And how exactly did they do that? By making a better product? What that isnt allowed?
Of course it is allowed. But Microsoft did far more than work to make a better browser (you forget that as a whole, reviews rank IE and NS exactly the same or worse in ease of use--at least through v4.0, I haven't seen more recent reviews). You would know this if you actually bothered to read the Findings of Fact instead of ranting (to put it nicely).
To summarize, MS has been found to have used its considerable clout to shove IE down consumers' throats despite the fact that they preferred Netscape. Had they not engaged in anti-competitive practices, MS would have far less browser share than it does now.
Read the FoF, then come back and say what you just said (remembering that facts can not be disputed--that's why they are called facts).
If you are constantly broadcast on the Net, you are never alone. This has its vices, but it also has amazing virtues.... Store cameras, street cameras, home cameras all make your world safer. If you are walking around constantly webcasting everything you see, then you are never going to be alone in a dark alley again. Sure, there are people dumb enough to attack you even if it means putting their face on the web: but a hell of a lot fewer then if it doesn't.
<shivers>
This reminds me of an especially poignant scene in a book I read (Moonwar, I think it was) where the leader of the lunar revolution witnessed the rape/murder of his female friend on Earth via VR. She wasn't alone, but it didn't save her either.
Merk, this is going to sound like a real cop-out, but as Stephen Young said: when it comes to legal advise, you'd be best off talking to a lawyer (since our legal system seems to feel they are the only people capable of understanding law anymore).
I don't deny that it is legal or that the countries are being compensated--but I don't have to like it either! I'm hardly so principled that I'm going to lose sleep over it, though. (but thanks for your concern;-) And despite the fact that there is nothing you or I can do about the TLD situation, I'm going to argue the point anyway.
While it is true that the purpose of domain names are to make it easier to find sites than using the raw IP numbers, there was a reason domains were set up the way they were. If it were *just* to make things easier to remember, then why have all the hubub about TLDs in the first place? IIRC, it was to make the DNS lookup tables simpler. Rather than to have a monolithic database full of TLDs of every size, shape, and color; we have a hierarchical system and split by TLD.
But while we are at it, why not make the domains self-describing? After all, duke.pdjlk is not much easier to remember than 19.233.5.154. And what if there is also a duke.oqwre? Which is which? The.com/.org/.gov/... system makes things much easier. But once we eliminate that distinction, the TLDs become meaningless and nearly as bad as random garbage. How often have you mistyped a URL b/c you couldn't remember its TLD?
With everyone registering under whatever TLD suits them, we can't tell what kind of site we are going to anymore. What's the sense in that?
Ok, I spent way too much time on that--it's amazing what you'll do to avoid homework;-)
What about it?.arpa is not a TLD--not according to RFC 1591. And if it is, show me a site that uses it--doing a quick search in google, I came up with no.arpa domains.
Both of these domains quite verifiably belong to those countries--and if you notice, the global TLDs section ONLY has.com,.edu,.gov,.int,.mil,.net, and.org. Everything else is a country.
/me expresses his disgust at the abuse of the domain name system.
Finally, without something like su, it is exceedingly annoying to have to shut all your programs down, log out, log in as Administrator to do some silly thing, and then start everything back up in your normal user account.
NT has a su if you buy the Resource Kit. However, you have to give your account special priveleges to use it. IIRC, the help file said that the only default account/group that gets them normally is Administrators...not even Power Users. I can't be sure what they were, so I can't say if it is a security risk to give those privileges to your normal account or not, but it seemed rather odd.
Nuh-uh. You are breaking the rules. The user has to be completely clueless. Whether you can believe it or not, it is NOT obvious:
How to turn on the computer
Which way a floppy disk goes in
What the floppy disk is for anyway
What the CDROM is for
What the mouse is for and how to use it.
If you were to do what mschmitt said, they'd give you a blank stare and complain they didn't know how to use a computer and you were being too hard on them. And you aren't allowed to tell them b/c the condition was that they don't read any documentation or get any outside help.
But you might say "Well, installing linux wouldn't be any easier!" and you are right. But that wasn't mschmitt's point. mschmitt's point was that whether you start with Windows or Linux, there is a learning curve either way. And sadly, that curve is too much for many as it is (I should know, my mom is one of them--and we are trying to get her to use Windows, the "easier" OS).
Most car drivers do not (and are not competent to) replace parts or tune the engine, they take the car to a workshop for a mechanic to do the work. So why should the average computer users be expected to perform the equivalent tasks themselves?
They shouldn't. But, oddly enough, they are expected to all the time in Windows. In Windows, everyone is a sysadmin of their system, whether they are qualified to be or not. In *nix, only root is able to do any sysadmining. The users are not expected to, nor are they even allowed to, make serious system changes they don't understand. And this works out well, since Linux boxes won't break once they are set up properly--unlike Windows.
I don't have a problem with things as you line it out. Fine, the owners of the computer hire people to admin their boxes. Then they don't have to know anything about how their computers work.
But if they take on that job, they can no more complain to their ISP/Computer Manufacturer/etc that it's too hard than they could complain to the dealership if they started to make modifications to their engine and couldn't get it to work.
But more often than not, people aren't complaining about getting their system set up than actually using it. Can you drive your car w/o knowing what a steering wheel is and how to use it? NO?! Then they should not expect to be able to use computers without knowing how to manipulate menus, recognise windows for what they ARE (I swear my parents can't do this) and manipulate them, etc... Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who expect just that.
Because he was defending against the argument that *BSD is behind Linux and thus inferior. What he's saying is that *BSD people choose to be conservative, and thus they take more time to work out the bugs before they put it in a distribution. It's a trade-off. You either get tech early, but with some problems here and there; or you wait a long time to get it, but when you do it has few bugs, if any. The end result is the same, but the process varies. He isn't trying to say one is better than the other, just explaining why *BSD people do what they do.
Take off your blinders and read the *whole* article.
Or, as would be my personal preference, we could introduce into language another gender-neutral set of pronouns. Then make the gender-specific pronouns only "proper" if it is truly necessary to denote gender--say if we are actually talking about sex or issues that only apply to one or another gender but isn't clear from context.
Somehow, I don't think that if we run into a n-sex alien species that we are going to blindly use "he." I would hope we would find a good, decent, generalized term by then.
Then take this to its conclusion. Since both Linux and *BSD derive from the same code at some point early in their history, they are the exact same operating system--just very fragmented. After all, both Linux and *BSD are derived from UNIX code.
If you argue that that doesn't count because they were rewritten from scratch to work on Intel processors and therefore they are different, then wasn't each *BSD ported separately? (unlike Linux)
Depending on where you place the bar, you can call *BSD and Linux the same OS, or you can see that each distribution is a completely different OS. But no matter where you draw the line, be consistant across the board.
Same here. Though I was disappointed that they didn't explain HOW it was done, give any of the code, or anything of that sort. As it is, it is nothing more than a stunt. If they want to hide behind "We're alerting MS to a security hole" they need to do more than just demonstrate the hole. Or did they email MS/Hotmail with the information?
Anyway, thank God I ditched Hotmail a long time ago...
I don't know about you, but I often spend quite a long time writing even a short email (or comment like this one) because i want it to sound good. So I put just as much effort into writing an email as someone else puts into picking out a greeting card. I suppose you could say I'm slow when it comes to writing, but I don't really think so.
Besides, which would you rather receive? A meaty email or a one-liner greeting card? Personally, I value the former more.
I did see this on the first day, and I did listen to it, I thought it was very good:-) However, I just didn't really have anything to say about it, that's all.
The only thing I have to say for Rob, et al is that you guys shouldn't choke this off--give yourselves time to grow an audience. The fact that this doesn't show up on the front page makes it hard to snag and comment on. A slashbox would be good, so would a separate topic for it. For comparison: the "Ask Slashdot" columns that don't get on the front page don't end up being very popular either--but people have learned to look, so they get a correspondingly bigger audience.
You've actually caught a cracker in the midst of doing something nefarious on your network. You want to preserve evidence of his crack-in-progress, while preventing any further damage.
The user would probably curse NT for crashing for no good reason and seeing that he couldn't shut it down properly, would simply flick the power switch. There goes your evidence. But you do have a point, as long as the admin makes sure to log (perhaps through a series of screenshots) what he was doing before halting the system that would work out well. Of course, calling security might be more effective.:-)
SMS allows remote controlling of other computers. But in order to do this, the client has to be running the Remote Control program, which sits on the taskbar and blinks very clearly when someone is controlling your computer.
Only if the sysadmin set it up that way. This can be turned off so the user isn't even aware that it is in use.
This isn't exactly stealth. The person could easily close out the program which resides unhidden on the taskbar like a minimized program.
Assuming they can see it (see above) and assuming they have the know-how and the rights to kill the program (it probably runs as an admin/the system, so the user wouldn't have the rights to kill the process--it isn't theirs!).
There is also a line in autoexec.bat you need (something like SMS_SETUP=NT) which could be taken out.
It can't be taken out if the machine uses NTFS and you don't have permission to even touch the file.
Well, the fact that there is a "Lock-up Machine" command probably doesn't help very much. From the BO2K web site:
Lock-up Machine
Makes the server machine completely unresponsive. The mouse will not move, and the keyboard will not work. Grinding halt. Also makes the BO2K server unresponsive and will kill your connection to the server after the protocol times out.
Keep in mind, they didn't say temporarily lock out--it completely kills the machine! So that might be a bit of ammunition for M$. Or is there actually a legitimate use for this?
Of course, I still think it's a great program! I intend to use it on my own machine at school once I get back.
Daveo has had a record of posting off-topic and annoying posts (which is why he now starts out with a score of 0), so some moderators routinely mark him down. I would assume that's what happened here--they just saw "Daveo" and marked him down--even though it was clearly unwarranted in this case.
To be honest, this is the first intelligent post I've seen from Daveo (IMHO: though I haven't exactly been keeping tabs on him, either). If you take a look at his posting history, you might understand better what I mean. His quality of posts seem to have gone up since when he first started, but his spelling is still atrocious. The spelling is bad enough that it is hard to understand what he is saying and makes him look careless and sloppy. On the whole, the moderators have been following the guidelines by marking down posts that don't make sense (i.e. are hard to read) and detract from the discussion (not always the case, but his earliest ones definately did--enough to get him a base score of 0). Specifically, this may have been tagged as flamebait because his speaking in the third person draws flames.
PS to Daveo: is there some reason you post in the third person?!?
Disclaimer: I hate Microsoft too, but I'm sensible enough to know when to compliment them for doing something right (rare as that is anymore). BTW: yes I know that IE doesn't exist for Linux, so I'm talking from M$Windows experience--which I know isn't applicable to everyone, but all I know (right now anyway) is M$Windows, so M$Windows I will talk about.:-/
EXTREMELY long rendering times (sometimes several minutes)
This is a Netscape thing. Hands down, IE renders faster than Netscape (so far anyway, but I eagerly await Mozilla 5 as much as anyone)
Inaccurate page placement when using "back" (i.e. I'm not taken back to where I was scrolled to, although this works at other sites.
No offense meant, but do you do any HTML at all? HTML has no control over how a back and forward button works in browsers. HTML is a markup language, not a browser specification! The explanation is simple: most other sites aren't nearly as complicated as/. is in HTML coding, so the browser can put you closer to where you were. Put 3 levels (or whatever) of nested tables, and good luck!
Too-often refresh. Every page I load is loaded dynamically. I can't think of a reason this would be HTML related, yet it doesn't happen at any other site. Given the slowness of/. and the rendering time mentioned above, I get extremely frustrated trying to do the simplest things here.
This is a Netscape thing. Since the page has so many embedded tables and so on, it takes Netscape a long time to render (or re-render) the HTML. IE, however, is much faster at rendering HTML, so if I resize, the page doesn't disappear to be re-rendered like in Netscape.
So the claims of caching problems is waaay off. It's a software/complexity issue, not an HTTP issue. If you are really having so much trouble, use Slashdot Lite--that's what it's there for.
I only wish that were always so. Unfortunately the real world of corporate politics doesn't work that way. There are often people that should do as the admin says, but don't have to because they are buddy-buddy with somebody more powerful than the admin (or his boss) is. Or maybe this person is more important than the admin is (i.e. this person makes more money for the company than the admin does). Either way, it doesn't work to threaten the user.
Besides, why even put it out for a fight if you can just hide it so the user doesn't know any better? Stealth makes it much easier.
If you were an ordinary user of NT, do you think you would WANT an admin to be able to see what you were doing, etc? No. If they knew it was there, they would kill it (and NT gives you enough power that you CAN do just that).
So, to keep it running, you'd want to make sure the users didn't even know it was there. Hence the stealth features.
Slashdot Mirror
Cut off Netscape's air supply.
And how exactly did they do that? By making a better product? What that isnt allowed?
Of course it is allowed. But Microsoft did far more than work to make a better browser (you forget that as a whole, reviews rank IE and NS exactly the same or worse in ease of use--at least through v4.0, I haven't seen more recent reviews). You would know this if you actually bothered to read the Findings of Fact instead of ranting (to put it nicely).
To summarize, MS has been found to have used its considerable clout to shove IE down consumers' throats despite the fact that they preferred Netscape. Had they not engaged in anti-competitive practices, MS would have far less browser share than it does now.
Read the FoF, then come back and say what you just said (remembering that facts can not be disputed--that's why they are called facts).
If you are constantly broadcast on the Net, you are never alone. This has its vices, but it also has amazing virtues. ... Store cameras, street cameras, home cameras all make your world safer. If you are walking around constantly webcasting everything you see, then you are never going to be alone in a dark alley again. Sure, there are people dumb enough to attack you even if it means putting their face on the web: but a hell of a lot fewer then if it doesn't.
<shivers>
This reminds me of an especially poignant scene in a book I read (Moonwar, I think it was) where the leader of the lunar revolution witnessed the rape/murder of his female friend on Earth via VR. She wasn't alone, but it didn't save her either.
That said, best of luck to you.
While it is true that the purpose of domain names are to make it easier to find sites than using the raw IP numbers, there was a reason domains were set up the way they were. If it were *just* to make things easier to remember, then why have all the hubub about TLDs in the first place? IIRC, it was to make the DNS lookup tables simpler. Rather than to have a monolithic database full of TLDs of every size, shape, and color; we have a hierarchical system and split by TLD.
But while we are at it, why not make the domains self-describing? After all, duke.pdjlk is not much easier to remember than 19.233.5.154. And what if there is also a duke.oqwre? Which is which? The .com/.org/.gov/... system makes things much easier. But once we eliminate that distinction, the TLDs become meaningless and nearly as bad as random garbage. How often have you mistyped a URL b/c you couldn't remember its TLD?
With everyone registering under whatever TLD suits them, we can't tell what kind of site we are going to anymore. What's the sense in that?
Ok, I spent way too much time on that--it's amazing what you'll do to avoid homework ;-)
What about it? .arpa is not a TLD--not according to RFC 1591. And if it is, show me a site that uses it--doing a quick search in google, I came up with no .arpa domains.
Both of these domains quite verifiably belong to those countries--and if you notice, the global TLDs section ONLY has .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org. Everything else is a country.
/me expresses his disgust at the abuse of the domain name system.
NT has a su if you buy the Resource Kit. However, you have to give your account special priveleges to use it. IIRC, the help file said that the only default account/group that gets them normally is Administrators...not even Power Users. I can't be sure what they were, so I can't say if it is a security risk to give those privileges to your normal account or not, but it seemed rather odd.
- How to turn on the computer
- Which way a floppy disk goes in
- What the floppy disk is for anyway
- What the CDROM is for
- What the mouse is for and how to use it.
If you were to do what mschmitt said, they'd give you a blank stare and complain they didn't know how to use a computer and you were being too hard on them. And you aren't allowed to tell them b/c the condition was that they don't read any documentation or get any outside help.But you might say "Well, installing linux wouldn't be any easier!" and you are right. But that wasn't mschmitt's point. mschmitt's point was that whether you start with Windows or Linux, there is a learning curve either way. And sadly, that curve is too much for many as it is (I should know, my mom is one of them--and we are trying to get her to use Windows, the "easier" OS).
They shouldn't. But, oddly enough, they are expected to all the time in Windows. In Windows, everyone is a sysadmin of their system, whether they are qualified to be or not. In *nix, only root is able to do any sysadmining. The users are not expected to, nor are they even allowed to, make serious system changes they don't understand. And this works out well, since Linux boxes won't break once they are set up properly--unlike Windows.
I don't have a problem with things as you line it out. Fine, the owners of the computer hire people to admin their boxes. Then they don't have to know anything about how their computers work.
But if they take on that job, they can no more complain to their ISP/Computer Manufacturer/etc that it's too hard than they could complain to the dealership if they started to make modifications to their engine and couldn't get it to work.
But more often than not, people aren't complaining about getting their system set up than actually using it. Can you drive your car w/o knowing what a steering wheel is and how to use it? NO?! Then they should not expect to be able to use computers without knowing how to manipulate menus, recognise windows for what they ARE (I swear my parents can't do this) and manipulate them, etc... Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who expect just that.
Take off your blinders and read the *whole* article.
Somehow, I don't think that if we run into a n-sex alien species that we are going to blindly use "he." I would hope we would find a good, decent, generalized term by then.
If you argue that that doesn't count because they were rewritten from scratch to work on Intel processors and therefore they are different, then wasn't each *BSD ported separately? (unlike Linux)
Depending on where you place the bar, you can call *BSD and Linux the same OS, or you can see that each distribution is a completely different OS. But no matter where you draw the line, be consistant across the board.
Anyway, thank God I ditched Hotmail a long time ago...
Besides, which would you rather receive? A meaty email or a one-liner greeting card? Personally, I value the former more.
The only thing I have to say for Rob, et al is that you guys shouldn't choke this off--give yourselves time to grow an audience. The fact that this doesn't show up on the front page makes it hard to snag and comment on. A slashbox would be good, so would a separate topic for it. For comparison: the "Ask Slashdot" columns that don't get on the front page don't end up being very popular either--but people have learned to look, so they get a correspondingly bigger audience.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
No court order, nothing. Quite simple and perfectly legal.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/sean/ declaration.html
The user would probably curse NT for crashing for no good reason and seeing that he couldn't shut it down properly, would simply flick the power switch. There goes your evidence. But you do have a point, as long as the admin makes sure to log (perhaps through a series of screenshots) what he was doing before halting the system that would work out well. Of course, calling security might be more effective. :-)
Only if the sysadmin set it up that way. This can be turned off so the user isn't even aware that it is in use.
This isn't exactly stealth. The person could easily close out the program which resides unhidden on the taskbar like a minimized program.
Assuming they can see it (see above) and assuming they have the know-how and the rights to kill the program (it probably runs as an admin/the system, so the user wouldn't have the rights to kill the process--it isn't theirs!).
There is also a line in autoexec.bat you need (something like SMS_SETUP=NT) which could be taken out.
It can't be taken out if the machine uses NTFS and you don't have permission to even touch the file.
Lock-up Machine
Keep in mind, they didn't say temporarily lock out--it completely kills the machine! So that might be a bit of ammunition for M$. Or is there actually a legitimate use for this?
Of course, I still think it's a great program! I intend to use it on my own machine at school once I get back.
FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, [and] Doubt
To be honest, this is the first intelligent post I've seen from Daveo (IMHO: though I haven't exactly been keeping tabs on him, either). If you take a look at his posting history, you might understand better what I mean. His quality of posts seem to have gone up since when he first started, but his spelling is still atrocious. The spelling is bad enough that it is hard to understand what he is saying and makes him look careless and sloppy. On the whole, the moderators have been following the guidelines by marking down posts that don't make sense (i.e. are hard to read) and detract from the discussion (not always the case, but his earliest ones definately did--enough to get him a base score of 0). Specifically, this may have been tagged as flamebait because his speaking in the third person draws flames.
PS to Daveo: is there some reason you post in the third person?!?
Disclaimer: I hate Microsoft too, but I'm sensible enough to know when to compliment them for doing something right (rare as that is anymore). BTW: yes I know that IE doesn't exist for Linux, so I'm talking from M$Windows experience--which I know isn't applicable to everyone, but all I know (right now anyway) is M$Windows, so M$Windows I will talk about. :-/
EXTREMELY long rendering times (sometimes several minutes)
This is a Netscape thing. Hands down, IE renders faster than Netscape (so far anyway, but I eagerly await Mozilla 5 as much as anyone)
Inaccurate page placement when using "back" (i.e. I'm not taken back to where I was scrolled to, although this works at other sites.
No offense meant, but do you do any HTML at all? HTML has no control over how a back and forward button works in browsers. HTML is a markup language, not a browser specification! The explanation is simple: most other sites aren't nearly as complicated as /. is in HTML coding, so the browser can put you closer to where you were. Put 3 levels (or whatever) of nested tables, and good luck!
Too-often refresh. Every page I load is loaded dynamically. I can't think of a reason this would be HTML related, yet it doesn't happen at any other site. Given the slowness of /. and the rendering time mentioned above, I get extremely frustrated trying to do the simplest things here.
This is a Netscape thing. Since the page has so many embedded tables and so on, it takes Netscape a long time to render (or re-render) the HTML. IE, however, is much faster at rendering HTML, so if I resize, the page doesn't disappear to be re-rendered like in Netscape.
So the claims of caching problems is waaay off. It's a software/complexity issue, not an HTTP issue. If you are really having so much trouble, use Slashdot Lite--that's what it's there for.
Besides, why even put it out for a fight if you can just hide it so the user doesn't know any better? Stealth makes it much easier.
So, to keep it running, you'd want to make sure the users didn't even know it was there. Hence the stealth features.