Interesting. I get modded flame-bait without a single reply.
Anyone mind to explain what on earth was flame-bait about my post?
Absolutely nothing, yet that won't stop incompetent or malicious moderators from pretending that "flamebait" is the same thing as "I disagree". Surprised? Don't be. This is simply how lesser men respond to criticism, no matter how constructive, because they don't have what it takes to handle it gracefully. If they did, they wouldn't be lesser men.
This has happened to some degree or another for as long as I have used Slashdot, but ever since they got rid of the old metamoderation system it has become much worse. I speak out against it when I see it too, but I do that knowing that they will try to have their petty revenge in the form of further down-mods. I can picture them now, saying something like "how DARE you point out what you believe to be unfair in a non-inflammatory tone and then offer reasoning to explain how you feel!" As I've said before, I bet these people wonder why they have inner conflict. Oh well, I have karma to burn so let them do their worst. Maybe one day the abusers of the moderation system will realize how petty and impotent they really are. I hope this does not discourage you. There are good moderators, too, and you should never allow lesser men to get under your skin for it is how they get their power.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. Handling a DNS error in a user-friendly manner is up to the application that is processing said error. You are correct that this is a non-issue because Web browsers have taken care of it for a long time now (your figure of 10 years is modest). Breaking the DNS protocol to serve advertisements in the name of user-friendliness deserves to be exposed for the absurdity that it is. You know what I consider to be "user friendly?" Respecting your users enough to never insult their intelligence like this. I wouldn't complain or challenge them if they simply said up-front "this is how we make money" rather than the absurd volume of posts that amount to "this is for your own good of course; trust us, our motives are pure!"
I'll add one more thing. I'm not sure if I have ever seen so many posts in a single Slashdot discussion that smelled so strongly of astroturfing. I realize that normally, "astroturfing" or "shill" is brought up as a cop-out, but I encourage you to see that for yourself. Do a text search of this discussion for my username of "causality" and you'll see several posts of mine that are a direct response to this. They tend to post AC (though not all of them) and they tend to suddenly get very quiet when seriously challenged, as though they know that their position is absurd. It's ridiculous and I really wonder how stupid they think we are. I'm not saying for certain that astroturfing is going on because I can't prove it, but I can say is that I am convinced to my own satisfaction that this is the case.
Besides everything (scary) that is involved on using OpenDNS as your resolver, it's true that it can block the Conficker Worm.
However, Conficker worm might be the last one that OpenDNS can stop. Once the evil minds realize the power of OpenDNS, they'll start using IP addresses instead of names within their worms (period).
You know I didn't even think of that. I did speculate that malware which can compromise the system can also alter DNS settings, either removing OpenDNS or (worse) replacing it with a hostile DNS server operated by the attacker. Your prediction is even simpler than that and sounds more likely.
That's really the problem with all of these blocklist solutions. None of them actually harden the host or address any of the widespread security problems that make these worms possible in the first place. The way I see it, there is one and only one reason why you have such things as worms and viruses. The reason is that an attacker can write a single piece of malware that can easily compromise thousands of vulnerable Windows machines in a fully automated fashion, with no skill required once the malware is written. If that ever changes, all of these blocklists and scanners and removal tools will be shown to be the superficial approaches that they really are.
This reminds me of a quote from Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." How true.
Stop spreading FUD.
Their privacy policy says that
"OpenDNS removes the IP address from its logs within 2 business days."
That's better than Google and probably any other search engine you might use.
I said that use of their service would make them privy to information that I don't wish for them to have. Specifically, my information. I'd love to hear a self-consistent explanation of how that constitutes Fear, Uncertainty, and/or Doubt. In fact I hereby challenge you to provide one. I'd like to see you try, so I won't tell you right now why that will fail although it's qute possible Merriam Webster can fill you in. Extra points if it's not trivial for me to tear down your argument. I don't normally use a tone like this when I reply to someone, but you have made an accusation and I demand to see either your evidence or a concession that you have spoken amiss.
I'd also like a self-consistent explanation of how the privacy problems posed by various search engines somehow justifies unnecessarily supplying OpenDNS with my information. Considering that the services OpenDNS offers are worse for me than what I can do for myself using Open Source software, this would indeed be unnecessary. To justify what you just said, you would have to explain how one wrong thing justifies and excuses another, unrelated wrong thing. Good luck with that.
I strongly doubt I'm going to get either explanation. I fully expect you to quietly disappear from this thread and find an easier target for your apologist message, but on occasion people do surprise me. Having said that, I will add that I think you are misunderstanding something fundamental. I will explain what that is. I am not satisfied that they promise to play nice with my information or that they don't retain it for very long (nevermind that I cannot audit their systems, so I have no way to verify those claims and must take their word for it). I am satisfied when they have no access to my information. If other people don't feel that way, this is their business, but I considered all my options long before it ever occurred to you that a little two-liner from an AC was going to change my mind and I believe my stance is a solid one that I can back up. Can you say the same?
Whoopty doo to all of it, they redirect your packets through their servers.
Is it going to kill you?
Is it going to get your details stolen?
It it going to screw up your connection?
Didn't think so.
It's completely unnecessary and cannot possibly help or benefit you in any way. Do you really need any other reason to avoid it?
"If everything is going well and there are no problems, it will do absolutely nothing for you" is not what I consider a selling point. How much simpler than that do you need it to be?
They are "Open" in sense of DNS terminology. Open DNS is one of the significant misconfiguration of an ordinary DNS server can have but their business works by opening it to planet and add extra features to decades old service without breaking standards.
But they do break the DNS standard. As several other posters have pointed out, the DNS protocol calls for an "NXDOMAIN" response to a non-existent hostname. Instead of sending this response, they are showing sponsored links. Not to mention that DNS is already "open to the planet". There are about 13 root DNS servers. Anyone who wants to can run their own DNS server that contacts those root servers to handle DNS queries. For free. With open-source software that is also free. OpenDNS isn't providing anything that I cannot easily do for myself AND they are failing to conform to the DNS standard in order to display what I consider spam. Why do I consider their "sponsored" links to be spam? That's easy -- if I cared about their sponsors, they would not have to direct me to their sites, I would go there on my own.
On top of all of this, there are two threats to privacy posted by OpenDNS. One is the Google request "proxying" ("hijacking" is another word that equally applies, in my opinion) that can be turned off. The other is the fact that they would know every site I visit, which cannot be turned off and is an inherent part of the arrangement. Using such a system doesn't make any rational sense whatsoever.
You are either speaking about what you don't remotely understand, or you're not really so ignorant and have some undisclosed financial relationship to OpenDNS and are not being honest with us about that. Both are rather foolish. My suggestion to you is that if you insist on doing this, try it on an audience that is less tech-savvy. Better yet, inform yourself about these matters or get a job that doesn't remove your self-respect. If that sounds like a strong response, it's because of how misleading your post was and because of how rapidly several posts very much like it (lots of praise and little to no evidence and reasoning) have appeared in this discussion.
What you're showing is that the troll succeeded in making you rage. He'll now be more motivated to post it over and over, because he knows it works.
I think trying to explain this to people is a lot like back when AOL tried so hard to tell customers that their staff will never ask for their account password. Despite repeated warnings and prompts, the password phishers never seemed to have any problems. Those hardheaded users preferred the convenience of refusing to stop and think or to change their habits because both of those require a small amount of effort.
Likewise, people who feed trolls prefer their little emotional outbursts and the righteous feelings they get from them and are not interested in whether they are part of the problem. The idea that they are doing exactly what the troll wanted them to do does not get their attention. They may claim otherwise or feel inclined to argue with me about that, but this is very simple: when a person's words tell me one thing and their actions tell me another, I disregard their words every time. They don't really give me a choice in the matter.
I've started using OpenDNS since Denmark started censoring the Piratebay. The easiest way to circumvent the block.
(TPB: My #1 source to bad 80's movies! (which I personally don't think is illegal to download, I'm assuming; since no one apparently want to sell them, it must be because they are worthless (which, honestly, most of them are:-)))
There is one way that is easier still, which is to resolve thepiratebay.org once (it is 83.140.65.11) and then add that to your hosts file. That way you don't need to surrender the privacy of which sites you visit or which Google search terms you use to the operators of OpenDNS.
Really I'd prefer to just run my own local caching DNS server, which is what I do. I'd recommend maradns or djbdns and I'd strongly suggest staying away from BIND and its poor security history (same reason I absolutely refuse to use sendmail) unless you simply must have some feature exclusive to it. It also can't hurt to use your firewall to make sure that your local DNS server can use UDP port 53 to contact only the root DNS servers of the world (I believe there are 13 of them) and no other addresses outside of your LAN.
Sure, just install your own caching DNS server on your machine and set your DNS server to 127.0.0.1.
For Linux, it's trivial...most distros include a caching nameserver package.
For Windows, it's a little harder to set up some of the open source nameservers, but you also have some free closed source and commercial software to choose from. Try searching for "DNS server Windows" and the results should get you started.
This gives you one advantage I haven't seen anyone else mention. If you run a caching DNS server on localhost, any queries for data that's already in the cache are answered instantly. You get to control how many objects are in the cache and how long they remain cached. The suggestions that others have made for Level 3's servers at 4.2.2.2 etc. do not and cannot have this advantage because you will always have the network latency of sending a request and awaiting their response.
I say that knowing that the DNS resolver (the DNS client) can also cache responses. I am merely saying that a local DNS client that performs caching combined with a local DNS server that performs caching is significantly better than a local caching client and a remote DNS server. For new queries that could not possibly be cached on this end, I also feel that my local server outperforms my ISP's, in the sense that the ISP server may be beefier but it also has a drastically higher load.
The latency difference would not significantly affect any sort of realistic network benchmark. However, near-instantaneous and lower-latency DNS resolution has a significant impact on the psychological perception of performance, especially with a Web browser. Ad servers have two annoying habits: they are often the slowest part of a page to load and they tend not to specify image size in the IMG tags so the browser must load the advertisement before it can render the rest of the page. Because of that, running a well-configured local caching DNS server and combining that with ad blocking (I primarily use Adblock Plus) is one of the best ways you can speed up your subjective Web experience without actually purchasing more bandwidth.
.....instructs its drone machines to report to 250 different internet addresses each day. Without the service, admins would have to manually block 1,750 domains each week, or 91,250 each year.
Wouldn't blocking "this weeks" known IP addresses stop the addition of new ones, rendering the infection impotent?
That would address a symptom and would do nothing about the actual problem. We keep doing that because we don't want to admit that addressing only symptoms is a failed idea; trying harder and harder to find new ways to implement this idea won't change the fact that it's a failed idea.
The root problem is the vulnerability of Windows to these types of worms. Yes I am selectively speaking about Microsoft Windows; if I ever start seeing widespread (keyword) worms in the wild (keyword) for *nix operating systems then on that day I'll include them too. Anti-virus seeks to remove or contain an external object to which Windows is vulnerable, so it too addresses only the symptom and not the vulnerability. The reason why *nix operating systems don't generally need anti-virus (unless of course you ask an anti-virus vendor) is because they have a security model that is able to prevent infections from occurring in the first place. This is much simpler and more practical (but creates fewer cottage industries) than sophisticated scanners and high-maintainence databases of tens of thousands of signatures that must be applied to every file or every file operation. It's a lot simpler than pretending that DNS is the correct tool for host security as well.
If OpenDNS maintains a highly effective, well-maintained blocklist and if many people start using it, what happens next is rather predictable. A worm/virus that can compromise the machine can also alter that machine's DNS settings. It could make the machine stop using OpenDNS or worse (as another poster has pointed out) it could make it use a hostile DNS server. You can expect this to be a standard malware feature if OpenDNS's efforts are successful. That's the downside of participating in an arms race. The best way to avoid an arms race is to realize that mitigation techniques, while not completely useless, have extremely limited utility and that prevention is the only actual cure.
In the same manner that you give another entity access to all your NTP syncs.
OpenDNS is basically the same thing as the NTP pool.
Put the tinfoil down, and back away slowly...
I'm really not sure why people keep comparing OpenDNS to NTP. NTP shares the current time, in UTC. This information is not secret and is not a privacy violation because it was already available to anyone who wants it. If knowing your system time helps an attacker to i.e. guess your TCP sequence numbers, that is a weakness in your (pseudo)random number generator, not a weakness in running an NTP daemon.
Compare that to the data that OpenDNS can collect. They can see every hostname you resolve with their service. Not unlike application-level techniques used by various advertisers (web bugs, third-party cookies, redirections, HTTP "ping", etc.) to track your browsing, a list of every hostname you resolve can certainly compromise your privacy. Every site I visit, when I visited it, and an idea of how often I visited it is not "already available to anyone who wants it." Normally, to obtain this sort of information, an attacker would need to either break into this computer and install a program to log and transmit it, or they would need to conduct a man-in-the-middle type of attack against my ISP's network. There's a reason for that.
Why would I volunteer this data to a third-party who otherwise would have no access to it? What's my incentive to unnecessarily trust them in exchange for a service I don't need? It's not like there is anything difficult about running my own caching DNS server (and you can bet I don't use BIND), not to mention that DNS has to be one of the worst ways to deal with the problem of host security. It's just not a tool that was ever designed for this type of job; meanwhile, better tools that are designed for this job are readily and freely available. This might tempt someone who doesn't want to take responsibility for their own security and thinks anyone else should handle it for them, but I recognize that as a personal shortcoming, a flawed idea. The product of a flawed idea is also flawed, so with this arrangement you are merely trading one threat (the Conflicker worm) for another threat (reduced privacy). I can't call that a solution with a straight face.
The point I was trying to make is that something isn't a right just because someone declares it to be.
That's how I feel when I see various corporations that want to restrict my freedoms in order to facilitate their business model. That is, I don't recognize their right to do so. I could voluntarily enter into such an arrangement with them, and many people do this, but they don't have a right to expect me to do so.
We're talking about software. The founding fathers surely did not talk about software in their constitutions. Computers didn't even exist back then.
I have already addressed this in my previous response to you. I said "the mistake that ignorant people make is that they think it's about computing or software development just because that's the arena in which freedom is being limited." This is not about computing and it is not about software. It is about freedom. The Founding Fathers had quite a lot to say about freedom. They certainly understood that there are forces who would love to take it away from us by any means available. The "means available" change over time; the principles and concepts involved are timeless.
This is often referred to as the Information Age because of how important computers and software have become; it is logical and natural that those who would like to control others also recognize the importance of computers and software. In ages past, the same restrictions on freedom were accomplished by controlling books and literacy but no one who understood that would say that all of the struggling was over the cellulose of which paper is made. That's the mistake you're making when you think that this is about programming or markets. It's not about cellulose and it's not about compilers and programming languages; it's about unhindered access to ideas. For extreme examples, read Farenheit 451 or look at how threatened the Old South was by the idea of literate black people. The only difference between that and the current artificial limitations on information technology is degree, but the principle of controlling people by restricting their access to and uses of information is the same. That is one of the timeless principles, in fact -- rulers throughout history have realized that a well-informed, well-educated public is quite difficult to oppress.
The 'rights' in this context mainly apply to those who want the product of hours of hard programming work for free because paying for software is now 'evil'.
I think you're forgetting that developers who create and release Open Source software do so voluntarily. No one is taking anything away from them; they give to the community because they are the kind of selfless people who enjoy doing that. What you say right there might be applicable to software piracy since commercial software companies do expect to be paid for their efforts, but it simply fails to describe anyone who releases software under the GPL (or similar licenses). So, yes I do run Linux and various Open Source applications and therefore I am enjoying the product of many hours of hard programming work, but the people who did that work wanted me to be able to do this and went out of their way to ensure that I could. These are good, respectable, selfless people who are willing to share the fruits of their labor. This is not an avoidance of "evil" as you suggest; it is an embracing of something good.
Well its only evil to those who expect something for nothing. For those who realize that hard work should be rewarded, they have no problem with paying for it.
Not all rewards are financial. Some Open Source developers do it for prestige and respect, some do it out of love for the community, some of them just enjoy programming and sharing, and others have motives unknown to me. Some of them are professional software developers who produce Open Source during their free time, w
Large procurement agencies understand how OpenOffice helps them to reduce their license costs.
Unfortunately, large organizations often want to spend all of their budget or else they risk having less money allocated to them next year. That there are often no real incentives to cut costs (unless of course they are forced to do so by a "crisis") is one of the more counterintuitive traits of medium-to-large institutions. This is especially true of entitites that don't need to make a profit, such as governmental departments. To them, the "free as in beer" aspect of OpenOffice could actually be a disadvantage.
What you suggest is certainly possible, I just consider it more likely that individuals and small businesses (of which there are many; most jobs in the USA are with small businesses) will adopt something like Open Office before the megacorps will. Once there is a significant userbase, the larger organizations may then find other reasons why it makes sense to support or at least accommodate it, like user demand or appreciation of the dangers of vendorlock. Especially vendorlock -- why businesses would ever find it acceptable that a remote vendor could limit their access to their own data when alternatives are available is the part that I don't understand.
What if most people don't care about those 'rights'?
Then they stand to lose them.
The only injustice is that if anyone loses them, everyone loses them, not just the people who failed to value them. It's about freedom. The mistake that ignorant people make is that they think it's about computing or software development just because that's the arena in which freedom is being limited. This is called the inability to see the forest for all of the trees, and it's a big mistake. It's what happens when people are concerned with dramas and storylines and mundane details, which can be quite complex, and not the underlying principles that manifest those things, which are quite simple. I certainly have more respect for those who can confine the results of their mistakes to themselves than I do for those who don't care (and don't even check to see) if someone else suffers because of their negligence.
I know many here will disagree with this, so be it.
But it isn't about Microsoft, it's about proprietary software. Right now the situation is such that people are forced, whether at work or at home, to use software where you aren't allowed basic rights to the software you use: to use your software in any fashion, to modify it however you want, and to distribute it to whoever who want.
That is the goal, and that is why we need to usurp Microsoft. They are still the number one vendor of software that most people are still forced to use. Other companies are just as bad, but none as dominant.
So if Microsoft is specifically targeting free software, I suggest we fight back.
I think the best way to fight back is to ignore them and/or refuse to take them seriously. They take themselves so seriously (far too much) that this is also the last thing they would expect or be prepared for. There are two wrong responses to anyone (corporations included) who has no power over you except the power that you give to them.
The first wrong response is rebellion or active resistance. This amounts to lowering yourself to their level and then having them beat you with experience. Rebellion against Microsoft would mean competing with them toe-to-toe in the business world, with the goal of either bankrupting them or eventually buying them out. Microsoft has more resources available than many small nations; it should be obvious why this won't work. People who imagine that the purpose of Linux is to engage in a glorious marketing battle against Windows for the desktop subscribe to this faulty view. That view has multiple flaws and the largest is that the "desktop" is not some prize or spoil of war but a possession belonging to a person, a person who voluntarily decides what it will run. This is especially absurd for anyone who claims to value the "free as in speech" aspect of Open Source. Piles of gold or inanimate resources are appropriate spoils of a contest; the free choices of willing participants are not.
The second wrong response is confirmity. This describes the folks who might use Windows etc. because "everyone else does." Some of them don't have a choice due to extreme vendor lock-in, but by far most of them do. There is often a concomitant "might makes right" belief, typically expressed by the (faulty) reasoning that Microsoft must have dominated this market because of the inherent superiority of their products. Betamax vs. VHS is a good counter-argument. Unnecessarily caring about what other people are doing is the antithesis of free thought and suggests an unwillingness to live your own life.
The power of refusing to participate is almost always underestimated. What really works against the seemingly-invincible juggernauts is passive resistance, something very much like what Mahatma Ghandi practiced (and Henry David Thoreau et al before him). We have a great advantage here that Ghandi did not have. We can apply passive resistance to a corporation like Microsoft without breaking any laws, so we do not even need Ghandi's willingness to go to jail (and worse) to pull this off. The biggest threat to the Microsoft's of the world is not displacement but irrelevance.
The very existence of Free Software, Open Source and even Apple undermines the notion that Microsoft wants to plant in everybodies head : that software is so complex that you need a company as big as them for research, development, production and support of software.
Paranoid much?
Microsoft is simply a corporation, trying to make as much money as it can. They want as much market share as possible, obviously, but you seem to be taking it out on an emotional limb there.
That's not really paranoia. In fact marketers have a word for it; they call it "mindshare". There are related concepts. For example, what is advertising other than the manipulation of behavior (convincing you to do something you may not have done had you not seen the ad) brought about by "planting a message in everyone's head"? Advertisers will use humor, half-truths, small children, etc. to get you to associate laughter, an inaccurate but convenient worldview, or paternalistic/maternalistic feelings and instincts with their products. Absolutely nothing is sacred to them; nothing is so good or wholesome or precious or innocent or sacred that they won't use it as a tool to create an emotional association that allows them to implant a suggestion. They don't see you as a human being who is equal to them and worthy of respect. They can't, because if they saw you that way, they would be disinclined to manipulate you. They see you as a dehumanized resource to be mined just like so much coal or metallic ore. This is a good fit with the nature of a corporation and the way it calls on human beings to become interchangable parts in its machinery. Beings who are individuals and worthy of love and respect are not interchangable parts in a faceless machine.
If a company sees an increase in sales immediately following an advertising campaign, something has happened other than customers proactively considering all available options and choosing the best solution for their needs based on objective criteria. If the customers were doing that, no advertisement of any kind would change their minds because the dialog of a TV commercial does not change their needs or the facts of their situation. That something that has happened is manipulation by suggestion.
What you call paranoia is the realization that anyone willing to treat people in such an alienated, dehumanized fashion does this because he fancies himself to be their master. As mindless, sheeplike, obsessed with conformity, and unfamiliar with critical thinking as most people have become (yes I do level this charge; do you doubt it?), such a person is unfortunately correct in many cases. I realize that our current economy depends on this system and that the people participating in it are mostly well-meaning and ignorant of the damage that it does because it is difficult to quantify. You can't really assign a numer or an equation to it and our culture is terrible at handling anything for which this is the case because we celebrate cleverness but not wisdom.
Lots of people seem like they want to believe that there are no downsides to our current way of life. I am merely saying that we hear about the benefits of this system all the time; what so few are willing to discuss are its costs. No one is fully informed without a solid understanding of both the benefits and the costs. You were right, in a way, that it was being taken "out on an emotional limb", but that's because the manipulation upon which much of the modern economy is based is primarily accomplished by emotional impact. Contrast that with persuasion, which is done dispassionately with facts and reasoning, and you can then discern the motivation with ease.
May I ask why you changed your mind? I question the necessity of asking if the guy is a "dumbass" because smart people can have lapses in judgment too, but otherwise I think you had a good point.
I'm also following your line of thinking. Why should it automatically detect your OS. I could be downloading from Fedora laptop to give to Win desktop b/c my network drivers are fried.
If it really isn't for your OS version, it won't work, end of story.
Why is this on the front page? The link isn't even the correct one...and unless I'm not reading this all correctly, it seems like someone is searching for a problem, rather than presenting an obvious one.
Yeah, that's exactly what bothers me about this posting.
There are legitimate grievances against Microsoft, concerning both their business practices and their products, to where there is no need to grasp at straws like this. For the purposes of this post I'll define "grievance" as "anything you dislike badly enough to refuse to do business with them". Maybe you really don't like Windows, maybe you see that they were convicted of monopolistic or anti-competitive practices in several countries and don't care to reward them with your patronage, or maybe you're just cheap and don't want to pay for a Windows license (and don't want to infringe anyone's copyrights) when free OSes of high quality are readily available.
My point is that if you want to criticize Microsoft or Windows and related products, this is one of the more counterproductive ways to do it. I should make one thing known: I do not like Microsoft or Windows at all and I have reasons for that, but I recognize that plenty of other people do like them. To those folks, a half-assed criticism like this looks like you're coming from a position of weakness. It looks like you have some kind of religious crusade or personal agenda and generally something other than facts and reasoning to back up your position. The fact is that if you use too many tactics like this and destroy your own credibility, your audience probably won't take you seriously again. Not only that, they will often ignore anyone who sounds too much like you even if that person does come up with facts and reasoning.
Silly tactics like "clutching at straws" and "making much ado about nothing" in matters that are usually handled by facts and logic (we're talking about computing here, not creative writing) are a good way to harm your own credibility, at least in the eyes of a savvy audience. It's primitive, but if you must imagine some huge contest between Windows and $ALTERNATIVE then think of it this way: the "other side" has their shills and their religious crusaders and their frothing-at-the-mouth irrational people, too. This is a great way to give (figurative, of course) ammunition to them. If you must believe this is a contest, some kind of glorious battle for domination of the desktop, think of this as arming your enemy. You don't win a contest by doing that.
I just mention that not to tell you anything you don't know (I really doubt I'm doing that) or to antagonize you, but that I think "not gonna tell ya how" creates a mystique that could be replaced with an understanding of both how to do these things and when not to do these things.
Point I was making is, those of us who already know how, know enough to not shoot ourselves in the foot. The info is out there, and in the course of finding it, the newbie's gonna learn why doing it is a Bad Idea until they learn enough to not screw it up totally.
In a way I think we're taking two slightly different approaches and arriving at the same place. That often happens when I am knowledgable about a subject and am discussing it with someone else who is also knowledgable about the subject. I consider it to be something like a stylistic difference.
I agree strongly that "the info is out there". I think the biggest difference between a skilled admin and a newbie is that the skilled admin knows how to educate himself where a newbie tends to be much more passive in this regard. So often someone is considered an "expert" or not based on how much they have memorized. Sysadmins may be called upon to perform a task when they may have never done that precise task before; they just know how to find good information and how to integrate it with their existing knowledge and how to find parallels between the new information and what they already understand. I appreciate your reasonable response and can add that I cannot help but agree with you about the (strong) importance of obtaining your own understanding of what is a Bad Idea and why. Especially the "why", as I consider that more important and more useful than a list of do's and don'ts, however comprehensive that list may be.
I think you should reread the parent's comment and then realize how much of an idiot you've been.
Don't worry, if I know the Slashdot mods, they'll mod you down to -1 as Flamebait and will probably mod him up using some flimsy excuse. I bet they think that the redistribution of wealth is a legitimate exercise of governmental power, too.
It never occurs to them that egregious errors like those made by cp.tar are the source of most "Flamebait" and anyone who makes them should be considered fair game. That's if you're interested in an overall reduction in "Flamebait". If you just want to bitch and moan and think moderation is one good way to do that, then please don't change anything, it's already perfect for your purposes.
I see your post is at -1 Flamebait. Though you were primarily talking about the other guy, I can't help but notice that the moderators have proven your point for you. That is, if they were going to mod you down for something, Offtopic would have actually been appropriate and they refuse to do that correctly. I say refuse because I believe they are perfectly capable, they just don't care because the moment you criticized them it became a personal crusade (lesser men react this way to criticism because they don't have what it takes to handle it gracefully) and their only concern was finding a way to shut you up. It should be obvious that this is what happened here, so yes they did an excellent job of proving your point. I wish they'd bring back the old metamoderation system; it was much better at dealing with this sort of pettiness.
The "Comments and Moderation" section of the Slashdot FAQ defines it this way: "Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage." Let's put your post to the test, shall we? No, you weren't nice, but you weren't exactly malicious and frothing-at-the-mouth either and I would expect a moderator to appreciate the difference. You pointed out what you perceive to be a problem, you discussed what you believe causes that problem, and you proposed a solution, however imperfect that may be. This really fails every test of "Flamebait" that could be applied to it. I can't even come up with a half-assed excuse that would justify calling it that with a straight face.
I don't hate anyone, but even if I strongly disagreed with you and hated your guts, I would feel like pretending that you made a Flamebait post when you clearly didn't, just so I could (ab)use the Slashdot moderation system to lash out at you would be one of the more petty and infantile things I could do. I feel like if I did that, it would say a lot of bad things about me and my character and my integrity but would say nothing at all about you. Whatever happened to taking someone on, like in open debate, if you've got a problem with them or don't like what they say? Am I the only one who sees how cowardly it is to try to do the same thing by abusing a moderation system? I wonder how many moderators will now get pissed off at me for saying what I believe while conveniently ignoring that they cannot possibly do so without becoming what I just described (and some people wonder why they have inner conflict). If so, you should know that it's not nearly the first time I've seen low-quality moderation and called it what it was. It won't be the last time either, unfortunately, though that's not how I would have it.
Alright Causality, what the hell do you think "chronological" means? You said it twice. Chronological adults? What?
People who are "adult" in terms of their physical age, that is, the amount of time that has passed since they were born. I am using the term to describe people who are small-minded and immature (especially emotionally) and generally childish because the only way they ever grew up was physically, yet they are more than old enough that they are capable of better. I also refer to them as "overgrown children". They express that in a large variety of ways, but they all have a few things in common.
All of them are primarily concerned with their wants and gratifications, at least more so than they are concerned about how their actions affect other people. They all have beliefs, including strong ones, that they have never questioned or seriously compared to other ideas in a process of refining what they believe (this sort of unquestioning obedience is nothing less than a form of slavery) and in this fashion they resemble machines that are programmed more than human beings who contemplate. They have a strong victim mentality that causes them to see the world as events that happen to them rather than systems in which they voluntarily participate. They are not courageous, in fact they are often cowards, but they may think that cruelty and the needless use of force is the same thing as courage. They think that learning is terribly hard work to be avoided instead of feeling a joy of discovery, or they're simply threatened by what they don't understand. In short, they are not fully living their own lives and it shows in the fact that none of them are joyous. They might be happy and gratified when they get what they want but it's always momentary; it is not a lasting appreciation of life for its own sake.
The problem is that this is so widespread that you now have an entire generation of people which has known no better example. This has become the culture and what I described above has become the average person, at least in the USA. It'll end as soon as people get tired of living in such a limited fashion and not a moment before, so in that way it does seem to serve a purpose. You should be able to see why patient understanding is the only correct response, but patient understanding does not imply a reluctance to call things what they are or to decide for yourself whether you will be available or unavailable for experiencing the results. My posts above about the last experiences I had with theaters amount to a description of the results and why I won't put myself in their path.
I hope that addresses your question. It was a worthy question, well worth answering, so please excuse my lack of brevity:-).
The spam problem will not be solved with laws or pretty tricks like this.
It is a technological problem, and as such will be solved by technological changes: the SMTP protocol is outdated and totally unadapted to the modern uses to which we put it. Let's replace it with something that authentifies sender and receiver properly, and that allows for efficient transmission of binary data.
I've always seen spam as an economic problem with many parallels to prohibition (like the War on Some Drugs). The actual problem is that so long as there are people in sufficient numbers who are willing to buy from a spammer (or who are vulnerable to being defrauded by a spammer), the spammers will find some way to do what they do. Spam is something of a business; it will end the moment it's difficult enough to do that a spammer can no longer make a profit. You don't really need any sort of perfect solution, just one that's good enough to remove the profit and put them out of business.
The parallels to prohibition really are strong. For example, trying to end spam by catching and prosecuting spammers will have about as much of an impact on spam as arresting drug dealers has had on the War on Some Drugs, i.e. little to none, and that's assuming no jurisdictional problems. In fact, to drug dealers and spammers alike, increased risk means less competition and higher profits when looked at from a purely business perspective. There simply is no force available that can neutralize sufficient economic demand and to spammers, who don't care about legal/ethical issues, being an easy target for scams is as indistinguishable from demand as willingly buying from them. You're right that laws or pretty tricks won't solve the problem, but I propose that technological changes won't solve the problem either. What is needed is for large numbers of people to both realize and care that this is a shared network and that their actions (such as buying from spammers or running insecure systems or making insecure transactions) can negatively impact other people. Obtain that sort of widespread understanding and these matters will take care of themselves. Try to proceed without it and see how insoluable this problem can be.
This idea about sending fake phishing e-mails might actually have an impact because the ultimate cause (or ultimate enabler) of this economic problem is the large number of ignorant users. This may identify some of them and prove to them that their current understanding leaves them vulnerable. I don't think this alone will end spam once and for all, but it's one of the few solutions I've heard that shows an awareness of the underlying problem.
Last time I looked, Redhat (Fedora, actually) wants you to make a root account at install. That was with FC7, the last time I ran Fedora on one of my machines. Ubuntu adds the first user account created in a fresh install to the sudo list.
There is a way to get a shell with root access so you can do a bunch of things without bothering with sudo, but I'm not gonna tell ya how.
Ubuntu's setup is just a simple matter of configuration (as you know). There's a few ways to get an unfettered root shell in Ubuntu. You could use "su" (installing it if need be), you could do "sudo bash", or you could unlock the root account so that you can simply login as root. This sort of management of user accounts and privileges is one of the most basic system administration tasks imaginable.
I just mention that not to tell you anything you don't know (I really doubt I'm doing that) or to antagonize you, but that I think "not gonna tell ya how" creates a mystique that could be replaced with an understanding of both how to do these things and when not to do these things. Ubuntu gets one thing right, which is that a user knowledgable enough about the basics to modify their setup is probably also knowledgable enough to understand why the limited use of root is a good thing. I feel like proper privilege separation is one thing that Unix got right, from the beginning, and that the severity of many of the security issues on Windows are because it is still playing catch-up (UAC is a step in that direction but not a real substitute). I think the Ubuntu setup is a pretty good default but I think that because of Ubuntu's target audience, which could be contrasted with LFS's target audience or Gentoo's target audience.
You can still copy and paste the address under the link.
I'm not entirely sure if it's exclusively RedirectRemover that does this or if perhaps NoScript is also playing a role (I don't use Gmail so I don't run any Javascript from Google), but when I do a Google search and click a result link, there is no redirect at all. It goes straight to the destination URL without sending any additional requests through Google's servers. I set it up this way some time ago for privacy and performance reasons and it's interesting that I it seems to have mitigated this problem for me as well.
Please, don't presume to tell me you know how to better operate a theatre. It justs makes you seem like an ass. It's incredibly presumptive of you to think that starting off a conversation with a patron with a threat is somehow going to lead to a situation that helps anyone.
That you wouldn't want a customer or a potential customer to tell you how he would like for you to do business, in fact, that you think such a customer is an "ass", is also part of the problem. I'm sure you have a challenging and exciting career as a movie theater operator or usher or whatever it is that you do; the reason you have that is because people like me are (or were) willing to pay you for it. Let's get one thing straight: if you operate a business and I am the customer, you are there to serve me, fullstop. That may include entertaining suggestions about what I'd like to see, even if they don't personally suit your own tastes, for it is the nature of business to respond to demand. If that's somehow offensive or otherwise not to your liking, perhaps dealing with the public isn't for you. Having established that, I'll respond to the only worthwhile statement you made.
I recognize the right of the owner of an establishment to determine who may and may not remain in that establishment. There is nothing unreasonable about this -- the same principle is why strangers don't enter your home and walk in on you while you're showering and why you could do something about it if they did.
Now a movie theater, like any other publicly-accessible business, wants to be a place where anyone feels welcome to visit because visitors spend money there. There is every reason to encourage them to do so... until they become disruptive and ruin the experience for everyone else. Then, to quote Spock, you have a situation where "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." As a purely business decision, I would refund the ticket money if I were the owner and asked someone to leave because a confrontation over the money is not worth it. But whether the money is refunded or not, I absolutely refuse to have a confrontation or an argument over the exercise of a basic right. The person I'm dealing with respects my basic rights because I respect his, or he doesn't, and if he doesn't and wants to have a confrontation about it, there are ways to deal with people like him that don't involve going toe-to-toe as though his position were equally valid (it isn't). I gave one such example. If you ask someone to leave and they want to argue so you tell them there will be police involved and charges pressed if they refuse, that is not a threat; that is how you protect your rights against those who don't want to honor them without breaking the law yourself. I'm not crazy about police, but that's actually what they're for. It would take only one or two such incidents before it became generally known that you're not going to be a pushover and cave in; once that's established, there won't be arguments about such basic and obvious things like whether the proprietor has the right to eject an unruly customer. That is a situation that does help everyone, especially you.
Now I will address your little outburst of indignity. What I said involved dealing with the people who just want to argue, like you mentioned. Nowhere did I say "you should start the conversation off by mentioning police." You're responding as though I said that, but that isn't what I said. How's it feel knowing that this misunderstanding is over nothing? For some reason, a few Slashdotters really seem to have a hard-on over responding to statements that weren't made ("twisting what you did say" might be a more accurate phrasing). They all have one thing in common: they never respond to favorable things that weren't said. For that reason, I recognize this as the tactic designed to control that it actually is. The really strange thing about people is that they can use fairly elaborate tactics, including
On an off-topic note, following one of the links promising asian intercourse brought me to the most elaborate fake-virus-scan scam I've ever seen (probably NSF insecure browsers): http://computerantivirusproscan.com/promo/1/freescan.php?nu=880407
Is this the norm today?
It's apparently the norm for people who can't tell it's a scam and honestly believe that some random Web link is going to bring them sex with Asians. Provided that the scam is painful enough, I can't find anything wrong with that.
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Interesting. I get modded flame-bait without a single reply. Anyone mind to explain what on earth was flame-bait about my post?
Absolutely nothing, yet that won't stop incompetent or malicious moderators from pretending that "flamebait" is the same thing as "I disagree". Surprised? Don't be. This is simply how lesser men respond to criticism, no matter how constructive, because they don't have what it takes to handle it gracefully. If they did, they wouldn't be lesser men.
This has happened to some degree or another for as long as I have used Slashdot, but ever since they got rid of the old metamoderation system it has become much worse. I speak out against it when I see it too, but I do that knowing that they will try to have their petty revenge in the form of further down-mods. I can picture them now, saying something like "how DARE you point out what you believe to be unfair in a non-inflammatory tone and then offer reasoning to explain how you feel!" As I've said before, I bet these people wonder why they have inner conflict. Oh well, I have karma to burn so let them do their worst. Maybe one day the abusers of the moderation system will realize how petty and impotent they really are. I hope this does not discourage you. There are good moderators, too, and you should never allow lesser men to get under your skin for it is how they get their power.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. Handling a DNS error in a user-friendly manner is up to the application that is processing said error. You are correct that this is a non-issue because Web browsers have taken care of it for a long time now (your figure of 10 years is modest). Breaking the DNS protocol to serve advertisements in the name of user-friendliness deserves to be exposed for the absurdity that it is. You know what I consider to be "user friendly?" Respecting your users enough to never insult their intelligence like this. I wouldn't complain or challenge them if they simply said up-front "this is how we make money" rather than the absurd volume of posts that amount to "this is for your own good of course; trust us, our motives are pure!"
I'll add one more thing. I'm not sure if I have ever seen so many posts in a single Slashdot discussion that smelled so strongly of astroturfing. I realize that normally, "astroturfing" or "shill" is brought up as a cop-out, but I encourage you to see that for yourself. Do a text search of this discussion for my username of "causality" and you'll see several posts of mine that are a direct response to this. They tend to post AC (though not all of them) and they tend to suddenly get very quiet when seriously challenged, as though they know that their position is absurd. It's ridiculous and I really wonder how stupid they think we are. I'm not saying for certain that astroturfing is going on because I can't prove it, but I can say is that I am convinced to my own satisfaction that this is the case.
Besides everything (scary) that is involved on using OpenDNS as your resolver, it's true that it can block the Conficker Worm. However, Conficker worm might be the last one that OpenDNS can stop. Once the evil minds realize the power of OpenDNS, they'll start using IP addresses instead of names within their worms (period).
You know I didn't even think of that. I did speculate that malware which can compromise the system can also alter DNS settings, either removing OpenDNS or (worse) replacing it with a hostile DNS server operated by the attacker. Your prediction is even simpler than that and sounds more likely.
That's really the problem with all of these blocklist solutions. None of them actually harden the host or address any of the widespread security problems that make these worms possible in the first place. The way I see it, there is one and only one reason why you have such things as worms and viruses. The reason is that an attacker can write a single piece of malware that can easily compromise thousands of vulnerable Windows machines in a fully automated fashion, with no skill required once the malware is written. If that ever changes, all of these blocklists and scanners and removal tools will be shown to be the superficial approaches that they really are.
This reminds me of a quote from Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." How true.
Stop spreading FUD. Their privacy policy says that "OpenDNS removes the IP address from its logs within 2 business days." That's better than Google and probably any other search engine you might use.
I said that use of their service would make them privy to information that I don't wish for them to have. Specifically, my information. I'd love to hear a self-consistent explanation of how that constitutes Fear, Uncertainty, and/or Doubt. In fact I hereby challenge you to provide one. I'd like to see you try, so I won't tell you right now why that will fail although it's qute possible Merriam Webster can fill you in. Extra points if it's not trivial for me to tear down your argument. I don't normally use a tone like this when I reply to someone, but you have made an accusation and I demand to see either your evidence or a concession that you have spoken amiss.
I'd also like a self-consistent explanation of how the privacy problems posed by various search engines somehow justifies unnecessarily supplying OpenDNS with my information. Considering that the services OpenDNS offers are worse for me than what I can do for myself using Open Source software, this would indeed be unnecessary. To justify what you just said, you would have to explain how one wrong thing justifies and excuses another, unrelated wrong thing. Good luck with that.
I strongly doubt I'm going to get either explanation. I fully expect you to quietly disappear from this thread and find an easier target for your apologist message, but on occasion people do surprise me. Having said that, I will add that I think you are misunderstanding something fundamental. I will explain what that is. I am not satisfied that they promise to play nice with my information or that they don't retain it for very long (nevermind that I cannot audit their systems, so I have no way to verify those claims and must take their word for it). I am satisfied when they have no access to my information. If other people don't feel that way, this is their business, but I considered all my options long before it ever occurred to you that a little two-liner from an AC was going to change my mind and I believe my stance is a solid one that I can back up. Can you say the same?
And what the hell is your point, exactly?
Whoopty doo to all of it, they redirect your packets through their servers. Is it going to kill you? Is it going to get your details stolen? It it going to screw up your connection? Didn't think so.
It's completely unnecessary and cannot possibly help or benefit you in any way. Do you really need any other reason to avoid it?
"If everything is going well and there are no problems, it will do absolutely nothing for you" is not what I consider a selling point. How much simpler than that do you need it to be?
They are "Open" in sense of DNS terminology. Open DNS is one of the significant misconfiguration of an ordinary DNS server can have but their business works by opening it to planet and add extra features to decades old service without breaking standards.
But they do break the DNS standard. As several other posters have pointed out, the DNS protocol calls for an "NXDOMAIN" response to a non-existent hostname. Instead of sending this response, they are showing sponsored links. Not to mention that DNS is already "open to the planet". There are about 13 root DNS servers. Anyone who wants to can run their own DNS server that contacts those root servers to handle DNS queries. For free. With open-source software that is also free. OpenDNS isn't providing anything that I cannot easily do for myself AND they are failing to conform to the DNS standard in order to display what I consider spam. Why do I consider their "sponsored" links to be spam? That's easy -- if I cared about their sponsors, they would not have to direct me to their sites, I would go there on my own.
On top of all of this, there are two threats to privacy posted by OpenDNS. One is the Google request "proxying" ("hijacking" is another word that equally applies, in my opinion) that can be turned off. The other is the fact that they would know every site I visit, which cannot be turned off and is an inherent part of the arrangement. Using such a system doesn't make any rational sense whatsoever.
You are either speaking about what you don't remotely understand, or you're not really so ignorant and have some undisclosed financial relationship to OpenDNS and are not being honest with us about that. Both are rather foolish. My suggestion to you is that if you insist on doing this, try it on an audience that is less tech-savvy. Better yet, inform yourself about these matters or get a job that doesn't remove your self-respect. If that sounds like a strong response, it's because of how misleading your post was and because of how rapidly several posts very much like it (lots of praise and little to no evidence and reasoning) have appeared in this discussion.
What you're showing is that the troll succeeded in making you rage. He'll now be more motivated to post it over and over, because he knows it works.
I think trying to explain this to people is a lot like back when AOL tried so hard to tell customers that their staff will never ask for their account password. Despite repeated warnings and prompts, the password phishers never seemed to have any problems. Those hardheaded users preferred the convenience of refusing to stop and think or to change their habits because both of those require a small amount of effort.
Likewise, people who feed trolls prefer their little emotional outbursts and the righteous feelings they get from them and are not interested in whether they are part of the problem. The idea that they are doing exactly what the troll wanted them to do does not get their attention. They may claim otherwise or feel inclined to argue with me about that, but this is very simple: when a person's words tell me one thing and their actions tell me another, I disregard their words every time. They don't really give me a choice in the matter.
I've started using OpenDNS since Denmark started censoring the Piratebay. The easiest way to circumvent the block.
(TPB: My #1 source to bad 80's movies! (which I personally don't think is illegal to download, I'm assuming; since no one apparently want to sell them, it must be because they are worthless (which, honestly, most of them are :-)))
There is one way that is easier still, which is to resolve thepiratebay.org once (it is 83.140.65.11) and then add that to your hosts file. That way you don't need to surrender the privacy of which sites you visit or which Google search terms you use to the operators of OpenDNS.
Really I'd prefer to just run my own local caching DNS server, which is what I do. I'd recommend maradns or djbdns and I'd strongly suggest staying away from BIND and its poor security history (same reason I absolutely refuse to use sendmail) unless you simply must have some feature exclusive to it. It also can't hurt to use your firewall to make sure that your local DNS server can use UDP port 53 to contact only the root DNS servers of the world (I believe there are 13 of them) and no other addresses outside of your LAN.
Sure, just install your own caching DNS server on your machine and set your DNS server to 127.0.0.1.
For Linux, it's trivial...most distros include a caching nameserver package.
For Windows, it's a little harder to set up some of the open source nameservers, but you also have some free closed source and commercial software to choose from. Try searching for "DNS server Windows" and the results should get you started.
This gives you one advantage I haven't seen anyone else mention. If you run a caching DNS server on localhost, any queries for data that's already in the cache are answered instantly. You get to control how many objects are in the cache and how long they remain cached. The suggestions that others have made for Level 3's servers at 4.2.2.2 etc. do not and cannot have this advantage because you will always have the network latency of sending a request and awaiting their response.
I say that knowing that the DNS resolver (the DNS client) can also cache responses. I am merely saying that a local DNS client that performs caching combined with a local DNS server that performs caching is significantly better than a local caching client and a remote DNS server. For new queries that could not possibly be cached on this end, I also feel that my local server outperforms my ISP's, in the sense that the ISP server may be beefier but it also has a drastically higher load.
The latency difference would not significantly affect any sort of realistic network benchmark. However, near-instantaneous and lower-latency DNS resolution has a significant impact on the psychological perception of performance, especially with a Web browser. Ad servers have two annoying habits: they are often the slowest part of a page to load and they tend not to specify image size in the IMG tags so the browser must load the advertisement before it can render the rest of the page. Because of that, running a well-configured local caching DNS server and combining that with ad blocking (I primarily use Adblock Plus) is one of the best ways you can speed up your subjective Web experience without actually purchasing more bandwidth.
FTFA:
.....instructs its drone machines to report to 250 different internet addresses each day. Without the service, admins would have to manually block 1,750 domains each week, or 91,250 each year.
Wouldn't blocking "this weeks" known IP addresses stop the addition of new ones, rendering the infection impotent?
That would address a symptom and would do nothing about the actual problem. We keep doing that because we don't want to admit that addressing only symptoms is a failed idea; trying harder and harder to find new ways to implement this idea won't change the fact that it's a failed idea.
The root problem is the vulnerability of Windows to these types of worms. Yes I am selectively speaking about Microsoft Windows; if I ever start seeing widespread (keyword) worms in the wild (keyword) for *nix operating systems then on that day I'll include them too. Anti-virus seeks to remove or contain an external object to which Windows is vulnerable, so it too addresses only the symptom and not the vulnerability. The reason why *nix operating systems don't generally need anti-virus (unless of course you ask an anti-virus vendor) is because they have a security model that is able to prevent infections from occurring in the first place. This is much simpler and more practical (but creates fewer cottage industries) than sophisticated scanners and high-maintainence databases of tens of thousands of signatures that must be applied to every file or every file operation. It's a lot simpler than pretending that DNS is the correct tool for host security as well.
If OpenDNS maintains a highly effective, well-maintained blocklist and if many people start using it, what happens next is rather predictable. A worm/virus that can compromise the machine can also alter that machine's DNS settings. It could make the machine stop using OpenDNS or worse (as another poster has pointed out) it could make it use a hostile DNS server. You can expect this to be a standard malware feature if OpenDNS's efforts are successful. That's the downside of participating in an arms race. The best way to avoid an arms race is to realize that mitigation techniques, while not completely useless, have extremely limited utility and that prevention is the only actual cure.
In the same manner that you give another entity access to all your NTP syncs.
OpenDNS is basically the same thing as the NTP pool.
Put the tinfoil down, and back away slowly...
I'm really not sure why people keep comparing OpenDNS to NTP. NTP shares the current time, in UTC. This information is not secret and is not a privacy violation because it was already available to anyone who wants it. If knowing your system time helps an attacker to i.e. guess your TCP sequence numbers, that is a weakness in your (pseudo)random number generator, not a weakness in running an NTP daemon.
Compare that to the data that OpenDNS can collect. They can see every hostname you resolve with their service. Not unlike application-level techniques used by various advertisers (web bugs, third-party cookies, redirections, HTTP "ping", etc.) to track your browsing, a list of every hostname you resolve can certainly compromise your privacy. Every site I visit, when I visited it, and an idea of how often I visited it is not "already available to anyone who wants it." Normally, to obtain this sort of information, an attacker would need to either break into this computer and install a program to log and transmit it, or they would need to conduct a man-in-the-middle type of attack against my ISP's network. There's a reason for that.
Why would I volunteer this data to a third-party who otherwise would have no access to it? What's my incentive to unnecessarily trust them in exchange for a service I don't need? It's not like there is anything difficult about running my own caching DNS server (and you can bet I don't use BIND), not to mention that DNS has to be one of the worst ways to deal with the problem of host security. It's just not a tool that was ever designed for this type of job; meanwhile, better tools that are designed for this job are readily and freely available. This might tempt someone who doesn't want to take responsibility for their own security and thinks anyone else should handle it for them, but I recognize that as a personal shortcoming, a flawed idea. The product of a flawed idea is also flawed, so with this arrangement you are merely trading one threat (the Conflicker worm) for another threat (reduced privacy). I can't call that a solution with a straight face.
That's how I feel when I see various corporations that want to restrict my freedoms in order to facilitate their business model. That is, I don't recognize their right to do so. I could voluntarily enter into such an arrangement with them, and many people do this, but they don't have a right to expect me to do so.
I have already addressed this in my previous response to you. I said "the mistake that ignorant people make is that they think it's about computing or software development just because that's the arena in which freedom is being limited." This is not about computing and it is not about software. It is about freedom. The Founding Fathers had quite a lot to say about freedom. They certainly understood that there are forces who would love to take it away from us by any means available. The "means available" change over time; the principles and concepts involved are timeless.
This is often referred to as the Information Age because of how important computers and software have become; it is logical and natural that those who would like to control others also recognize the importance of computers and software. In ages past, the same restrictions on freedom were accomplished by controlling books and literacy but no one who understood that would say that all of the struggling was over the cellulose of which paper is made. That's the mistake you're making when you think that this is about programming or markets. It's not about cellulose and it's not about compilers and programming languages; it's about unhindered access to ideas. For extreme examples, read Farenheit 451 or look at how threatened the Old South was by the idea of literate black people. The only difference between that and the current artificial limitations on information technology is degree, but the principle of controlling people by restricting their access to and uses of information is the same. That is one of the timeless principles, in fact -- rulers throughout history have realized that a well-informed, well-educated public is quite difficult to oppress.
I think you're forgetting that developers who create and release Open Source software do so voluntarily. No one is taking anything away from them; they give to the community because they are the kind of selfless people who enjoy doing that. What you say right there might be applicable to software piracy since commercial software companies do expect to be paid for their efforts, but it simply fails to describe anyone who releases software under the GPL (or similar licenses). So, yes I do run Linux and various Open Source applications and therefore I am enjoying the product of many hours of hard programming work, but the people who did that work wanted me to be able to do this and went out of their way to ensure that I could. These are good, respectable, selfless people who are willing to share the fruits of their labor. This is not an avoidance of "evil" as you suggest; it is an embracing of something good.
Not all rewards are financial. Some Open Source developers do it for prestige and respect, some do it out of love for the community, some of them just enjoy programming and sharing, and others have motives unknown to me. Some of them are professional software developers who produce Open Source during their free time, w
Unfortunately, large organizations often want to spend all of their budget or else they risk having less money allocated to them next year. That there are often no real incentives to cut costs (unless of course they are forced to do so by a "crisis") is one of the more counterintuitive traits of medium-to-large institutions. This is especially true of entitites that don't need to make a profit, such as governmental departments. To them, the "free as in beer" aspect of OpenOffice could actually be a disadvantage.
What you suggest is certainly possible, I just consider it more likely that individuals and small businesses (of which there are many; most jobs in the USA are with small businesses) will adopt something like Open Office before the megacorps will. Once there is a significant userbase, the larger organizations may then find other reasons why it makes sense to support or at least accommodate it, like user demand or appreciation of the dangers of vendorlock. Especially vendorlock -- why businesses would ever find it acceptable that a remote vendor could limit their access to their own data when alternatives are available is the part that I don't understand.
What if most people don't care about those 'rights'?
Then they stand to lose them.
The only injustice is that if anyone loses them, everyone loses them, not just the people who failed to value them. It's about freedom. The mistake that ignorant people make is that they think it's about computing or software development just because that's the arena in which freedom is being limited. This is called the inability to see the forest for all of the trees, and it's a big mistake. It's what happens when people are concerned with dramas and storylines and mundane details, which can be quite complex, and not the underlying principles that manifest those things, which are quite simple. I certainly have more respect for those who can confine the results of their mistakes to themselves than I do for those who don't care (and don't even check to see) if someone else suffers because of their negligence.
I know many here will disagree with this, so be it.
But it isn't about Microsoft, it's about proprietary software. Right now the situation is such that people are forced, whether at work or at home, to use software where you aren't allowed basic rights to the software you use: to use your software in any fashion, to modify it however you want, and to distribute it to whoever who want.
That is the goal, and that is why we need to usurp Microsoft. They are still the number one vendor of software that most people are still forced to use. Other companies are just as bad, but none as dominant.
So if Microsoft is specifically targeting free software, I suggest we fight back.
I think the best way to fight back is to ignore them and/or refuse to take them seriously. They take themselves so seriously (far too much) that this is also the last thing they would expect or be prepared for. There are two wrong responses to anyone (corporations included) who has no power over you except the power that you give to them.
The first wrong response is rebellion or active resistance. This amounts to lowering yourself to their level and then having them beat you with experience. Rebellion against Microsoft would mean competing with them toe-to-toe in the business world, with the goal of either bankrupting them or eventually buying them out. Microsoft has more resources available than many small nations; it should be obvious why this won't work. People who imagine that the purpose of Linux is to engage in a glorious marketing battle against Windows for the desktop subscribe to this faulty view. That view has multiple flaws and the largest is that the "desktop" is not some prize or spoil of war but a possession belonging to a person, a person who voluntarily decides what it will run. This is especially absurd for anyone who claims to value the "free as in speech" aspect of Open Source. Piles of gold or inanimate resources are appropriate spoils of a contest; the free choices of willing participants are not.
The second wrong response is confirmity. This describes the folks who might use Windows etc. because "everyone else does." Some of them don't have a choice due to extreme vendor lock-in, but by far most of them do. There is often a concomitant "might makes right" belief, typically expressed by the (faulty) reasoning that Microsoft must have dominated this market because of the inherent superiority of their products. Betamax vs. VHS is a good counter-argument. Unnecessarily caring about what other people are doing is the antithesis of free thought and suggests an unwillingness to live your own life.
The power of refusing to participate is almost always underestimated. What really works against the seemingly-invincible juggernauts is passive resistance, something very much like what Mahatma Ghandi practiced (and Henry David Thoreau et al before him). We have a great advantage here that Ghandi did not have. We can apply passive resistance to a corporation like Microsoft without breaking any laws, so we do not even need Ghandi's willingness to go to jail (and worse) to pull this off. The biggest threat to the Microsoft's of the world is not displacement but irrelevance.
The very existence of Free Software, Open Source and even Apple undermines the notion that Microsoft wants to plant in everybodies head : that software is so complex that you need a company as big as them for research, development, production and support of software.
Paranoid much?
Microsoft is simply a corporation, trying to make as much money as it can. They want as much market share as possible, obviously, but you seem to be taking it out on an emotional limb there.
That's not really paranoia. In fact marketers have a word for it; they call it "mindshare". There are related concepts. For example, what is advertising other than the manipulation of behavior (convincing you to do something you may not have done had you not seen the ad) brought about by "planting a message in everyone's head"? Advertisers will use humor, half-truths, small children, etc. to get you to associate laughter, an inaccurate but convenient worldview, or paternalistic/maternalistic feelings and instincts with their products. Absolutely nothing is sacred to them; nothing is so good or wholesome or precious or innocent or sacred that they won't use it as a tool to create an emotional association that allows them to implant a suggestion. They don't see you as a human being who is equal to them and worthy of respect. They can't, because if they saw you that way, they would be disinclined to manipulate you. They see you as a dehumanized resource to be mined just like so much coal or metallic ore. This is a good fit with the nature of a corporation and the way it calls on human beings to become interchangable parts in its machinery. Beings who are individuals and worthy of love and respect are not interchangable parts in a faceless machine.
If a company sees an increase in sales immediately following an advertising campaign, something has happened other than customers proactively considering all available options and choosing the best solution for their needs based on objective criteria. If the customers were doing that, no advertisement of any kind would change their minds because the dialog of a TV commercial does not change their needs or the facts of their situation. That something that has happened is manipulation by suggestion.
What you call paranoia is the realization that anyone willing to treat people in such an alienated, dehumanized fashion does this because he fancies himself to be their master. As mindless, sheeplike, obsessed with conformity, and unfamiliar with critical thinking as most people have become (yes I do level this charge; do you doubt it?), such a person is unfortunately correct in many cases. I realize that our current economy depends on this system and that the people participating in it are mostly well-meaning and ignorant of the damage that it does because it is difficult to quantify. You can't really assign a numer or an equation to it and our culture is terrible at handling anything for which this is the case because we celebrate cleverness but not wisdom.
Lots of people seem like they want to believe that there are no downsides to our current way of life. I am merely saying that we hear about the benefits of this system all the time; what so few are willing to discuss are its costs. No one is fully informed without a solid understanding of both the benefits and the costs. You were right, in a way, that it was being taken "out on an emotional limb", but that's because the manipulation upon which much of the modern economy is based is primarily accomplished by emotional impact. Contrast that with persuasion, which is done dispassionately with facts and reasoning, and you can then discern the motivation with ease.
Ignore that.
May I ask why you changed your mind? I question the necessity of asking if the guy is a "dumbass" because smart people can have lapses in judgment too, but otherwise I think you had a good point.
I'm also following your line of thinking. Why should it automatically detect your OS. I could be downloading from Fedora laptop to give to Win desktop b/c my network drivers are fried. If it really isn't for your OS version, it won't work, end of story. Why is this on the front page? The link isn't even the correct one...and unless I'm not reading this all correctly, it seems like someone is searching for a problem, rather than presenting an obvious one.
Yeah, that's exactly what bothers me about this posting.
There are legitimate grievances against Microsoft, concerning both their business practices and their products, to where there is no need to grasp at straws like this. For the purposes of this post I'll define "grievance" as "anything you dislike badly enough to refuse to do business with them". Maybe you really don't like Windows, maybe you see that they were convicted of monopolistic or anti-competitive practices in several countries and don't care to reward them with your patronage, or maybe you're just cheap and don't want to pay for a Windows license (and don't want to infringe anyone's copyrights) when free OSes of high quality are readily available.
My point is that if you want to criticize Microsoft or Windows and related products, this is one of the more counterproductive ways to do it. I should make one thing known: I do not like Microsoft or Windows at all and I have reasons for that, but I recognize that plenty of other people do like them. To those folks, a half-assed criticism like this looks like you're coming from a position of weakness. It looks like you have some kind of religious crusade or personal agenda and generally something other than facts and reasoning to back up your position. The fact is that if you use too many tactics like this and destroy your own credibility, your audience probably won't take you seriously again. Not only that, they will often ignore anyone who sounds too much like you even if that person does come up with facts and reasoning.
Silly tactics like "clutching at straws" and "making much ado about nothing" in matters that are usually handled by facts and logic (we're talking about computing here, not creative writing) are a good way to harm your own credibility, at least in the eyes of a savvy audience. It's primitive, but if you must imagine some huge contest between Windows and $ALTERNATIVE then think of it this way: the "other side" has their shills and their religious crusaders and their frothing-at-the-mouth irrational people, too. This is a great way to give (figurative, of course) ammunition to them. If you must believe this is a contest, some kind of glorious battle for domination of the desktop, think of this as arming your enemy. You don't win a contest by doing that.
Point I was making is, those of us who already know how, know enough to not shoot ourselves in the foot. The info is out there, and in the course of finding it, the newbie's gonna learn why doing it is a Bad Idea until they learn enough to not screw it up totally.
In a way I think we're taking two slightly different approaches and arriving at the same place. That often happens when I am knowledgable about a subject and am discussing it with someone else who is also knowledgable about the subject. I consider it to be something like a stylistic difference.
I agree strongly that "the info is out there". I think the biggest difference between a skilled admin and a newbie is that the skilled admin knows how to educate himself where a newbie tends to be much more passive in this regard. So often someone is considered an "expert" or not based on how much they have memorized. Sysadmins may be called upon to perform a task when they may have never done that precise task before; they just know how to find good information and how to integrate it with their existing knowledge and how to find parallels between the new information and what they already understand. I appreciate your reasonable response and can add that I cannot help but agree with you about the (strong) importance of obtaining your own understanding of what is a Bad Idea and why. Especially the "why", as I consider that more important and more useful than a list of do's and don'ts, however comprehensive that list may be.
I think you should reread the parent's comment and then realize how much of an idiot you've been.
Don't worry, if I know the Slashdot mods, they'll mod you down to -1 as Flamebait and will probably mod him up using some flimsy excuse. I bet they think that the redistribution of wealth is a legitimate exercise of governmental power, too. It never occurs to them that egregious errors like those made by cp.tar are the source of most "Flamebait" and anyone who makes them should be considered fair game. That's if you're interested in an overall reduction in "Flamebait". If you just want to bitch and moan and think moderation is one good way to do that, then please don't change anything, it's already perfect for your purposes.
I see your post is at -1 Flamebait. Though you were primarily talking about the other guy, I can't help but notice that the moderators have proven your point for you. That is, if they were going to mod you down for something, Offtopic would have actually been appropriate and they refuse to do that correctly. I say refuse because I believe they are perfectly capable, they just don't care because the moment you criticized them it became a personal crusade (lesser men react this way to criticism because they don't have what it takes to handle it gracefully) and their only concern was finding a way to shut you up. It should be obvious that this is what happened here, so yes they did an excellent job of proving your point. I wish they'd bring back the old metamoderation system; it was much better at dealing with this sort of pettiness.
The "Comments and Moderation" section of the Slashdot FAQ defines it this way: "Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage." Let's put your post to the test, shall we? No, you weren't nice, but you weren't exactly malicious and frothing-at-the-mouth either and I would expect a moderator to appreciate the difference. You pointed out what you perceive to be a problem, you discussed what you believe causes that problem, and you proposed a solution, however imperfect that may be. This really fails every test of "Flamebait" that could be applied to it. I can't even come up with a half-assed excuse that would justify calling it that with a straight face.
I don't hate anyone, but even if I strongly disagreed with you and hated your guts, I would feel like pretending that you made a Flamebait post when you clearly didn't, just so I could (ab)use the Slashdot moderation system to lash out at you would be one of the more petty and infantile things I could do. I feel like if I did that, it would say a lot of bad things about me and my character and my integrity but would say nothing at all about you. Whatever happened to taking someone on, like in open debate, if you've got a problem with them or don't like what they say? Am I the only one who sees how cowardly it is to try to do the same thing by abusing a moderation system? I wonder how many moderators will now get pissed off at me for saying what I believe while conveniently ignoring that they cannot possibly do so without becoming what I just described (and some people wonder why they have inner conflict). If so, you should know that it's not nearly the first time I've seen low-quality moderation and called it what it was. It won't be the last time either, unfortunately, though that's not how I would have it.
Alright Causality, what the hell do you think "chronological" means? You said it twice. Chronological adults? What?
People who are "adult" in terms of their physical age, that is, the amount of time that has passed since they were born. I am using the term to describe people who are small-minded and immature (especially emotionally) and generally childish because the only way they ever grew up was physically, yet they are more than old enough that they are capable of better. I also refer to them as "overgrown children". They express that in a large variety of ways, but they all have a few things in common.
:-).
All of them are primarily concerned with their wants and gratifications, at least more so than they are concerned about how their actions affect other people. They all have beliefs, including strong ones, that they have never questioned or seriously compared to other ideas in a process of refining what they believe (this sort of unquestioning obedience is nothing less than a form of slavery) and in this fashion they resemble machines that are programmed more than human beings who contemplate. They have a strong victim mentality that causes them to see the world as events that happen to them rather than systems in which they voluntarily participate. They are not courageous, in fact they are often cowards, but they may think that cruelty and the needless use of force is the same thing as courage. They think that learning is terribly hard work to be avoided instead of feeling a joy of discovery, or they're simply threatened by what they don't understand. In short, they are not fully living their own lives and it shows in the fact that none of them are joyous. They might be happy and gratified when they get what they want but it's always momentary; it is not a lasting appreciation of life for its own sake.
The problem is that this is so widespread that you now have an entire generation of people which has known no better example. This has become the culture and what I described above has become the average person, at least in the USA. It'll end as soon as people get tired of living in such a limited fashion and not a moment before, so in that way it does seem to serve a purpose. You should be able to see why patient understanding is the only correct response, but patient understanding does not imply a reluctance to call things what they are or to decide for yourself whether you will be available or unavailable for experiencing the results. My posts above about the last experiences I had with theaters amount to a description of the results and why I won't put myself in their path.
I hope that addresses your question. It was a worthy question, well worth answering, so please excuse my lack of brevity
The spam problem will not be solved with laws or pretty tricks like this.
It is a technological problem, and as such will be solved by technological changes: the SMTP protocol is outdated and totally unadapted to the modern uses to which we put it. Let's replace it with something that authentifies sender and receiver properly, and that allows for efficient transmission of binary data.
I've always seen spam as an economic problem with many parallels to prohibition (like the War on Some Drugs). The actual problem is that so long as there are people in sufficient numbers who are willing to buy from a spammer (or who are vulnerable to being defrauded by a spammer), the spammers will find some way to do what they do. Spam is something of a business; it will end the moment it's difficult enough to do that a spammer can no longer make a profit. You don't really need any sort of perfect solution, just one that's good enough to remove the profit and put them out of business.
The parallels to prohibition really are strong. For example, trying to end spam by catching and prosecuting spammers will have about as much of an impact on spam as arresting drug dealers has had on the War on Some Drugs, i.e. little to none, and that's assuming no jurisdictional problems. In fact, to drug dealers and spammers alike, increased risk means less competition and higher profits when looked at from a purely business perspective. There simply is no force available that can neutralize sufficient economic demand and to spammers, who don't care about legal/ethical issues, being an easy target for scams is as indistinguishable from demand as willingly buying from them. You're right that laws or pretty tricks won't solve the problem, but I propose that technological changes won't solve the problem either. What is needed is for large numbers of people to both realize and care that this is a shared network and that their actions (such as buying from spammers or running insecure systems or making insecure transactions) can negatively impact other people. Obtain that sort of widespread understanding and these matters will take care of themselves. Try to proceed without it and see how insoluable this problem can be.
This idea about sending fake phishing e-mails might actually have an impact because the ultimate cause (or ultimate enabler) of this economic problem is the large number of ignorant users. This may identify some of them and prove to them that their current understanding leaves them vulnerable. I don't think this alone will end spam once and for all, but it's one of the few solutions I've heard that shows an awareness of the underlying problem.
Last time I looked, Redhat (Fedora, actually) wants you to make a root account at install. That was with FC7, the last time I ran Fedora on one of my machines. Ubuntu adds the first user account created in a fresh install to the sudo list.
There is a way to get a shell with root access so you can do a bunch of things without bothering with sudo, but I'm not gonna tell ya how.
Ubuntu's setup is just a simple matter of configuration (as you know). There's a few ways to get an unfettered root shell in Ubuntu. You could use "su" (installing it if need be), you could do "sudo bash", or you could unlock the root account so that you can simply login as root. This sort of management of user accounts and privileges is one of the most basic system administration tasks imaginable.
I just mention that not to tell you anything you don't know (I really doubt I'm doing that) or to antagonize you, but that I think "not gonna tell ya how" creates a mystique that could be replaced with an understanding of both how to do these things and when not to do these things. Ubuntu gets one thing right, which is that a user knowledgable enough about the basics to modify their setup is probably also knowledgable enough to understand why the limited use of root is a good thing. I feel like proper privilege separation is one thing that Unix got right, from the beginning, and that the severity of many of the security issues on Windows are because it is still playing catch-up (UAC is a step in that direction but not a real substitute). I think the Ubuntu setup is a pretty good default but I think that because of Ubuntu's target audience, which could be contrasted with LFS's target audience or Gentoo's target audience.
You can still copy and paste the address under the link.
I'm not entirely sure if it's exclusively RedirectRemover that does this or if perhaps NoScript is also playing a role (I don't use Gmail so I don't run any Javascript from Google), but when I do a Google search and click a result link, there is no redirect at all. It goes straight to the destination URL without sending any additional requests through Google's servers. I set it up this way some time ago for privacy and performance reasons and it's interesting that I it seems to have mitigated this problem for me as well.
Please, don't presume to tell me you know how to better operate a theatre. It justs makes you seem like an ass. It's incredibly presumptive of you to think that starting off a conversation with a patron with a threat is somehow going to lead to a situation that helps anyone.
That you wouldn't want a customer or a potential customer to tell you how he would like for you to do business, in fact, that you think such a customer is an "ass", is also part of the problem. I'm sure you have a challenging and exciting career as a movie theater operator or usher or whatever it is that you do; the reason you have that is because people like me are (or were) willing to pay you for it. Let's get one thing straight: if you operate a business and I am the customer, you are there to serve me, fullstop. That may include entertaining suggestions about what I'd like to see, even if they don't personally suit your own tastes, for it is the nature of business to respond to demand. If that's somehow offensive or otherwise not to your liking, perhaps dealing with the public isn't for you. Having established that, I'll respond to the only worthwhile statement you made.
... until they become disruptive and ruin the experience for everyone else. Then, to quote Spock, you have a situation where "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." As a purely business decision, I would refund the ticket money if I were the owner and asked someone to leave because a confrontation over the money is not worth it. But whether the money is refunded or not, I absolutely refuse to have a confrontation or an argument over the exercise of a basic right. The person I'm dealing with respects my basic rights because I respect his, or he doesn't, and if he doesn't and wants to have a confrontation about it, there are ways to deal with people like him that don't involve going toe-to-toe as though his position were equally valid (it isn't). I gave one such example. If you ask someone to leave and they want to argue so you tell them there will be police involved and charges pressed if they refuse, that is not a threat; that is how you protect your rights against those who don't want to honor them without breaking the law yourself. I'm not crazy about police, but that's actually what they're for. It would take only one or two such incidents before it became generally known that you're not going to be a pushover and cave in; once that's established, there won't be arguments about such basic and obvious things like whether the proprietor has the right to eject an unruly customer. That is a situation that does help everyone, especially you.
I recognize the right of the owner of an establishment to determine who may and may not remain in that establishment. There is nothing unreasonable about this -- the same principle is why strangers don't enter your home and walk in on you while you're showering and why you could do something about it if they did.
Now a movie theater, like any other publicly-accessible business, wants to be a place where anyone feels welcome to visit because visitors spend money there. There is every reason to encourage them to do so
Now I will address your little outburst of indignity. What I said involved dealing with the people who just want to argue, like you mentioned. Nowhere did I say "you should start the conversation off by mentioning police." You're responding as though I said that, but that isn't what I said. How's it feel knowing that this misunderstanding is over nothing? For some reason, a few Slashdotters really seem to have a hard-on over responding to statements that weren't made ("twisting what you did say" might be a more accurate phrasing). They all have one thing in common: they never respond to favorable things that weren't said. For that reason, I recognize this as the tactic designed to control that it actually is. The really strange thing about people is that they can use fairly elaborate tactics, including
On an off-topic note, following one of the links promising asian intercourse brought me to the most elaborate fake-virus-scan scam I've ever seen (probably NSF insecure browsers): http://computerantivirusproscan.com/promo/1/freescan.php?nu=880407 Is this the norm today?
It's apparently the norm for people who can't tell it's a scam and honestly believe that some random Web link is going to bring them sex with Asians. Provided that the scam is painful enough, I can't find anything wrong with that.