This is probably irrelevant but I'm going to spout on, basically because the telnetd exploit does nothing to my boxen. Putting aside the exploit, telnet is completely insecure from the ground up. Ever su into a box over telnet? Guess what, you're not the only one with your password now. For those of you who haven't switched to SSH yet, you were asking for it. This just gives you another reason to switch.
Payola killed the search engine. Yahoo use payola since the get-go (or shortly after) and it was quickly discovered that they sucked. Now all the other search engines have admitted to it, and Google came out a true winner. Now companies want a piece of Google, just as they wanted a piece of Altavista. I just hope Google doesn't become what Altavista is now.
Ok moderators... let me see if I understand. The original article is about anonymous posting. An AC posts, rejoicing his protection and permission to stay anonymous. How does that get modded to "offtopic"? Someone didn't have their Penguin Mints today.
I've seen this asked many places already. The long and the short of it is that this tactic is ILLEGAL. You'd be subject to the same punishment as the Code Red authors. Yes, your intentions are good, but you're A) accessing a computer system without consent and B) INSTALLING software without consent. This is no different than me walking into your house at 3 AM to install the IIS patch on your server. It doesn't matter that I had good intentions, I'd be at gun point pretty quick. I'd be charged with unauthorized entry regardless... you didn't invite me, I came in, and refused to leave when you told me to because "the patch wasn't finished upgrading".
"the days before the software was disabled, there were hundreds of attempts at intrusion into the judiciary's network from places like China and Iran.
"
How does Monitoring Software == firewall software all of a sudden? Please don't tell me that their monitoring software is also a "personal firewall" package. If they're relying on firewalling at the workstation level then all of my faith in the judicial system is lost. "We didn't have the staff to support a redundant SOHO system so we ordered up a few copies of Norton's Personal Firewall". Oh, the humanity!
I haven't been able to read the article (/.'ed?) but to me it looks like they're doing a side by side "Joe Shmoe, install XP on this machine, Mandrake on this machine, and tell us which was a nicer experience". This is good news for the linux community. Joe Schmoe, the same guy who's told that XP is the way to go, has found a free OS that does the same thing. Recent versions of Mandrake and Redhat have been very easily installed. The hardware auto-detect actually works under Mandrake, which is a huge improvement over any version of Windows.
To get into an argument over which GUI is btter is a moot point. Joe Schmoe has discovered for the first time that he has options.. lots of them. Joe Schmoe will go command line, TWM (my favorite), Gnome, or whatever as he chooses.
There's a miconception about Sircam. My memory tells me that Sircam DOES NOT send documents. It uses a file name from a document and sends itself using that file name. For instance if I have company_secrets.doc and I get Sircam, it will send out the Sircam executable NAMED company_secrets.doc, but the actual attachment will not contain any text from the true.doc file.
Then again, if a user with company_secrets.doc on his PC is dumb enough to open an infected attachment he deserves what he gets.
I hate to criticize.NET since I am by no means the expert on the subject. Think about if.NET actually succeeds. Every PC, PDA, cell phone, and dog collar will be running a Microsoft OS and accessing its data over.NET. What happens when the.NET version of Code Red comes out? What then? All my data is wrapped up in.NET. Everything I do is on a server somewhere but the wireless.NET is too bottlenecked for me to get to it. It's a sign of things to come. Companies put many $$ into Microsoft software and constantly have to upgrade to keep a virus from systematically destroying their entire network. When are people going to get the hint that despite all their propoganda, Microsoft is not good for anyone.
Maybe, just maybe, issuing bonds will put a dent in vaporware. Talk big, get people hyped up, GET FUNDING, release date passes, second release date passes... umm, uh oh, now we're fscked. And we owe money to people. Vaporware developers spend their life savings paying off the funding that weakened their credibility... maybe people will be a little more careful next time they start writing code.
And if crew members have a question, they can simply ask. The PSA will have advanced voice-recognition and intent-interpretation technologies that will allow it to understand spoken questions and commands.
First off, there's some blatant misconceptions about this trojan. It is *NOT* an OutCrook only trojan. The trojan does a MAPI lookup so anything that gets stored in the Windows Address Book is vulnerable. An SMTP server embedded in the attachment is what does the real work. That way it can sneak right by the network virus scanners because it's not using the e-mail system (Groupwise, Exchange, etc) that's being scanned. Unless you've made some really neat filter that sits on your T1 router and watches packets, you'll never catch it.
Now, in refernece to other OutCrook-only virii. There is a neat hack floating around that allows Evolution to connect to an Exchange Server through the HTML interface. I haven't done any research so I can't provide a URL, but it's out there. Might help you in your situation.
I believe that many of these virii/trojans/whatevers are just because users are dumber than hammers. With the exception of the auto-open exploit type virii (I think they patched that awhile ago in OutCrook) all attachments have to be executed. That requires the end user to open attachments. No matter how many viruses knock out companies and parts of the internet, there will be idiots who open attachments. As an experiment, I should write up some VBscript that uses the standard "e-mail to everyone in MAPI" trick with the subject line "This is a virus" and a body of "this attached script is a virus. Please don't open it" and see how far it propogates.
Contrary to popular opinion, THE INTERNET IS NOT *IN* THE BENCH!. Stealing an ATM is one thing.. there's value there (presumably the money, although I've been told it's impossible to break into them, maybe that's just the cops spreading FUD so I don't try it). Stealing a park bench with a Cat 5 jack and some ethernet... you'd have to be making some kind of political statement or something. There's no way it'd be worth your time to steal a park bench with a Cat 5 jack.
How does this indiscernable change in the bits compare to digital--> analog --> digital? Basically, to a trained ear which sounds worse? Ripping from a CD to a wave at 44K 16 stereo sounds a lot better than ripping to a 128K MP3, so what's to prevent me from ripping from CD to wave to MP3? Sure, I lose some of the quality going from digital to analog but wouldn't that be masked by the MP3 compression? IOW, does the option to rip a CD in analog in Musicmatch already defeat this copy protection since MP3s are lower quality anyway?
I'm not a pro by any means, but I can hear most little inconsistancies in my music. I wish I knew which album they encoded so I could try to find it and try this myself.
From the article: "A person who's seen shared source is probably very contaminated and is going to have a hard time working on other projects"
Hmm... let's think about that for a second. Which software should be labeled as a cancer? Apparently Microsoft's own code is so contaminated that just by viewing it you're never able to work on a software project again.
Have you ever done user support/helpdesk stuff? Never underestimate the power of stupid people. I still get calls from users telling me that Windows is giving them an error box saying "Warning, your internet connection is not optimized".
Slashdot: Whiny nerds, stuff that only our staff cares about.
Anywho, on with my rant. Microsoft is not Hitler, however they're marketing/FUD tactics are the only intelligence inside Microsoft. Windows 2000 is crap. It's FINALLY taking some hints from that 30 year old OS called UNIX. They call it a "revolution". We call it "been there, done that". Internet Explorer is a crappy browser. Why does it appear to be better? Because it dominates the market. Developers are told that no one uses Netscape, so develop for IE. Netscape et al becomes incompatible as the new HTML standards favor IE and slowly squeeze everything out of the market. That's just the kind of power Microsoft has. They have the ability to make the standards committies ignore everyone else, declare Microsoft the standard, and bingo, MS wins again. I have no problems with one company setting the standards. I am not anti-Microsoft. I'm against shitty software. Everything Microsoft "innovates" (writes, buys, redistributes, whichever is the tactic of the day) is complete crap. I have yet to see a piece of MS software and say "ah hah! finally someone has heard my plea". No, actually, every time they release new software my reaction is "I'm supposed to use THIS? Do I HAVE to?" And because of their market control the answer is generally "yes, you have to" from the PHB.
legally required rant:
Ok, moderators, are you smoking crack? This is the first post to point out the painfully obvious, moderate him up!
On the serious note, this article fails to support its own title. "Death of the linux desktop" it says, but where was there evidence that it's alive? The beauty of open source is that things don't die. Ever. If someone stops developemnt (Eazel being the obvious), so what? those who use it and want it, keep developing! Where's the problem here?
The other thing that just burned me about the article is the mention of Corel linux failing. First of all, Corel linux was a POS to begin with. I couldn't get the POS installed on 3 different machines. There's no options, so I know I didn't screw anything up. My first install attempt, it didn't even unmount the partitions after install! It fsck'd on my first boot, most of the daemons wouldn't start, the OS was UNUSABLE. I tried installing on a laptop, the res was messed up and it put the "Continue" button off the screen. I couldn't even click the Continue button! I never got past the first screen! Corel linux blew chunks. Lots of them. Take them OUT of the equation!
Linux on the desktop is alive and kicking. This article is just blowing senseless smoke. Mozilla is really starting to look good, Evolution beats the crap out of OutHouse, and Open Office is getting there. Wiritng an article like this is poiintless, you've just reconfirmed what we already know.. the linux desktop needs work. Saying that it's dead... STFU. It's not there yet. Development will continue, and I'm reminded every time I sit at a Windoze machine how truly superior it is.
I work for a smaller company as a sys admin, so I'm often on call. The nice thing is that management understands (is that an oxymoron?) that I can't be home 24/7 on weekends ready to go *IN CASE* the server farm decides to melt down or something. At my company, we do quadruple redundancy. Every 4th week, I'm the primary contact. I either need to fix it if I'm home, or call one of the other 3 "stand by" techs if I can't. It's worked well in that we've never experienced more than a half hour of downtime using this system, even at 2 AM when a hard drive died once. Also, when I do get called in, I get paid a buttload of overtime (especially between 12 and 7 AM) so it's worth my while.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad it's /.'ed already.
This is probably irrelevant but I'm going to spout on, basically because the telnetd exploit does nothing to my boxen. Putting aside the exploit, telnet is completely insecure from the ground up. Ever su into a box over telnet? Guess what, you're not the only one with your password now. For those of you who haven't switched to SSH yet, you were asking for it. This just gives you another reason to switch.
Payola killed the search engine. Yahoo use payola since the get-go (or shortly after) and it was quickly discovered that they sucked. Now all the other search engines have admitted to it, and Google came out a true winner. Now companies want a piece of Google, just as they wanted a piece of Altavista. I just hope Google doesn't become what Altavista is now.
Ok moderators... let me see if I understand. The original article is about anonymous posting. An AC posts, rejoicing his protection and permission to stay anonymous. How does that get modded to "offtopic"? Someone didn't have their Penguin Mints today.
Yup. While many of the flea market dealers look and smell like carnies, it's the best deal in town.
I've seen this asked many places already. The long and the short of it is that this tactic is ILLEGAL. You'd be subject to the same punishment as the Code Red authors. Yes, your intentions are good, but you're A) accessing a computer system without consent and B) INSTALLING software without consent. This is no different than me walking into your house at 3 AM to install the IIS patch on your server. It doesn't matter that I had good intentions, I'd be at gun point pretty quick. I'd be charged with unauthorized entry regardless... you didn't invite me, I came in, and refused to leave when you told me to because "the patch wasn't finished upgrading".
"the days before the software was disabled, there were hundreds of attempts at intrusion into the judiciary's network from places like China and Iran. "
How does Monitoring Software == firewall software all of a sudden? Please don't tell me that their monitoring software is also a "personal firewall" package. If they're relying on firewalling at the workstation level then all of my faith in the judicial system is lost. "We didn't have the staff to support a redundant SOHO system so we ordered up a few copies of Norton's Personal Firewall". Oh, the humanity!
I haven't been able to read the article (/.'ed?) but to me it looks like they're doing a side by side "Joe Shmoe, install XP on this machine, Mandrake on this machine, and tell us which was a nicer experience". This is good news for the linux community. Joe Schmoe, the same guy who's told that XP is the way to go, has found a free OS that does the same thing. Recent versions of Mandrake and Redhat have been very easily installed. The hardware auto-detect actually works under Mandrake, which is a huge improvement over any version of Windows.
To get into an argument over which GUI is btter is a moot point. Joe Schmoe has discovered for the first time that he has options.. lots of them. Joe Schmoe will go command line, TWM (my favorite), Gnome, or whatever as he chooses.
There's a miconception about Sircam. My memory tells me that Sircam DOES NOT send documents. It uses a file name from a document and sends itself using that file name. For instance if I have company_secrets.doc and I get Sircam, it will send out the Sircam executable NAMED company_secrets.doc, but the actual attachment will not contain any text from the true .doc file.
Then again, if a user with company_secrets.doc on his PC is dumb enough to open an infected attachment he deserves what he gets.
I hate to criticize .NET since I am by no means the expert on the subject. Think about if .NET actually succeeds. Every PC, PDA, cell phone, and dog collar will be running a Microsoft OS and accessing its data over .NET. What happens when the .NET version of Code Red comes out? What then? All my data is wrapped up in .NET. Everything I do is on a server somewhere but the wireless .NET is too bottlenecked for me to get to it. It's a sign of things to come. Companies put many $$ into Microsoft software and constantly have to upgrade to keep a virus from systematically destroying their entire network. When are people going to get the hint that despite all their propoganda, Microsoft is not good for anyone.
Maybe, just maybe, issuing bonds will put a dent in vaporware. Talk big, get people hyped up, GET FUNDING, release date passes, second release date passes... umm, uh oh, now we're fscked. And we owe money to people. Vaporware developers spend their life savings paying off the funding that weakened their credibility... maybe people will be a little more careful next time they start writing code.
look through the discussion... the site went down shortly after due to being /.ed. Someone posted a mirror in the comments, just browse them.
How quickly we forget. Or was I the only one who ran out and filled my computer with cement?
And if crew members have a question, they can simply ask. The PSA will have advanced voice-recognition and intent-interpretation technologies that will allow it to understand spoken questions and commands.
It's powered by Ask Jeeves!
First off, there's some blatant misconceptions about this trojan. It is *NOT* an OutCrook only trojan. The trojan does a MAPI lookup so anything that gets stored in the Windows Address Book is vulnerable. An SMTP server embedded in the attachment is what does the real work. That way it can sneak right by the network virus scanners because it's not using the e-mail system (Groupwise, Exchange, etc) that's being scanned. Unless you've made some really neat filter that sits on your T1 router and watches packets, you'll never catch it.
Now, in refernece to other OutCrook-only virii. There is a neat hack floating around that allows Evolution to connect to an Exchange Server through the HTML interface. I haven't done any research so I can't provide a URL, but it's out there. Might help you in your situation.
I believe that many of these virii/trojans/whatevers are just because users are dumber than hammers. With the exception of the auto-open exploit type virii (I think they patched that awhile ago in OutCrook) all attachments have to be executed. That requires the end user to open attachments. No matter how many viruses knock out companies and parts of the internet, there will be idiots who open attachments. As an experiment, I should write up some VBscript that uses the standard "e-mail to everyone in MAPI" trick with the subject line "This is a virus" and a body of "this attached script is a virus. Please don't open it" and see how far it propogates.
Contrary to popular opinion, THE INTERNET IS NOT *IN* THE BENCH!. Stealing an ATM is one thing.. there's value there (presumably the money, although I've been told it's impossible to break into them, maybe that's just the cops spreading FUD so I don't try it). Stealing a park bench with a Cat 5 jack and some ethernet... you'd have to be making some kind of political statement or something. There's no way it'd be worth your time to steal a park bench with a Cat 5 jack.
How does this indiscernable change in the bits compare to digital--> analog --> digital? Basically, to a trained ear which sounds worse? Ripping from a CD to a wave at 44K 16 stereo sounds a lot better than ripping to a 128K MP3, so what's to prevent me from ripping from CD to wave to MP3? Sure, I lose some of the quality going from digital to analog but wouldn't that be masked by the MP3 compression? IOW, does the option to rip a CD in analog in Musicmatch already defeat this copy protection since MP3s are lower quality anyway?
I'm not a pro by any means, but I can hear most little inconsistancies in my music. I wish I knew which album they encoded so I could try to find it and try this myself.
Ok, that story was better than the original one!
From the article:
"A person who's seen shared source is probably very contaminated and is going to have a hard time working on other projects"
Hmm... let's think about that for a second. Which software should be labeled as a cancer? Apparently Microsoft's own code is so contaminated that just by viewing it you're never able to work on a software project again.
Yes, I know that's out of context. Laugh anyway.
You CANNOT mistake smart tags for ordinary links.
Have you ever done user support/helpdesk stuff? Never underestimate the power of stupid people. I still get calls from users telling me that Windows is giving them an error box saying "Warning, your internet connection is not optimized".
I disagree with most of what you said, except:
Or has Slashdot regressed?
Slashdot: Whiny nerds, stuff that only our staff cares about.
Anywho, on with my rant. Microsoft is not Hitler, however they're marketing/FUD tactics are the only intelligence inside Microsoft. Windows 2000 is crap. It's FINALLY taking some hints from that 30 year old OS called UNIX. They call it a "revolution". We call it "been there, done that". Internet Explorer is a crappy browser. Why does it appear to be better? Because it dominates the market. Developers are told that no one uses Netscape, so develop for IE. Netscape et al becomes incompatible as the new HTML standards favor IE and slowly squeeze everything out of the market. That's just the kind of power Microsoft has. They have the ability to make the standards committies ignore everyone else, declare Microsoft the standard, and bingo, MS wins again. I have no problems with one company setting the standards. I am not anti-Microsoft. I'm against shitty software. Everything Microsoft "innovates" (writes, buys, redistributes, whichever is the tactic of the day) is complete crap. I have yet to see a piece of MS software and say "ah hah! finally someone has heard my plea". No, actually, every time they release new software my reaction is "I'm supposed to use THIS? Do I HAVE to?" And because of their market control the answer is generally "yes, you have to" from the PHB.
I'm going to step out on a limb here and say that these people didn't like getting Slashdotted and locked out read permissions.
legally required rant:
Ok, moderators, are you smoking crack? This is the first post to point out the painfully obvious, moderate him up!
On the serious note, this article fails to support its own title. "Death of the linux desktop" it says, but where was there evidence that it's alive? The beauty of open source is that things don't die. Ever. If someone stops developemnt (Eazel being the obvious), so what? those who use it and want it, keep developing! Where's the problem here?
The other thing that just burned me about the article is the mention of Corel linux failing. First of all, Corel linux was a POS to begin with. I couldn't get the POS installed on 3 different machines. There's no options, so I know I didn't screw anything up. My first install attempt, it didn't even unmount the partitions after install! It fsck'd on my first boot, most of the daemons wouldn't start, the OS was UNUSABLE. I tried installing on a laptop, the res was messed up and it put the "Continue" button off the screen. I couldn't even click the Continue button! I never got past the first screen! Corel linux blew chunks. Lots of them. Take them OUT of the equation!
Linux on the desktop is alive and kicking. This article is just blowing senseless smoke. Mozilla is really starting to look good, Evolution beats the crap out of OutHouse, and Open Office is getting there. Wiritng an article like this is poiintless, you've just reconfirmed what we already know.. the linux desktop needs work. Saying that it's dead... STFU. It's not there yet. Development will continue, and I'm reminded every time I sit at a Windoze machine how truly superior it is.
Now all they need is a kitchen sink
I work for a smaller company as a sys admin, so I'm often on call. The nice thing is that management understands (is that an oxymoron?) that I can't be home 24/7 on weekends ready to go *IN CASE* the server farm decides to melt down or something. At my company, we do quadruple redundancy. Every 4th week, I'm the primary contact. I either need to fix it if I'm home, or call one of the other 3 "stand by" techs if I can't. It's worked well in that we've never experienced more than a half hour of downtime using this system, even at 2 AM when a hard drive died once. Also, when I do get called in, I get paid a buttload of overtime (especially between 12 and 7 AM) so it's worth my while.