"For your home, SATA (or IDE) disks yes, but ISPs (which I have worked for many) use expensive storage system such as NetApps for example which are significantly more expensive."
So then let's bump that 30 to 50 cents all the way up to a whole two dollars in raw hardware cost, per gig. You cannot recoup that in subscriber fees in a year?
"2. Google can offer it for next to nothing while ISP get paid 20-30 bucks a month can't offer more space."
Oh, good show. Changing 30-50/month to 20-30. Sorry, but prices for broadband hereabouts is closer to _my_ figures, not yours. The only time it's 20/month is when the broadband provider is offering a 6 month special or if it's the bottom of the barrel 768K down 128K up at $25 a month.
"I don't know the internal workings but I wouldn't be surprised if 1G of mail used less than 100M of real disk space."
It's not compressed. Try it. Send 20MB of JPEGs to yourself in Yahoo and see what your remaining space decreases by. (jpegs cannot be usefully compressed by LZW style compressions and may even add to the file size, so this is a good test.)
And lastly:
"As you know most email is in plain text" Really. People mail all sorts of things these days. (fake astonishment) My gawd, they even have this thing where you can view pictures and all sorts of stuff! You should see it!
The big deal is that some ISPs, especially American ones, sit on their fat asses and not upgrade equipment, and the attitude from the OP is that "you can like it or you can lump it." Well...(steve martin)EXCUUUUUSE MEEEE!(/steve martin)
"If you want to provide users with 500MB of space times 200,000 then go for it."
Google and Yahoo does. I don't see them crying.
"500MB x 200,000 might be a tad minor to some, consider backing this all up times a factor of at least 3."
Cry me a freakin' river. If Y! and Google can supply users with umpteen megabytes of disk space for non-paying customers, and you're an ISP charging 30-50 bux a month (and twice to three times that from your non-residential customers) and unable to offer the same, then you're doing something wrong.
"Iwork at a rather large ISP, and I really don't see the advantages. First off, customers always forget passwords, they already get 10MB of space per email account, and we allow 6 total, per account. (6x10=60MB)"
Wow. The local Unix BBS offers me a half gig.
Welcome to (deleted) Public Access Unix Quotas: There is an unenforced limit of 500 megs per user. Type "rules" for information on inappropriate use of the system. Note: If you're a new Unix user, enter "(deleted)help" for some general hints. >>>> No background processes are allowed!
I've got a couple of gmail accounts too. I hardly use my ISP's email because it's too limited. To top if off, you think that your company is magnanimous in "giving" 10 megs per user. Disk space is dirt cheap, and easily paid for by user subscriptions. If you're not offering a gig, which costs somewhere on the order of 30 to 50 cents in hardware, then you're not really offering anything that your customers are paying for. 10 megs/user, 60 total? Nickel and diming, literally.
"That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers."
Three lions escape from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.
They decide to split up, to improve the chances that they won't all be caught all at once, and agree to meet three months later to compare notes.
So three months pass by and they all meet. Two of the lions are all skin and bone. One is shaking, he says "I ate one kid at a school and they chased me into the woods. I had to live on voles, shrews, and the occasional mountain biker...stringy, they are." The second lion, also skinny, said "I ate a cop, and they chased me 'round the city and I wound up having to climb up Mt. Ranier and all I could find to eat was squirrels."
So the two look at the third lion and ask why he's so fat and happy:
"I hid in the bushes next to Microsoft's main entrance. I ate a manager a day and nobody noticed."
-- BMO
(joke shamelessly stolen and adapted from IBM to Microsoft)
Lean isn't mysterious. It's popular, especially in manufacturing.
It ain't about laying off people. Not if you do it right.
However, for many companies, it's a radical re-think of the corporate culture and hard to implement because far too many managers can't wrap their heads around some of the concepts and think it's just simpler to get rid of people. That's not Lean. That's just stupidity.
-- BMO - "I'm not anti-business. I'm anti stupidity" - Dilbert
"They will eventually realize that unencrypted traffic is like sending postcards instead of letters and like yelling in a town square instead of making a phonecall (though I remember seeing people using a phone in a town square, yelling so loudly I thought they didn't really need the phone in the first place....)"
I must be a cynical bastard because I see that what you say in the first half is contradicted in the second half of what you wrote. People don't know or care how wide open most communication is. Let's take cordless phones. For the longest time, they were simple part 15 devices that didn't frequency hop (DSS) were pure analog (as opposed to digital), and broadcast everything in the clear in easy to tune frequencies. Only when DSS was available would I consider cordless phones "safe". 20 years ago I tried explaining this to my _parents_ about cordless phones WRT scanners. No traction. Zero. And my dad isn't technically illiterate.
His sister still uses a 20 year old cordless. She won't upgrade.
Most people assume that nobody will ever listen. Got a baby monitor? You might be very entertaining to your neighbors. Personally I don't have a scanner. I don't want to know. I _really_ don't want to know. But that's just me.
"the gagging point is almost quantum in nature - one moment, there is not a sign of it anywhere; the other, it punches you in the face."
You have much more faith in fellow human beings than I do. People will "swallow camels and strain at gnats."
Quote from someone probably smarter than me long ago. Written down in a book that's kinda popular.
"Hopefully this will drive people and information service providers to use encryption wherever they can."
Of the general population of the US, only the technically minded minority will do that.
Seriously. Try to talk to someone who thinks that the Internet is the IE icon (really, a co-worker keeps saying this) and all you'll get is glazed eyeballs and a "I don't get it. It's too complicated. I have nothing to hide" reaction.
Such people can't even be trusted to keep their anti-malware software for Windows up to date. You think the general public is going to start encrypting everything suddenly because of this?
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
Only if encryption gets as transparent as the fish:// ioslave in KDE will it get serious adoption, and even then it will have to be enabled by default. Don't expect Microsoft to lead the way in this department.
"I don't have the references, but as recently as a few years ago there was a patent issued (and a start-up company associated with it), that re-formatted text as single words presented to the user full-screen."
Another "just because it's on a computer it gets a patent" idiocy. The idea is at least 35 years old according to personal direct experience.
Anyway, a sort-of flash example. Not for scientific purposes. Might be safe for work or not. It's just text and jazz:
Before the invention of desktop computers, this is the exact way I boosted my reading speed in elementary school.
There were these little projectors you could take with you to a corner or wherever. The film strip had words on it and there was a dial you could turn. It displayed one word at a time. You set the dial to where you could barely keep up, and as you got more comfortable at higher speeds, you turned the dial up more.
So let's just say that Vint Cerf is off by 50 percent in the wrong direction. So I'll pull a number out of my ass and say 1/8. That's still a ton.
"dared someone to provide proof that any "GNU/Linux" machine was in a botnet."
Well, that's just silly. If I want amusement, I'll put SSH back on 22 and watch the bots hit the logs.
"It's interesting no one else bothered to question that number."
That number is plausible to me. Most people are running around with expired AV and Anti-Spyware, which is _worse_ IMO than no protection at all. Many people think that they don't need to update after their trial periods run out. If you were to say non-professionally administered machines (the ones sitting at home) I'd guess higher than Vint by 100 percent. Half of all home machines, and I think that guess is low.
People take care of their cars better, and that's not saying much.
And it's not just refuting the sham expert, it's about refuting the RIAA's strategy in general, and it's worked. The RIAA has much higher hurdles to jump now. Extorting money from random people just became much more expensive.
"So that's a bit like talking about botnets and your desperate denial of the existence of Linux botnets with tens of thousands of machines?"
Tens of thousands?
I don't really know about that, but let's take that number at face value and compare that to what Vint Cerf has calculated: he figures that 1/4 of all Windows clients are bots.
That's 150 MILLION machines compared to your purported "tens of thousands". The Bible says something about removing a log of wood from your own eye before pointing out a speck of dust in another's. Religious or not, it's good advice.
And let's look at the attack vectors for "linux botnets" - nearly all of them are servers running vulnerable PHP code and victims of brute force attacks at the SSH port. This is _trivial_ to secure. If you run sshd on any port other than 22, all those "invalid user" messages simply go away. That's not even taking into account using Denyhosts. If you combine the two strategies, it's simply too much of a waste of time for someone to try to root the box through SSH. The other obvious strategy is to not run random PHP code without checking first online if it's massive security risk.
But that's all about server stuff. Joe and Josephine User don't run services, or at least shouldn't. Gone are the days of Linux shipping with tons of services turned on by default - they must be configured and started by the owner. Take a Linux distro like Ubuntu 7.04, and stick it on a computer bare-arsed naked to a cable modem. The likelihood of a successful attack is nearly nil, but to do the same thing to a Windows machine, a take-over is 50 percent likely within 20 minutes (I'm being generous here, I've seen most estimates below 12 minutes and 5 minutes) - before patches can be successfully installed.
So you can sit there and blame the user all you like, but it doesn't change the reality that Windows is unsafe at any speed, by design.
If you use Windows, each new installation (or daemonic posession) in your computer negates whatever gains you may have had gotten through Moore's Law.
Computers only 12 months old with a _gigabye_(!) of RAM are not robust enough to run a full install of Vista with all the bells and whistles, for example.
-- BMO
Yeah, mod me troll, bitch. I've got more karma than you've got mod points.
--Msg: 28501 of 28505 4/23/2007 6:17:36 PM Recs: 8 Sentiment: Strong Sell By: atul666 Send PM Profile Ignore Recommend Add To Favorites The REAL reason Ralphie hates open wireless
Here's a curious thing. During the recent CP80 hearings in Utah, Ralphie proposed cracking down on local Utah ISPs, and anyone who offers open wireless access. The one witness in opposition quoted in the media was one Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, a local Utah ISP that would disproportionately bear the brunt of Ralphie's proposal, since it's a local ISP, and offers open wireless access in the Salt Lake metro area. It seemed odd at the time that Ralphie and the legislators would be so hot on the proposal, since ISPs based out of state would be unaffected by the proposed law, so the law would have no effect whatsoever on the pr0n "crisis".
Pete Ashdown's name sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn't connect the dots until today. In addition to being the founder & owner of XMission, Mr. Ashdown was also the Democratic challenger to Sen. Orrin Hatch in last year's general election.
Recall that Ralphie donated quite heavily to Sen. Hatch's reelection campaign, with donations arriving in his name and the names of his kids as well. Which isn't technically legal, but hey. Oh, and Hatch's son is one of SCO's top lawyers, of course.
So maybe this is all one big incredible coincidence. Or maybe it's political payback time, with Ralphie trying to buy a few more favors in the process.
Msg: 28505 of 28505 4/23/2007 7:06:32 PM Recs: 0 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: monsieur_bobo Send PM Profile Ignore Recommend Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 28501 by atul666
Re: The REAL reason Ralphie hates open wireless
[Or maybe it's political payback time, with Ralphie trying to buy a few more favors in the process. ]
I'll pick door number two - payback time. If Mr. Ashdown had any other political ambitions, they are history now. From here on out, Mr Ashdown is going to labeled as, at best 'soft on child pornography' and, at worst, a purveyor of child porn. Child porn is everybody's favorite campaign issue because nobody is for it and, once you get elected, you don't actually have to *do* anything about it as it is already against the law and vigorously prosecuted. From here on out, thanks to Ralph 'Spoilsport' Yarro, Mr. Ashdown is on the wrong side on an issue that creates a very powerful gut level reaction. Mr. Ashdown could cure cancer, bring world peace, stop gloabl warming, and eliminate poverty world wide and he has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher.
3.2.22 What's a "Joe Job"? The act of faking a spam so that it appears to be from an innocent third party, in order to damage their reputation and possibly to trick their provider into revoking their Internet access. Named after Joes.com, which was victimized in this way by a spammer some years ago.
You will not wind up on a blacklist. This is a well known phenomenon among mail admins.
Couldn't we just have a contest where actual live spammers are fed to lions?
To quote Bill Mattocks...
"My sense of personal integrity is none of your concern."
-thus spake Walt "Pickle Jar" Rines "I'm going to pound your balls flat with a wooden mallet."
-thus respondeth Bill Mattocks
And TSG has alleged that nobody can write an OS kernel by his lonesome. TSG has alleged many, MANY things. They have even alleged that I, BMO, personally owe them $699 per CPU to run Linux. To date, none of their allegations were shown to have any weight. None, zero, nada, nil.
PJ didn't need to fake an illness to duck a subpoena. This is the internet, isn't it?. She could be anywhere in the world and still run Groklaw. She could be sitting right next to me.
Nevermind the stories by Lyin' Lyons et alia came out saying that PJ was being subpoenaed _after_ PJ said she needed to take a health break.
"You should put the virtual disk under version control."
VMware does that. To clean the virtual machine, you can pick any of the older images. I was asked if I tried uninstalling using the spyware company uninstaller and I said no. I picked the April 1 image out of a perverted sense of humor. -- BMO
"that Investor Village was spreading some "updater.exe" the other day (via ads), so this might have been a bit larger than just the one site?"
It's spyware from an ad service. It's like those "Your computer is infected" ads on a Yahoo page.
The real carrier of the evil is dropspam.com, which pretends to be a spam filtering service. I fired up VMware and installed upgrade.exe out of morbid curiosity. The results are here:
Msg: 26529 of 26688 4/6/2007 6:57:44 AM Recs: 26 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Boyle M. Owl Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 26470 by sco_source_scam
Re: IV advertising malware? Dropspam.com
The tiny program is a downloader and installer. I have run it inside of VMware, the only way to run Windows...
It may be legitimate, but read on, and grok the implications of the license....
3. Licensee's Covenants (a) The Licensee has read all information pertaining to the operation of the Software and expressly agrees that the Licensor shall be permitted to make any modifications, alterations and re-configurations to the Licensee's computer hardware and software including its email inbox and outbox as required for the normal operation of the Software, including but not limited to the re-routing of emails to the Licensor's server for the purposes of screening emails for spam and viruses and attaching a brief message promoting the Software to all out-going emails of the Licensee.
The licensor can kindly stay the fuck out of my computer, tyvm.
(b) The Licensee further agrees that the Licensor shall be permitted to send emails (Authentication Emails) on behalf of the Licensee to those email addresses which have been stored in the Licensee's computer or which appear as senders in incoming emails, for the purposes of authenticating these email addresses and providing the recipients with an opportunity to update the Licensor with additional authentic email addresses.
"We're going to examine your drive for email addresses, and then we're going to spam the shit out of your friends."
(c) If the Licensee wishes to delete or remove the Software for any reason, such deletion or removal must be carried out using either the program or software removal tool inherent in the Licensee's computer operating system including the Add/Remove tool provided by Microsoft® Windows, or such other similar program or software provided by the Licensor, which will be available to the Licensee through the Licensor's website. The Licensee acknowledges that if the deletion or removal of the Software is carried out by any other manner or by using any program or software other than those described above, the Licensee's email software or system may not be restored fully and/or may fail to start up and function properly, and as a result the Licensee may not be able to receive or send emails.
"Yeah, ya see, our program so severely fucks your system that if you try to remove us with something that might work, we'll break your smtp and pop3 server pointers."
As I wrote this, several other popups came up and want me to install shit. Ahahahah, I'm going to install all this and then I'm going to run a friend's malware scanner to see what it really does.
Ghod...this is what being a windows user is like?! I have forgotten!
-- BMO
Msg: 26531 of 26688 4/6/2007 7:18:35 AM Recs: 25 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Boyle M. Owl Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 26529 by Boyle M. Owl Re: IV advertising malware? Dropspam.com
I do this shit so you don't have to...
Up until I installed upgrade.exe, the system was pristine except for an installation of OpenOffice and Opera....
BTW, this is just a _part_ of the log that goes on forever...
Checking system programs...
Checking Windows directory contents... c:\windows\appupdate.exe: Version info not found (Suspicious) c:\windows\ewwsetup.exe:
"Yeah? Which version of OpenSSH? Got the latest security patches from Apple? What's your IP address?"
First off, only the clued even know that ssh exists and how to turn it on. Joe and Josephine user don't know nor care what it is. It's not turned on by default. If one is offering SSH as a service, one should be clued into where to get updates, and recompiling one's own instead of waiting for Apple. Funny how Apple includes a full dev kit with OS/X and Microsoft doesn't for Windows. http://developer.apple.com/tools/
The fact is that OS/X is far more robust than any version of Windows. The proof is in the pudding, puddin'.
Slashdot Mirror
"Novell worked out a deal with Microsoft. Novell got a big bucket-o-cash, and Microsoft got what still seems to amount to nothing."
And Judas got a pocketful of coins for only a kiss.
What did Microsoft get? Microsoft got _validation_ from one of the premier Linux distributors for what it considers pocket change.
I've got a question for John Dragoon: How do those pieces of silver feel now?
--
BMO
So when is Con Ed going to stop electrocuting dogs and passers by?
c s/people/l/jodie_lane/index.html?query=CONSOLIDATE D%20EDISON%20INC&field=org&match=exact
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopi
Fix THAT first.
--
BMO
"For your home, SATA (or IDE) disks yes, but ISPs (which I have worked for many) use expensive storage system such as NetApps for example which are significantly more expensive."
So then let's bump that 30 to 50 cents all the way up to a whole two dollars in raw hardware cost, per gig. You cannot recoup that in subscriber fees in a year?
"2. Google can offer it for next to nothing while ISP get paid 20-30 bucks a month can't offer more space."
Oh, good show. Changing 30-50/month to 20-30. Sorry, but prices for broadband hereabouts is closer to _my_ figures, not yours. The only time it's 20/month is when the broadband provider is offering a 6 month special or if it's the bottom of the barrel 768K down 128K up at $25 a month.
"I don't know the internal workings but I wouldn't be surprised if 1G of mail used less than 100M of real disk space."
It's not compressed. Try it. Send 20MB of JPEGs to yourself in Yahoo and see what your remaining space decreases by. (jpegs cannot be usefully compressed by LZW style compressions and may even add to the file size, so this is a good test.)
And lastly:
"As you know most email is in plain text" Really. People mail all sorts of things these days. (fake astonishment) My gawd, they even have this thing where you can view pictures and all sorts of stuff! You should see it!
--
BMO
The big deal is that some ISPs, especially American ones, sit on their fat asses and not upgrade equipment, and the attitude from the OP is that "you can like it or you can lump it." Well...(steve martin)EXCUUUUUSE MEEEE!(/steve martin)
"If you want to provide users with 500MB of space times 200,000 then go for it."
Google and Yahoo does. I don't see them crying.
"500MB x 200,000 might be a tad minor to some, consider backing this all up times a factor of at least 3."
Cry me a freakin' river. If Y! and Google can supply users with umpteen megabytes of disk space for non-paying customers, and you're an ISP charging 30-50 bux a month (and twice to three times that from your non-residential customers) and unable to offer the same, then you're doing something wrong.
--
BMO
"Iwork at a rather large ISP, and I really don't see the advantages. First off, customers always forget passwords, they already get 10MB of space per email account, and we allow 6 total, per account. (6x10=60MB)"
Wow. The local Unix BBS offers me a half gig.
Welcome to (deleted) Public Access Unix
Quotas: There is an unenforced limit of 500 megs per user.
Type "rules" for information on inappropriate use of the system.
Note: If you're a new Unix user, enter "(deleted)help" for some general hints.
>>>> No background processes are allowed!
I've got a couple of gmail accounts too. I hardly use my ISP's email because it's too limited. To top if off, you think that your company is magnanimous in "giving" 10 megs per user. Disk space is dirt cheap, and easily paid for by user subscriptions. If you're not offering a gig, which costs somewhere on the order of 30 to 50 cents in hardware, then you're not really offering anything that your customers are paying for. 10 megs/user, 60 total? Nickel and diming, literally.
--
BMO
"That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers."
Three lions escape from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.
They decide to split up, to improve the chances that they won't all be caught all at once, and agree to meet three months later to compare notes.
So three months pass by and they all meet. Two of the lions are all skin and bone. One is shaking, he says "I ate one kid at a school and they chased me into the woods. I had to live on voles, shrews, and the occasional mountain biker...stringy, they are." The second lion, also skinny, said "I ate a cop, and they chased me 'round the city and I wound up having to climb up Mt. Ranier and all I could find to eat was squirrels."
So the two look at the third lion and ask why he's so fat and happy:
"I hid in the bushes next to Microsoft's main entrance. I ate a manager a day and nobody noticed."
--
BMO
(joke shamelessly stolen and adapted from IBM to Microsoft)
Lean isn't mysterious. It's popular, especially in manufacturing.
It ain't about laying off people. Not if you do it right.
However, for many companies, it's a radical re-think of the corporate culture and hard to implement because far too many managers can't wrap their heads around some of the concepts and think it's just simpler to get rid of people. That's not Lean. That's just stupidity.
--
BMO - "I'm not anti-business. I'm anti stupidity" - Dilbert
"They will eventually realize that unencrypted traffic is like sending postcards instead of letters and like yelling in a town square instead of making a phonecall (though I remember seeing people using a phone in a town square, yelling so loudly I thought they didn't really need the phone in the first place....)"
I must be a cynical bastard because I see that what you say in the first half is contradicted in the second half of what you wrote. People don't know or care how wide open most communication is. Let's take cordless phones. For the longest time, they were simple part 15 devices that didn't frequency hop (DSS) were pure analog (as opposed to digital), and broadcast everything in the clear in easy to tune frequencies. Only when DSS was available would I consider cordless phones "safe". 20 years ago I tried explaining this to my _parents_ about cordless phones WRT scanners. No traction. Zero. And my dad isn't technically illiterate.
His sister still uses a 20 year old cordless. She won't upgrade.
Most people assume that nobody will ever listen. Got a baby monitor? You might be very entertaining to your neighbors. Personally I don't have a scanner. I don't want to know. I _really_ don't want to know. But that's just me.
"the gagging point is almost quantum in nature - one moment, there is not a sign of it anywhere; the other, it punches you in the face."
You have much more faith in fellow human beings than I do. People will "swallow camels and strain at gnats."
Quote from someone probably smarter than me long ago. Written down in a book that's kinda popular.
'Tis the way of the world.
--
BMO
"Hopefully this will drive people and information service providers to use encryption wherever they can."
Of the general population of the US, only the technically minded minority will do that.
Seriously. Try to talk to someone who thinks that the Internet is the IE icon (really, a co-worker keeps saying this) and all you'll get is glazed eyeballs and a "I don't get it. It's too complicated. I have nothing to hide" reaction.
Such people can't even be trusted to keep their anti-malware software for Windows up to date. You think the general public is going to start encrypting everything suddenly because of this?
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
Only if encryption gets as transparent as the fish:// ioslave in KDE will it get serious adoption, and even then it will have to be enabled by default. Don't expect Microsoft to lead the way in this department.
--
BMO
"I don't have the references, but as recently as a few years ago there was a patent issued (and a start-up company associated with it), that re-formatted text as single words presented to the user full-screen."
Another "just because it's on a computer it gets a patent" idiocy. The idea is at least 35 years old according to personal direct experience.
Anyway, a sort-of flash example. Not for scientific purposes. Might be safe for work or not. It's just text and jazz:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/samsung.php
--
BMO
Before the invention of desktop computers, this is the exact way I boosted my reading speed in elementary school.
There were these little projectors you could take with you to a corner or wherever. The film strip had words on it and there was a dial you could turn. It displayed one word at a time. You set the dial to where you could barely keep up, and as you got more comfortable at higher speeds, you turned the dial up more.
Very effective.
--
BMO
So let's just say that Vint Cerf is off by 50 percent in the wrong direction. So I'll pull a number out of my ass and say 1/8. That's still a ton.
"dared someone to provide proof that any "GNU/Linux" machine was in a botnet."
Well, that's just silly. If I want amusement, I'll put SSH back on 22 and watch the bots hit the logs.
"It's interesting no one else bothered to question that number."
That number is plausible to me. Most people are running around with expired AV and Anti-Spyware, which is _worse_ IMO than no protection at all. Many people think that they don't need to update after their trial periods run out. If you were to say non-professionally administered machines (the ones sitting at home) I'd guess higher than Vint by 100 percent. Half of all home machines, and I think that guess is low.
People take care of their cars better, and that's not saying much.
--
BMO
It may have taken some effort, but the testimony reads like a playbook for anyone who needs to pick apart any RIAA expert.
0 73736822
I posted this before, but this should be required reading for anyone interested in the subject:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070302
And it's not just refuting the sham expert, it's about refuting the RIAA's strategy in general, and it's worked. The RIAA has much higher hurdles to jump now. Extorting money from random people just became much more expensive.
--
BMO
"So that's a bit like talking about botnets and your desperate denial of the existence of Linux botnets with tens of thousands of machines?"
7 .html
Tens of thousands?
I don't really know about that, but let's take that number at face value and compare that to what Vint Cerf has calculated: he figures that 1/4 of all Windows clients are bots.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070125-870
That's 150 MILLION machines compared to your purported "tens of thousands". The Bible says something about removing a log of wood from your own eye before pointing out a speck of dust in another's. Religious or not, it's good advice.
And let's look at the attack vectors for "linux botnets" - nearly all of them are servers running vulnerable PHP code and victims of brute force attacks at the SSH port. This is _trivial_ to secure. If you run sshd on any port other than 22, all those "invalid user" messages simply go away. That's not even taking into account using Denyhosts. If you combine the two strategies, it's simply too much of a waste of time for someone to try to root the box through SSH. The other obvious strategy is to not run random PHP code without checking first online if it's massive security risk.
But that's all about server stuff. Joe and Josephine User don't run services, or at least shouldn't. Gone are the days of Linux shipping with tons of services turned on by default - they must be configured and started by the owner. Take a Linux distro like Ubuntu 7.04, and stick it on a computer bare-arsed naked to a cable modem. The likelihood of a successful attack is nearly nil, but to do the same thing to a Windows machine, a take-over is 50 percent likely within 20 minutes (I'm being generous here, I've seen most estimates below 12 minutes and 5 minutes) - before patches can be successfully installed.
So you can sit there and blame the user all you like, but it doesn't change the reality that Windows is unsafe at any speed, by design.
--
BMO
If you use Windows, each new installation (or daemonic posession) in your computer negates whatever gains you may have had gotten through Moore's Law.
Computers only 12 months old with a _gigabye_(!) of RAM are not robust enough to run a full install of Vista with all the bells and whistles, for example.
--
BMO
Yeah, mod me troll, bitch. I've got more karma than you've got mod points.
Apple ProDOS had tabs, too.
If something has a real-world example, it's obvious if it's implemented in software, indeed the real world example should be considered "prior art".
--
BMO
--Msg: 28501 of 28505 4/23/2007 6:17:36 PM Recs: 8 Sentiment: Strong Sell
0 .html
e .html
By: atul666 Send PM Profile Ignore Recommend Add To Favorites
The REAL reason Ralphie hates open wireless
Here's a curious thing. During the recent CP80 hearings in Utah, Ralphie proposed cracking down on local Utah ISPs, and anyone who offers open wireless access. The one witness in opposition quoted in the media was one Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, a local Utah ISP that would disproportionately bear the brunt of Ralphie's proposal, since it's a local ISP, and offers open wireless access in the Salt Lake metro area. It seemed odd at the time that Ralphie and the legislators would be so hot on the proposal, since ISPs based out of state would be unaffected by the proposed law, so the law would have no effect whatsoever on the pr0n "crisis".
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660213162,0
Pete Ashdown's name sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn't connect the dots until today. In addition to being the founder & owner of XMission, Mr. Ashdown was also the Democratic challenger to Sen. Orrin Hatch in last year's general election.
http://formaline.blogspot.com/2006/05/im-with-pet
Recall that Ralphie donated quite heavily to Sen. Hatch's reelection campaign, with donations arriving in his name and the names of his kids as well. Which isn't technically legal, but hey. Oh, and Hatch's son is one of SCO's top lawyers, of course.
So maybe this is all one big incredible coincidence. Or maybe it's political payback time, with Ralphie trying to buy a few more favors in the process.
Msg: 28505 of 28505 4/23/2007 7:06:32 PM Recs: 0 Sentiment: Not Disclosed
By: monsieur_bobo Send PM Profile Ignore Recommend Add To Favorites
Posted as a reply to msg 28501 by atul666
Re: The REAL reason Ralphie hates open wireless
[Or maybe it's political payback time, with Ralphie trying to buy a few more favors in the process. ]
I'll pick door number two - payback time. If Mr. Ashdown had any other political ambitions, they are history now. From here on out, Mr Ashdown is going to labeled as, at best 'soft on child pornography' and, at worst, a purveyor of child porn. Child porn is everybody's favorite campaign issue because nobody is for it and, once you get elected, you don't actually have to *do* anything about it as it is already against the law and vigorously prosecuted. From here on out, thanks to Ralph 'Spoilsport' Yarro, Mr. Ashdown is on the wrong side on an issue that creates a very powerful gut level reaction. Mr. Ashdown could cure cancer, bring world peace, stop gloabl warming, and eliminate poverty world wide and he has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher.
You are being joe-jobbed. Do not worry about it.
http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#joe_job
3.2.22 What's a "Joe Job"?
The act of faking a spam so that it appears to be from an innocent third party, in order to damage their reputation and possibly to trick their provider into revoking their Internet access. Named after Joes.com, which was victimized in this way by a spammer some years ago.
You will not wind up on a blacklist. This is a well known phenomenon among mail admins.
--
BMO
"It supports BOTH platforms. Windows AND Mac. How much better can it get?"
ahem...
"We have BOTH kinds of music here! Country AND western!" - Blues Brothers
--
BMO
...a justification of using the "sourgrapes" tag, this is it.
I trust Google about as much as I trust any other corp (not much at all) but to see Microsoft crying in its oatmeal is just poetic.
--
BMO
Couldn't we just have a contest where actual live spammers are fed to lions?
To quote Bill Mattocks...
"My sense of personal integrity is none of your concern."
-thus spake Walt "Pickle Jar" Rines
"I'm going to pound your balls flat with a wooden mallet."
-thus respondeth Bill Mattocks
And TSG has alleged that nobody can write an OS kernel by his lonesome. TSG has alleged many, MANY things. They have even alleged that I, BMO, personally owe them $699 per CPU to run Linux. To date, none of their allegations were shown to have any weight. None, zero, nada, nil.
PJ didn't need to fake an illness to duck a subpoena. This is the internet, isn't it?. She could be anywhere in the world and still run Groklaw. She could be sitting right next to me.
Nevermind the stories by Lyin' Lyons et alia came out saying that PJ was being subpoenaed _after_ PJ said she needed to take a health break.
--
BMO
"You should put the virtual disk under version control."
VMware does that. To clean the virtual machine, you can pick any of the older images. I was asked if I tried uninstalling using the spyware company uninstaller and I said no. I picked the April 1 image out of a perverted sense of humor.
--
BMO
"that Investor Village was spreading some "updater.exe" the other day (via ads), so this might have been a bit larger than just the one site?"
It's spyware from an ad service. It's like those "Your computer is infected" ads on a Yahoo page.
The real carrier of the evil is dropspam.com, which pretends to be a spam filtering service. I fired up VMware and installed upgrade.exe out of morbid curiosity. The results are here:
Msg: 26529 of 26688 4/6/2007 6:57:44 AM Recs: 26 Sentiment: Not Disclosed
By: Boyle M. Owl Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites
Posted as a reply to msg 26470 by sco_source_scam
Re: IV advertising malware? Dropspam.com
The tiny program is a downloader and installer. I have run it inside of VMware, the only way to run Windows...
It may be legitimate, but read on, and grok the implications of the license....
3. Licensee's Covenants
(a) The Licensee has read all information pertaining to the operation of the Software and expressly agrees that the Licensor shall be permitted to make any modifications, alterations and re-configurations to the Licensee's computer hardware and software including its email inbox and outbox as required for the normal operation of the Software, including but not limited to the re-routing of emails to the Licensor's server for the purposes of screening emails for spam and viruses and attaching a brief message promoting the Software to all out-going emails of the Licensee.
The licensor can kindly stay the fuck out of my computer, tyvm.
(b) The Licensee further agrees that the Licensor shall be permitted to send emails (Authentication Emails) on behalf of the Licensee to those email addresses which have been stored in the Licensee's computer or which appear as senders in incoming emails, for the purposes of authenticating these email addresses and providing the recipients with an opportunity to update the Licensor with additional authentic email addresses.
"We're going to examine your drive for email addresses, and then we're going to spam the shit out of your friends."
(c) If the Licensee wishes to delete or remove the Software for any reason, such deletion or removal must be carried out using either the program or software removal tool inherent in the Licensee's computer operating system including the Add/Remove tool provided by Microsoft® Windows, or such other similar program or software provided by the Licensor, which will be available to the Licensee through the Licensor's website. The Licensee acknowledges that if the deletion or removal of the Software is carried out by any other manner or by using any program or software other than those described above, the Licensee's email software or system may not be restored fully and/or may fail to start up and function properly, and as a result the Licensee may not be able to receive or send emails.
"Yeah, ya see, our program so severely fucks your system that if you try to remove us with something that might work, we'll break your smtp and pop3 server pointers."
As I wrote this, several other popups came up and want me to install shit. Ahahahah, I'm going to install all this and then I'm going to run a friend's malware scanner to see what it really does.
Ghod...this is what being a windows user is like?! I have forgotten!
--
BMO
Msg: 26531 of 26688 4/6/2007 7:18:35 AM Recs: 25 Sentiment: Not Disclosed
By: Boyle M. Owl Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites
Posted as a reply to msg 26529 by Boyle M. Owl
Re: IV advertising malware? Dropspam.com
I do this shit so you don't have to...
Up until I installed upgrade.exe, the system was pristine except for an installation of OpenOffice and Opera....
BTW, this is just a _part_ of the log that goes on forever...
Checking system programs...
Checking Windows directory contents...
c:\windows\appupdate.exe: Version info not found (Suspicious)
c:\windows\ewwsetup.exe:
"Yeah? Which version of OpenSSH? Got the latest security patches from Apple? What's your IP address?"
First off, only the clued even know that ssh exists and how to turn it on. Joe and Josephine user don't know nor care what it is. It's not turned on by default. If one is offering SSH as a service, one should be clued into where to get updates, and recompiling one's own instead of waiting for Apple. Funny how Apple includes a full dev kit with OS/X and Microsoft doesn't for Windows. http://developer.apple.com/tools/
The fact is that OS/X is far more robust than any version of Windows. The proof is in the pudding, puddin'.
--
BMO