Wow, that was an angry response. Yes, I did read the article before I posted, that's how I knew they did upgrades on Win XP SP2 and none of the other systems. The article explictly stated that the Win XP SP1 system was exploited by Blaster and Sasser in under 18 minutes, which is good enough to call them "hacked". There are three faults with the second part of your argument stating that if they haven't upgraded to SP2 they deserved to be hacked. In the first, there are those who can not upgrade due to programs (custom jobs, programs no longer supported by their manufacturers) that will no longer work with SP2. In the second, there are those who turned off (or had a "helpful" tech turn off) their automatic updates and have no idea how to update their system. Yes, they should know their computers better, but that's a debate for another time and it's one that we've rehashed time and time again. In the third, they only updated Win XP SP2. Had they done all the upgrades on all the systems, I have a feeling the Win system would still not have fared as well as the UNIX-based systems. Remember, there *HAVE* been exploits for XP SP2 in the wild already. Granted, XP SP2 is a step in the right direction, but it is nowhere near perfect. Viruses, spyware, etc are still a problem.
You are anonymous, and most likely you are attempting to troll. I probably should not have bitten but what can I say, it gave me the chance to rant a bit.
I'm not that surprised, but Windows was the least secure. It should be noted that XP SP2 was installed and then the updates were applied "automatically" while none of the UNIX-ish systems had updates installed, just what came on the CDs. I know, competent admins can make any machine secure, but I wonder how MS can sleep at night knowing that their users are at such a high risk, even if they don't DO anything.
A great example of what you are asking about is the company Sourcefire. The free program in question is Snort. Sourcefire improves the core of Snort and sells complete solutions (boxes with snort configured, support on boxes sold, etc). The improvements made to Snort by Sourcefire trickle back into the Snort codebase. End result is that a company makes a decent living off a free program, and the free program gets a professional staff working on it.
I spent an entire summer on a polyphasic sleep cycle and I suffered no adverse effects. I managed to whittle myself down to an hour of sleep a day (5.75 hours awake, 15 minutes asleep) and I did not end up going insane. The most important thing is to keep yourself busy. I spent my time in a well-lit room reading almost constantly. Your mileage may vary.
Yast should do the dependencies for you automatically. At least, it always has for me. As well, I installed apt4rpm on SuSE and actually prefer it over Yast as the packages tend to be more current.
I agree with this. After having a computer system less than two feet away from my bed since I was 14 (eight years), I find that I just can't fall asleep without the gentle white noise of my humming fans.
A lot of us chose to use Netscape when we realized that IE was a piece of crap. We were a small but dedicated group. After Netscape died, a lot of us moved to Mozilla, where we brought our passion and dedication. Yes, Netscape may have returned from the dead, but it's not *our* Netscape, it's a familiar-looking (and smelly) corpse animated by the dark AOL magic that seems to autospawn new AOL coasters every month. Netscape of lore is dead. It might steal marketshare from IE because of the familiar name, but somehow I doubt users will get excited about it the way they did for the original Netscape.
All good suggestions. I work for a school system in Nevada, and we use Deep Freeze on our machines whenever possible. However, one shouldn't get into the habit of thinking Deep Freeze == secure. Recently we had an outbreak of Sasser at one of our schools. A machine (with Deep Freeze) gets infected, lets it spread to a few more machines and then crashes. It comes back up, clean, and promptly gets reinfected. I'm going to have to go through machine by machine to install the patch. At least when I take them off the network and reboot, it'll be a clean system I'm patching. Again, great suggestions, I just wanted to throw my two cents into the pot.
I know it's all business, but it seems kind of immature to me to put down other projects. Is Solaris so horrid that Sun can't trust the good features to outweigh the bad? Personally, I'd be more impressed if companies laid out all the facts, good and bad, about BOTH products and let the end-user decide. If Solaris is so awful that the only way they can get customers is to belittle the competition...maybe Sun needs to take an objective look at themselves instead of blaming everyone else.
I have my doubts that MS is really going to do what it states it will. It'll probably release some code, of that I'm sure. But, my gut tells me it will be non-important code. Who is going to know? Odds are their document formats and their proprietary secret stuff is still going to be hidden. Sure, we'll have the code to see how to finally axe Clippy, but we won't be able handle Word Documents any better.
I, for one, am terrified of this. In the first, if you are only renting the software, you do not really own it, so they can basically monitor you, or refuse access to the software if they want. Second, they have to have some way to monitor if the software is working or not, depending on your subscription time, which means either every (SUBSCRIPTION TIME) you'll have to reregister and reenter your code, or they will need to have access to your system (via the network, or in the real world) to reactivate it. Scary.
As far as I'm aware, this does NOT mean anything about downloading files, or any crap like that. When it says moving data across a quantum network, they are referring to a Beowulf cluster of sorts, for data processing. Please correct me if I'm wrong, my quatum computational theory is a bit rusty.
After reading the article, I wonder what exactly makes it so special? Perhaps the convenience of the entire setup, but for 40 gig, you would expect a lower price. I can get a USB enclosure for a hard drive for $30.00 here or perhaps elsewhere for even less. A 200 gig HD from tigerdirect.com is $89.99. Don't get me wrong, I am really excited to see Linux systems set up like this, but the price kind of threw me off.
Absolutely. But, it's just one of those mild annoyances that would really suck if MS made it so they had to do that. And, knowing the way most users are, they'll just say "screw it" and be happy to have another couple of gigs for their XP installation. I'm horribly cynical, and I apologize.
I know replying to my own post is a baddy, but I had a follow-up thought: Has anyone tried to install this patch on a system dual-booting with Linux? Not that I think MS would do anything evil...like destroying the MBR, and thus, LILO. Cough Cough. Any commentary/experience with this?
Just because MS makes it available doesn't mean they've worked out all the bugs. They may have taken care of a number, only 1/5 or 1/20 or even 1/100 have problems, but that is still a huge number. I know I'm not deploying the patch at my site for at least a couple of weeks, until I see the articles of the after-effects.
I might just be horribly ignorant, so please inform me...security? Even though all it is transferring is system calls and such, I am certain that there are ways to back-engineer what the computer is doing at that time by reading the (very faint, I'm sure) wireless signals. Again, I do not know, so will someone please enlighten me? What exactly is going on, what are the security ramifications?
Slashdot Mirror
You are anonymous, and most likely you are attempting to troll. I probably should not have bitten but what can I say, it gave me the chance to rant a bit.
I'm not that surprised, but Windows was the least secure. It should be noted that XP SP2 was installed and then the updates were applied "automatically" while none of the UNIX-ish systems had updates installed, just what came on the CDs. I know, competent admins can make any machine secure, but I wonder how MS can sleep at night knowing that their users are at such a high risk, even if they don't DO anything.
A great example of what you are asking about is the company Sourcefire. The free program in question is Snort. Sourcefire improves the core of Snort and sells complete solutions (boxes with snort configured, support on boxes sold, etc). The improvements made to Snort by Sourcefire trickle back into the Snort codebase. End result is that a company makes a decent living off a free program, and the free program gets a professional staff working on it.
I spent an entire summer on a polyphasic sleep cycle and I suffered no adverse effects. I managed to whittle myself down to an hour of sleep a day (5.75 hours awake, 15 minutes asleep) and I did not end up going insane. The most important thing is to keep yourself busy. I spent my time in a well-lit room reading almost constantly. Your mileage may vary.
Yast should do the dependencies for you automatically. At least, it always has for me. As well, I installed apt4rpm on SuSE and actually prefer it over Yast as the packages tend to be more current.
I agree with this. After having a computer system less than two feet away from my bed since I was 14 (eight years), I find that I just can't fall asleep without the gentle white noise of my humming fans.
A lot of us chose to use Netscape when we realized that IE was a piece of crap. We were a small but dedicated group. After Netscape died, a lot of us moved to Mozilla, where we brought our passion and dedication. Yes, Netscape may have returned from the dead, but it's not *our* Netscape, it's a familiar-looking (and smelly) corpse animated by the dark AOL magic that seems to autospawn new AOL coasters every month. Netscape of lore is dead. It might steal marketshare from IE because of the familiar name, but somehow I doubt users will get excited about it the way they did for the original Netscape.
Well, at least you know that you won't have to wait until your birthday for her to go down on you.
All good suggestions. I work for a school system in Nevada, and we use Deep Freeze on our machines whenever possible. However, one shouldn't get into the habit of thinking Deep Freeze == secure. Recently we had an outbreak of Sasser at one of our schools. A machine (with Deep Freeze) gets infected, lets it spread to a few more machines and then crashes. It comes back up, clean, and promptly gets reinfected. I'm going to have to go through machine by machine to install the patch. At least when I take them off the network and reboot, it'll be a clean system I'm patching. Again, great suggestions, I just wanted to throw my two cents into the pot.
I know it's all business, but it seems kind of immature to me to put down other projects. Is Solaris so horrid that Sun can't trust the good features to outweigh the bad? Personally, I'd be more impressed if companies laid out all the facts, good and bad, about BOTH products and let the end-user decide. If Solaris is so awful that the only way they can get customers is to belittle the competition...maybe Sun needs to take an objective look at themselves instead of blaming everyone else.
Mmmm, you had me at naked.
GPorn? I'm a little scared.
My glass is just half-empty, I guess.
I, for one, am terrified of this. In the first, if you are only renting the software, you do not really own it, so they can basically monitor you, or refuse access to the software if they want. Second, they have to have some way to monitor if the software is working or not, depending on your subscription time, which means either every (SUBSCRIPTION TIME) you'll have to reregister and reenter your code, or they will need to have access to your system (via the network, or in the real world) to reactivate it. Scary.
As far as I'm aware, this does NOT mean anything about downloading files, or any crap like that. When it says moving data across a quantum network, they are referring to a Beowulf cluster of sorts, for data processing. Please correct me if I'm wrong, my quatum computational theory is a bit rusty.
After reading the article, I wonder what exactly makes it so special? Perhaps the convenience of the entire setup, but for 40 gig, you would expect a lower price. I can get a USB enclosure for a hard drive for $30.00 here or perhaps elsewhere for even less. A 200 gig HD from tigerdirect.com is $89.99. Don't get me wrong, I am really excited to see Linux systems set up like this, but the price kind of threw me off.
NASA is actually planning on something like this for their network. I hope they have a plan for dropped "packets".
Because there's a chance in the Sims that my characters will have sex, whereas in the real world...
Pardon the cynical viewpoint, but as long as war (any war) is profitable, there will be no peace.
Yes!, but who the hell can figure out how to change any of the settings?
Absolutely. But, it's just one of those mild annoyances that would really suck if MS made it so they had to do that. And, knowing the way most users are, they'll just say "screw it" and be happy to have another couple of gigs for their XP installation. I'm horribly cynical, and I apologize.
I know replying to my own post is a baddy, but I had a follow-up thought: Has anyone tried to install this patch on a system dual-booting with Linux? Not that I think MS would do anything evil...like destroying the MBR, and thus, LILO. Cough Cough. Any commentary/experience with this?
Just because MS makes it available doesn't mean they've worked out all the bugs. They may have taken care of a number, only 1/5 or 1/20 or even 1/100 have problems, but that is still a huge number. I know I'm not deploying the patch at my site for at least a couple of weeks, until I see the articles of the after-effects.
I might just be horribly ignorant, so please inform me...security? Even though all it is transferring is system calls and such, I am certain that there are ways to back-engineer what the computer is doing at that time by reading the (very faint, I'm sure) wireless signals. Again, I do not know, so will someone please enlighten me? What exactly is going on, what are the security ramifications?
However, Stone never came out and said Novell would not entertain a buyout offer. Stay tuned.
Am I the only one who heard cheesy sinister music after that? Moderately sensationalistic. Just an observation, no need to take offense.