright), they sued Novell for slander of title, and they were sued by RedHat.
In other news, although negotiations will still be conducted around a round table, the ratio of the its circumference to its diameter will be exactly 3.
True. I think BitTorrent's centralized nature encourages legal use - finding and shutting down an illegit tracker is as easy to do as shutting down an illegit website. And in return, you get trust - it wouldn't be safe to run software from, say, Gnutella, but with BitTorrent, if you trust mandrake.com, you can trust your download.
I want to make a distinction between having a potential legitimate use and being primarily used legitimately at present. Commerce on the internet was once primarily porn - should it have therefore been banned? Right now, some networks are used mostly for mass copyright infringement. But in the future, say if magnatune.com and similar prosper, those same networks might make it much easier for small artists to succeed. So banning even a very specific technology based on its current primary use is very dangerous.
OK, disk space and RAM are comparatively cheap. But there's another factor - perceived speed. If you are using Gnome and launch a QT app, or KDE and launch a GTK app, there's a noticeable delay. Those several megabytes often have to be read in from disk or swap, and disk speed hasn't been significantly improving.
And for any banks that don't work with other browsers, the solution is to email them a nastygram, then either switch banks (if you're idealistic to a fault) or use IE for that site (if you're practical). There's no reason to use an inferior browser when you don't have to. (There's a plugin that makes it easy to switch to IE on the fly.)
Every tool that can be used to communicate can also be used to infringe copyright. And every tool that can infringe copyright can also be used to communicate without doing so. Communication and the ability to infringe copyright are absolutely inseperable, one and the same.
We have a constitutional right to freedom of press. Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom... of the press. Banning any communication tool abridges the freedom of the press. "P2P" (which is difficult to define anyway) is a communication tool. So Congress cannot ban it.
If it were my copyrighted material (the term IP is misleading), I wouldn't be pissed off at P2P, I'd be pissed off at how people abuse it. I think the best, and also the only, things the RIAA should do is to (a) sue people violate their copyright, and (b) to offer cheap, non-DRM downloads.
Your subject line brings up an interesting point. You cannot deny that BitTorrent is used for legally downloading ISOs. It's saved Mandrake a lot of money. I'm not saying BitTorrent isn't used for copyright violation; I'm saying it has both good and bad uses, and the exact same technology is used in either case.
If you think P2P should be banned, I'd be very interested to your draft of such a law.
I'd just like to point out the the Googlebomb has worked on that too: litigious bastards. As well as for Google and regular MSN (is there a difference between MSN and the link in parent?).
Glass doesn't kill "fit and unfit" birds alike, it only kills the unfit.
Don't get me wrong - it's a bad thing. But by definition, the birds that hit the glass and die before they reproduce are unfit. The real problem is that glass, um, moves the birds' cheese, changes the fitness function. We don't know how fast the birds will adapt to having to avoid transparent and reflective objects, so we ought to help them by not making so damn many of them.
To clarify "server-side widget-drawing and window management code," what I mean is this. Currently, a programmer writes "make a window with a button and a textbox." The widget drawing code runs in the client's process. It communicates with X, possibly over a network, on the level of "draw a line here in this color." X does this, and it communicates, possibly over a network, with a window manager, which is just another client.
Basically, I think clients ought to talk to the display server on a higher level, like "make a window with a button and a textbox." Translation of that to "draw a line here" would happen in the display server.
Right now, a programmer chooses which toolkit his code will work with. This way, by choosing a plugin, or even a different display server (which conforms to some standard), the user would choose which toolkit, and it would be system-wide (except for apps running through the X wrapper). The programmer would be able to choose which library he uses to communicate with the server - C, C++, wxWindows, or even just pretending it's an X server.
Giving GTK and QT the ability to use the same themes looks good, but makes the bloat worse, not better. That would cause even more code repetition.
UserLinux is showing us that it's not yet possible to make a Linux distro with fewer than two GUI toolkits. Actually more, when you figure in FLTK, Motif, XAW, XUL, FOX and so on. This wastes disk space, memory, and developer time, and the end result is an inconsistent GUI with no single place to change the look-n-feel.
I think what Linux on the Desktop needs is something just like X, but with server-side widget-drawing and window management code. The client-server design is what makes X great, and should be kept. But with a default widget set, there'd be one place to change fonts, window decorations, colors, etc. And there'd be less repetition.
It wouldn't be inflexible. A good X replacemnt would have an X-server client so that X programs could run as part of it. So it would still be easy to use your own toolkit if you really wanted to. And the server would have a plugin system to allow a wide range of widget and window styles.
At the moment, I run KDE. I suppose X's architecture is better than Windows's putting everything in kernel-space, but it still pains me. I can't wait until I can easily run something like PicoGUI or Fresco on my desktop.
People should realize that almost any tool has both good and bad uses. General purpose computers and operating systems, in particular, can be used for almost anything, and there's no way for the creator to control it. If you violate human rights, it's your fault, not Microsoft's.
Everyone says Slashdot is anti-Microsoft about everything. But I haven't seen one comment saying it's their fault (except perhaps the article title.) We're not anti-business, we're anti-idiot.
Seriously, though. According to the recent PBS special on DNA, a breast cancer predisposition gene was found largely thanks to very the complete family records that Mormons keep as a matter of faith.
US patent #5,901,206, portable telephone with flashlight, covers this. I'd just like to point out that, even though I assume you're not "skilled in the art," you came up with this idea easily enough. And given the sheer number of people in America, surely someone thought of it before 1999.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no problem that can't be solved with an additional level of indirection.
As others have said, shutting down solid fuel rockets is difficult. But it's not impossible. See here:
The shuttles don't do this because it's too violent, as the SRBs are right next to the tank and the orbiter's wings. But if you could do this reversibly in space, it might be possible. You would need to be a pretty big valve. Or maybe you could just dialate the nozzle.
Stacking many small solid fuel engines could also be helpful. If the mission design is such that energy is more important than power, it might be useful. It might also be more reliable than one big liquid fuel rocket - if one doesn't light, just jettison it and light the next. (As long as it never explodes, and the top of the stack could take the compression.)
Well, one argument is that there are could be a catastrophe. ("The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.") But another argument is, what's the point of a species' existance, if not to grow? ("Go west, young man!")
Yes, this is quite complex. It's much easier if your distro is already set up for ALSA, though.
One solution to that problem is to eject the device, which causes a rescan of the partition table. Find the device node (I can't remember if disc or generic) under /dev, and run "eject /dev/foo/bar" I think you do this after inserting the next media.
Fastest boot logo switch ever.
Not really. If 12 oz of coffee causes 8 oz water loss, even though you have a net gain of 4 oz, that's still 8 oz less than you should have drunk.
Allow me to explain capitalism. Many different entities produce products. They compete with each other. This drives prices down. Jobs are lost. For an individual organization, in the short term, competition is bad.
But for an industry, in the long term, competition is the only way to move forward. More efficient production methods are favored. To whatever extent Linux's development model is more efficient, it will succeed, even at the expense of Microsoft's OS business, however painful that may be (and vice versa). This is good because cheaper capital goods (eg. operating systems) make it possible for others to produce more (eg. custom apps).
Not paying high license fees allows companies to employ more programmers to write their custom software.
superbowl - playing feild analogy
.5 trillion, exports, jobs, sales. ip assets are becoming more inportant in 20 years, ip is becoming significant, see nifty chart
us vs ibm
combatants
david-goliath
ibm=10000lb, sco=200lbs
importance of ip
sco owns unix - my view
defend ip
side-show - mydoom - largest virus, largest ddos
i was working with oss leader, listened to his speech, i'm not a student
he said - copyrights in us are outdated, out of sync with digital age
lobby congress to overturn current copyright laws and DMCA
dmca is a disaster, get it out
i have importants copyrights
he attacked copyrights
he said: we sell linux, it's free, we go out and displace SCO and Sun
i took that personally
stuff happened between us and ibm, hence lawsuit
take a hard look at the importance of copyrights
dilbert cartoon - i created kazza, wouldn't society collapes? yeah, but it's cool
statistics about ip - copyrighted works drive industry,
eldred vs. ashcroft - copyright extension act.
congress promotes progress with exclusive rights - initial investment is based on roi. ability to license, ensure value for you and customers. we see in digital age, question "how do you deal with easily available digital works." how do you deal with free dl'd copyrighted works over internet.
who uses napster? ok. 40 million napster dl's. it was exciting. like shoplifting (it's great!) seems not a good thing. now itunes, legit napster, not for free. video industry says it can't compete with a free model - film piracy, (don't send messages) drug industry, patents.
how do free models work in protectable industries? congress said, fair compensation, incentive, let's move on. stevens said, rewarding author is secondary to progress of science. he was minority, majority said "economic philosophy - encourage individual effort by personal gain to help public" You will shape this argument - which side will win? (19min) 7 justices ruled in favor that copyrighted works are extendable, protectable, progress is best favoring individual artists. minority (that's you) progress of science is key determiner of how this plays on. battle ongoing, despite decision.
SCO Owns The UNIX OS. Two OS's - windows (bill gates, billions, desktop -> server); UNIX, not desktop, really for businesses. servers behind businesses are geared around unix. started at atnt -> novell -> sco. center is ip / contract rights. we paid 100M for these rights. at the center of attention.
People have many opionions. Winding road is one question, second question is what do we have? in simple terms (not details), basics. first things is SysV, commercialized unix, atnt gave to us. We own the source code. (object, binary, source...etc) (crown jewels). SCO owns agreement to all unix vendors. MS is monolithic. They own it lock stock barrel, singularaly as one company. Unix was partnered and licensed 1000's of times by atnt. how common is it to license source this broadly? not very. we also own SysV copyrights. APA says, 8 pages of copyrights are ours. Ammendment reinforces we own them. Novell has claimed ownership. We got it from them, and in last 6 months Novell said we didn't sell you them. We disagree violently, so we filed a lawsuit. why? we went to copyright office, registered. audience:"you provide them with a copy, fill out forms, pay a fee. We received additional legal protection." it's cool, you get it, and "wow". "
key part - copyright office granted us certain legal protections. sontag was responsible for that. it was like, "cool". We got word that Novell had filed for regisrations on the same works. And guess what? CO granted them a
So if such hardware exists (and it could certainly be made), this is yet another obstacle to a "secure" PC. Do other standards for connecting displays have Macrovision-style restrictions? Would Palladium hardware obselete all those monitors?
Sco never sued Linux users. They sued IBM for contract violations involving trade secrets, methods, and concepts, (not copyright), they sued Novell for slander of title, and they were sued by RedHat.
And for classified documents, Wingdings.
Sorry.
I want to make a distinction between having a potential legitimate use and being primarily used legitimately at present. Commerce on the internet was once primarily porn - should it have therefore been banned? Right now, some networks are used mostly for mass copyright infringement. But in the future, say if magnatune.com and similar prosper, those same networks might make it much easier for small artists to succeed. So banning even a very specific technology based on its current primary use is very dangerous.
OK, disk space and RAM are comparatively cheap. But there's another factor - perceived speed. If you are using Gnome and launch a QT app, or KDE and launch a GTK app, there's a noticeable delay. Those several megabytes often have to be read in from disk or swap, and disk speed hasn't been significantly improving.
And for any banks that don't work with other browsers, the solution is to email them a nastygram, then either switch banks (if you're idealistic to a fault) or use IE for that site (if you're practical). There's no reason to use an inferior browser when you don't have to. (There's a plugin that makes it easy to switch to IE on the fly.)
We have a constitutional right to freedom of press. Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press. Banning any communication tool abridges the freedom of the press. "P2P" (which is difficult to define anyway) is a communication tool. So Congress cannot ban it.
QED.
Your subject line brings up an interesting point. You cannot deny that BitTorrent is used for legally downloading ISOs. It's saved Mandrake a lot of money. I'm not saying BitTorrent isn't used for copyright violation; I'm saying it has both good and bad uses, and the exact same technology is used in either case.
If you think P2P should be banned, I'd be very interested to your draft of such a law.
I'd just like to point out the the Googlebomb has worked on that too: litigious bastards. As well as for Google and regular MSN (is there a difference between MSN and the link in parent?).
Don't get me wrong - it's a bad thing. But by definition, the birds that hit the glass and die before they reproduce are unfit. The real problem is that glass, um, moves the birds' cheese, changes the fitness function. We don't know how fast the birds will adapt to having to avoid transparent and reflective objects, so we ought to help them by not making so damn many of them.
Basically, I think clients ought to talk to the display server on a higher level, like "make a window with a button and a textbox." Translation of that to "draw a line here" would happen in the display server.
Right now, a programmer chooses which toolkit his code will work with. This way, by choosing a plugin, or even a different display server (which conforms to some standard), the user would choose which toolkit, and it would be system-wide (except for apps running through the X wrapper). The programmer would be able to choose which library he uses to communicate with the server - C, C++, wxWindows, or even just pretending it's an X server.
Giving GTK and QT the ability to use the same themes looks good, but makes the bloat worse, not better. That would cause even more code repetition.
I think what Linux on the Desktop needs is something just like X, but with server-side widget-drawing and window management code. The client-server design is what makes X great, and should be kept. But with a default widget set, there'd be one place to change fonts, window decorations, colors, etc. And there'd be less repetition.
It wouldn't be inflexible. A good X replacemnt would have an X-server client so that X programs could run as part of it. So it would still be easy to use your own toolkit if you really wanted to. And the server would have a plugin system to allow a wide range of widget and window styles.
At the moment, I run KDE. I suppose X's architecture is better than Windows's putting everything in kernel-space, but it still pains me. I can't wait until I can easily run something like PicoGUI or Fresco on my desktop.
People should realize that almost any tool has both good and bad uses. General purpose computers and operating systems, in particular, can be used for almost anything, and there's no way for the creator to control it. If you violate human rights, it's your fault, not Microsoft's.
Everyone says Slashdot is anti-Microsoft about everything. But I haven't seen one comment saying it's their fault (except perhaps the article title.) We're not anti-business, we're anti-idiot.
Seriously, though. According to the recent PBS special on DNA, a breast cancer predisposition gene was found largely thanks to very the complete family records that Mormons keep as a matter of faith.
US patent #5,901,206, portable telephone with flashlight, covers this. I'd just like to point out that, even though I assume you're not "skilled in the art," you came up with this idea easily enough. And given the sheer number of people in America, surely someone thought of it before 1999.