I don't know about JavaYou(tm), but JavaMe(tm) thinks that if we(c) just got rid of these trademarks, we(c) would have noproblem.com creating a Free Software(tm) version of Java(tm)(r)(c) which would run perfectly.
I've noticed something most people don't seem to want to see: people are a victim of circumstance. Marshall may have made that plan because he had no choice. Hitler led Germany because there was a demand for him. People are malleable, adaptable, they do not like change yet adaptability is one their key traits.
What would you do? Here you are, in command of the US, there's a war raging a continent away that could dramatically alter the power base of the world. Do you sit there, or do you act? We acted, and emerged some 40 odd years later as the last standing superpower in the world.
People are rational.
People try to make the best decisions based on the resources and information available.
People, when in groups, tend to throw morality to the wind.
For geeks, I can illustrate the last point quite vividly by pointing them to the playgrounds of their youth - chastised... never by one, but by a group. The other two should be self-evident. Combine these together and you have a fairly effective formula for determining what that person will do - they're rational. What would you do in their shoes?
This "man of the century" stuff presupposing that this person is somehow superior to his peers is non-sense. They had, or developed, the character traits needed to survive in that position. Some succeeded brilliantly at the task, others failed miserably. Was it really personality, or was it just good (bad?) timing? I lean towards the ladder - I believe every individual, at any time and in any location, can make a difference. Sorry Time, but you should put a mirror on that page, and let us make a difference in our own private lives. In the final analysis, that's all that matters.
Well, atleast they didn't use embedded W2K, or it would have required dual-celeron, 256mb of RAM, a 4.2gb HDD.. and ocasionally would beep out "General Protection Fault in module phone.vxd" in morse code for no apparent reason.
Anyway, this ought to reinvigorate the phone phreaks... now they have an "intelligent" phone to hack into and make it do the free phonecall bit. Wonder how vulnerable they are to EMR...
Associated Press -- God announced that Mother Nature has been released under GPL. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has been calling on God for some time now to free the API used to control Earth. In a complete about-face that suprised religious pundits and ZDNet, God released the entire weather source under GPL. It is hoped that the bugs in the current version of Earth can be repaired by legions of hackers across the world. But not everybody is cheering.
ID Software released it's controversial Quake mod hours after God released Weather, and the script kiddies have been causing widespread mayhem in California. Due to a programming bug, California slid into the ocean. Munge, of l0pht industries, has been calling for "ethical hacking" of the weather infrastructure.
Even slashdot, a nerds for news site has not gone unaffected. It's servers were attacked by a huge distributed Abundance of Service attack (ASS) causing torrential downpours which have flooded out a three county area surrounding the "Geek Compound".
This is just too good of news. I was planning on tossing out my rh6 installation and going with Mandrake this weekend. Now I got a whole new batch of bleeding edge (bleeding as in "I'm bleeding more than you are!") software to work with. My, what a nice christmas present.
The subject line sums up my feelings on this topic. Most of society believes that personal wealth is a direct causation of personal character and ability. As a result, polls which are taken of the general population will reflect this. Jon is only trying to, albeit verbosely, to point this out.
Look buddy, I didn't crawl out from underneath my mountains of mountain dew containers, shook off those #$@! doritos crumbs, fired up this lizard of a system, shake my mousepad off, remove the pennies from my floppy drive (I have a 3 year old sister), and login on MEDIANULL only to hear that some #$@! nominated himself for living on Macaroni and cheese and working with linux. I deserve the award, not you, and it's for one very simple reason -
First, didn't I just do a rant about this in another article? Jon... you can use the public forum too! *big grin*
Anyway, my vote for man of the year is Steve Jobs. My reasons are as follows...
Bought Apple back in black. Who else could have done it?
The iMac. Stunning marketing - they outdid even Microsoft's best. That alone deserves an award.
MacOS X - Caught the "open source" wave ahead of everybody else...
...then blew it on louzy licensing.
Played copycat with Microsoft by trying to hoard Firewire. Net result: Manufacturers moved to USB.
Has never claimed to have "invented the internet" - something no other Time Man of the Year contender can claim.
For both the victories and the failures, I vote Steve in for Man of the Year. Now, in the interests of removing any complaints of sexism on my, or slashdot's, part - I also nominate Monica Lewinsky as Woman of the Year - few people could singlehandedly embarrass an entire continent so thoroughly..
I looked back through the archives, and indeed - they did just that. On further digging, he did the same thing this year. But the quotes were different. "Linux will never go mainstream", and "Don't get me wrong, I'm right behind you guys"...
They left out a critical detail: The Jesse Berst Timeline!
January: "Leenucks?" -- Jesse Berst March: "Linux will never amount to anything!" May: "Linux might give Microsoft a run for it's money July: "I always said Linux was a contender." September: "Linux beats NT hands down." November: "Go linux go!"
Your definition of script kiddie is alittle more narrow than mine. A script kiddie in my book is basically someone who scans netblock after netblock looking for a system vulnerable to whatever exploits he downloaded. He logs the results of every scan for later use (when he finds an exploit for that platform / program) and in the meantime tries his current selection of cracks. If it works, he roots the box, scribbles some graffiti on the web page, deletes files, and generally vandalizes the site and moves on. More sophisticated ones might leave backdoors in to collect passwords or make an attempt at getting access elsewhere on the network, but most just root, deface, and move on.
A script kiddie is usually someone who has alot of time to waste (high school / college student), has limited knowledge of networking (ie: knows how to connect two boxes together, but probably not the difference between a switch and a router), and usually, but not always, has a self-esteem problem which they "resolve" by breaking into sites en masse.
Now that we're using the same terminology... script kiddies generally are not quiet - you can see them coming a mile away in your logs. If you're like me, you have your syslog piped right to a dedicated terminal sitting at your desk - I can see attacks in the first few seconds of the attempt. But for those that aren't as clued, someone picking through the digital rubble of a now-destroyed site can be a very educational (if sometimes expensive) lesson. Our random vandal just ratcheted up the priority security properly deserves for this sys/netadmin. Unfortunate, but some people learn no other way. Atleast in most cases the damage is a lost webpage or two which can often be restored from backup and a few damaged egos left in the wake.
Hey, you can bash the l335 13 year old kids out there breaking into systems, but who's fault is it if you leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and leave it unattended while you go shopping all day? Insurance companies will tell you you didn't make a reasonable effort to prevent it, hence you can't collect. Your fault. If they catch the criminal, great - you get your car back. If not, tough.
There's another spin I want to put on this - and that is that these script kiddies are performing an invaluable job - exposing security holes without doing *too much* damage. What's worse - a defaced webpage (graffiti) or industrial espionage. Which method would you like to have done to your web server? I prefer the former - atleast I know when it happened, and it's easy to clean up.
Microsoft would never have released any security patches to SMB filesharing, or the SAM database "syskey" in SP6a or a plethora of other fixes if it wasn't for the pervasiveness of these "script kiddies". Conventional methods of writing to Microsoft failed - read any bugtraq posting about M$ and it'll go something like this: "I wrote to them a month ago and never heard anything, so I'm posting this really easy way to compromise any M$ OS to the public. Thanks Microsoft.
I'm reminded of a quote from Southpark: "Blame Canada! Blame Canada!" It's true, a hundred times over. We'll just shovel the blame around - it's the script kiddies fault (our root password was aadvark, but that's not OUR fault!) - it's the governments fault - it's Microsoft's fault... how about "It's your fault." They point the finger at the admin, the admin points the finger at the vendor, and all the user gets is the finger. Thank god for script kiddies - they crack security enough to get it fixed, and they have the intelligence of lobotomized flatworms - ie: they can't do much real damage. Look at it another way: if they really were a threat, don't you think the FBI would be more active in trying to catch them?
Sorry, I don't buy it. You'd only disrupt the backbones, and little else - most small/medium-sized ISPs use static routes. Backbones do use protocols like BGP, but not all of them (use the same protocol). And I would certainly expect that they would not be allowing rogue packets past their border routers - especially routing (from icmp, bgp, dhcp, or anything of the sort). I am willing to listen if you have actually been inside these networks and seen that such packets make it onto their internal network - I have neither the time nor inclination to try something like this. Maybe you're more bored than I am and have actually looked around. Anyway, while you can certainly raise cain on a network that relies on such dynamic protocols, the problem would disappear as quickly as it appeared - ie: about 30 minutes (assuming high clueon radiation in the NOC).
Besides, incorrectly routed packets still go *somewhere*, and icmp can still act as a return mechanism to indicate where these "hacking" attempts are being made so the admins can track it and temporarily assign static routes to the affected router(s). 30 minutes to take down, 30 minutes to bring back online. Again, this assumes the clueon index was particularily high at the affected backbones at the time of attack.... *cough* Not sprint *cough*...
This doesn't preclude the possibility of a more long-term guerilla war being made on the backbones, but that wouldn't "take the whole 'net down in 30 minutes". It would make the evening commute more interesting though.. and I for one think it would give the community a solid kick in their complacency.
Personally, I wonder how many servers have been silently compromised inside these networks and are being used as relays for other attacks. If the cracker kept a low profile, such activity might remain undiscovered for some time. That is a much more serious risk IMO than some 30-minute orgasm of custom packets being thrown at the backbones.
Why can't linux people just accept that their OS' niche is a unix-like OS running on commodity hardware? We've seen another good example of an OS that tries to be all things, and look how it failed. Do we really want to take the industry down that path again? Linux works exceptionally well on the hardware it was designed for: namely, x86 hardware. It runs on macintoshes, HP machines, Alphas, and god only knows what else... but those are all inferior ports.
Code sharing is good. Code bloat is not. My vote is to fork the existing ports into seperate kernel dev teams and refocus linux. If we spread ourselves too thin, we'll release about as often as Microsoft. *stepping down off the soap box* Mark me down now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about JavaYou(tm), but JavaMe(tm) thinks that if we(c) just got rid of these trademarks, we(c) would have noproblem.com creating a Free Software(tm) version of Java(tm)(r)(c) which would run perfectly.
You're right. Tyranny has simply put on new clothes.
What would you do? Here you are, in command of the US, there's a war raging a continent away that could dramatically alter the power base of the world. Do you sit there, or do you act? We acted, and emerged some 40 odd years later as the last standing superpower in the world.
People are rational.
People try to make the best decisions based on the resources and information available.
People, when in groups, tend to throw morality to the wind.
For geeks, I can illustrate the last point quite vividly by pointing them to the playgrounds of their youth - chastised ... never by one, but by a group. The other two should be self-evident. Combine these together and you have a fairly effective formula for determining what that person will do - they're rational. What would you do in their shoes?
This "man of the century" stuff presupposing that this person is somehow superior to his peers is non-sense. They had, or developed, the character traits needed to survive in that position. Some succeeded brilliantly at the task, others failed miserably. Was it really personality, or was it just good (bad?) timing? I lean towards the ladder - I believe every individual, at any time and in any location, can make a difference. Sorry Time, but you should put a mirror on that page, and let us make a difference in our own private lives. In the final analysis, that's all that matters.
Gates of Hell: a recently uncovered tomb detailing Gates' descent from heaven and into the abyss of hell, kicked out by archangel Janet. ...
Anyway, this ought to reinvigorate the phone phreaks... now they have an "intelligent" phone to hack into and make it do the free phonecall bit. Wonder how vulnerable they are to EMR...
Comeon Rob... it's supposed to be stuff that matters... not commercialized crap like this. *sigh*. -1, here I come...
ID Software released it's controversial Quake mod hours after God released Weather, and the script kiddies have been causing widespread mayhem in California. Due to a programming bug, California slid into the ocean. Munge, of l0pht industries, has been calling for "ethical hacking" of the weather infrastructure.
Even slashdot, a nerds for news site has not gone unaffected. It's servers were attacked by a huge distributed Abundance of Service attack (ASS) causing torrential downpours which have flooded out a three county area surrounding the "Geek Compound".
Additional news to follow...
Thanks Mandrake!
Sorry... couldn't resist... =)
Your .sig has expired... you'll probably want to point it somewhere new....
This is really old. Gore is an idiot, but he's going to get nominated man of the year? Hmmm... well... actually that might be fitting...
Monica was the person who blew the whole thing open, as I recall.
Cute. =)
The subject line sums up my feelings on this topic. Most of society believes that personal wealth is a direct causation of personal character and ability. As a result, polls which are taken of the general population will reflect this. Jon is only trying to, albeit verbosely, to point this out.
... and on the seventh day, Knuth rested. We've been trying to debug the #$@! thing ever since.
You never worked in tech support.
Anyway, my vote for man of the year is Steve Jobs. My reasons are as follows...
- Bought Apple back in black. Who else could have done it?
- The iMac. Stunning marketing - they outdid even Microsoft's best. That alone deserves an award.
- MacOS X - Caught the "open source" wave ahead of everybody else...
- ...then blew it on louzy licensing.
- Played copycat with Microsoft by trying to hoard Firewire. Net result: Manufacturers moved to USB.
- Has never claimed to have "invented the internet" - something no other Time Man of the Year contender can claim.
For both the victories and the failures, I vote Steve in for Man of the Year. Now, in the interests of removing any complaints of sexism on my, or slashdot's, part - I also nominate Monica Lewinsky as Woman of the Year - few people could singlehandedly embarrass an entire continent so thoroughly..I looked back through the archives, and indeed - they did just that. On further digging, he did the same thing this year. But the quotes were different. "Linux will never go mainstream", and "Don't get me wrong, I'm right behind you guys"...
The Jesse Berst Timeline!
January: "Leenucks?" -- Jesse Berst
March: "Linux will never amount to anything!"
May: "Linux might give Microsoft a run for it's money
July: "I always said Linux was a contender."
September: "Linux beats NT hands down."
November: "Go linux go!"
Now I see here at the top it says "Children's rules to toys"... somehow though I don't think it applies to children anymore...
A script kiddie is usually someone who has alot of time to waste (high school / college student), has limited knowledge of networking (ie: knows how to connect two boxes together, but probably not the difference between a switch and a router), and usually, but not always, has a self-esteem problem which they "resolve" by breaking into sites en masse.
Now that we're using the same terminology... script kiddies generally are not quiet - you can see them coming a mile away in your logs. If you're like me, you have your syslog piped right to a dedicated terminal sitting at your desk - I can see attacks in the first few seconds of the attempt. But for those that aren't as clued, someone picking through the digital rubble of a now-destroyed site can be a very educational (if sometimes expensive) lesson. Our random vandal just ratcheted up the priority security properly deserves for this sys/netadmin. Unfortunate, but some people learn no other way. Atleast in most cases the damage is a lost webpage or two which can often be restored from backup and a few damaged egos left in the wake.
There's another spin I want to put on this - and that is that these script kiddies are performing an invaluable job - exposing security holes without doing *too much* damage. What's worse - a defaced webpage (graffiti) or industrial espionage. Which method would you like to have done to your web server? I prefer the former - atleast I know when it happened, and it's easy to clean up.
Microsoft would never have released any security patches to SMB filesharing, or the SAM database "syskey" in SP6a or a plethora of other fixes if it wasn't for the pervasiveness of these "script kiddies". Conventional methods of writing to Microsoft failed - read any bugtraq posting about M$ and it'll go something like this: "I wrote to them a month ago and never heard anything, so I'm posting this really easy way to compromise any M$ OS to the public. Thanks Microsoft.
I'm reminded of a quote from Southpark: "Blame Canada! Blame Canada!" It's true, a hundred times over. We'll just shovel the blame around - it's the script kiddies fault (our root password was aadvark, but that's not OUR fault!) - it's the governments fault - it's Microsoft's fault... how about "It's your fault." They point the finger at the admin, the admin points the finger at the vendor, and all the user gets is the finger. Thank god for script kiddies - they crack security enough to get it fixed, and they have the intelligence of lobotomized flatworms - ie: they can't do much real damage. Look at it another way: if they really were a threat, don't you think the FBI would be more active in trying to catch them?
Besides, incorrectly routed packets still go *somewhere*, and icmp can still act as a return mechanism to indicate where these "hacking" attempts are being made so the admins can track it and temporarily assign static routes to the affected router(s). 30 minutes to take down, 30 minutes to bring back online. Again, this assumes the clueon index was particularily high at the affected backbones at the time of attack.... *cough* Not sprint *cough* ...
This doesn't preclude the possibility of a more long-term guerilla war being made on the backbones, but that wouldn't "take the whole 'net down in 30 minutes". It would make the evening commute more interesting though.. and I for one think it would give the community a solid kick in their complacency.
Personally, I wonder how many servers have been silently compromised inside these networks and are being used as relays for other attacks. If the cracker kept a low profile, such activity might remain undiscovered for some time. That is a much more serious risk IMO than some 30-minute orgasm of custom packets being thrown at the backbones.
Why can't linux people just accept that their OS' niche is a unix-like OS running on commodity hardware? We've seen another good example of an OS that tries to be all things, and look how it failed. Do we really want to take the industry down that path again? Linux works exceptionally well on the hardware it was designed for: namely, x86 hardware. It runs on macintoshes, HP machines, Alphas, and god only knows what else... but those are all inferior ports.
Code sharing is good. Code bloat is not. My vote is to fork the existing ports into seperate kernel dev teams and refocus linux. If we spread ourselves too thin, we'll release about as often as Microsoft. *stepping down off the soap box* Mark me down now.
Yes... censorship is aimed against the individual by the group.