Either you haven't actually worked as an admin, or you have been lucky enough to find the perfect bosses up until now.
The first line starts it off. If you've been given responsibility....given the rights to stop whatever you see fit.
Heh. Police have been given the responsibility to prevent crime. Do they have the right to stop whatever they see fit? Nah.
Sysadmins are given the responsibility of making the network function as the users need it to function. They have been given the right to be paged when it breaks, and the right to lots of coffee. In an ideal world, yeah, you have full rights. You do what you want. In the real world, you do what you can.
And you _always_ need to be backed up by management, for the simple fact that they manage you. If you're not backed up, then they will, at the very least, put you under a lot of pressure, and at the worst, simply fire you for causing more work for them (You pissed off teachers. Teachers are bitching. Lots of them. Easiest fix: Explain to all the profs why they should be happy, or fire the admin in a market full of out of work admins? You can guess which they'll usually pick).
This post is a nice theory. I would love if the world was like this.
As a question: What happens the first time that either Ad-Aware or this spyware package removes a critical system component (more likely the spyware, since it doesn't prompt you on each removal)? When I install it, and it does the sweep of my system, for some reason it decides that, say, a modified file that I have running is an ad-removal program. This one might not do it, but if this trend continues, it will at some point. Say that critical file is then removed, and turns out to make my system inoperable.
Wonder what they'd do at that point. Wonder what they'd do if someone purposefully renamed a component, and repointed all references, then installed their spyware? And then, say, sued them for lost time, expense, data, etc?
It's an amusing thought exercise.
And as a note: No, just because you click "Okay" doesn't give them license to do anything. The courts do use phrases like "reasonable" and "expected" when looking at contracts. If I wrote up a contract for cell phone service, and added a clause that "By signing, you give me the right to loot and pillage your house, shoot your tv, and bury you alive," I wouldn't suddenly be allowed to do those things. Common sense (sorta) usually prevails.
I noticed that too. But I checked, and the team spells INIOSES, which doesn't seem to be any kind of satire or pun. Things do actually happen on April 1 occasionally. The fact that the diver's name was Monty Halls (cf Monty Hall of Let's Make A Deal) was a bit bothersome as well, but I don't see the BBC putting up a story like this 10 days after April Fool's....
And if you do this, every user will request support on every product you include. Even if you put some sort of disclaimer on the cd. They will want you to fully troubleshoot their ICQ client, mIRC, Eudora, and all.
I'd say include the basics. A browser. Eudora. Then on your web page, put a link with "Extra software." And let them find it.
Do you really want some 75 yr old woman calling helpdesk and yelling because she "found this icq thing and can't figure it out, and there's all this por-no-graphy!"?
In Deed. Maybe it was deleted immediately, unread. I'd liken email summons to leaving the summons at someone's door. You can't insure that someone has read it - just that you sent it to the location they were at.
Hell, how do they know that _I_ read it? What if my roommate routinely downloads my mail and deletes it, to be a punk? What if it was d/l'ed, and crashed in mid read, corrupting the mail?
The other issue is that I would be willing to bet that techs at Dell (at least frontline techs) are _required_ to do that. I doubt the Dell procedures manual says "If customer knows what they are doing, skip steps 1-15, and RMA drive." You should have asked to be escalated to someone who would actually be able to be flexible. If he was just being an ass, he would have said "No, he'll say the same thing." If he couldn't do anything, he'd say "Hold on, let me get you someone."
Whether the guy 1. Was an idiot, 2. Was bored, and didn't want you on the phone interrupting his surfing of personal web sites and email or 3. Just couldn't do a damn thing is really irrelevant to the outcome. Any of the 3 means that he couldn't/wouldn't do anything but follow his support procedures.
Some phone agents do know better, they just can't do anything. Some are morons.
Here's a story on... well, I'm not sure. It was listed under "Will Hollywood's 'Tomb' be a box office 'Raider?'" which was news about: Lara Croft, Angelina Jolie, video game, Tomb Raider Chronicles Web, Max Payne.
Here's the summary:
After the success of last year ' s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and high expectations for Resident Evil, out Friday, studios are booting up for more. The game: Alice in Wonderland gets a twisted remake in American McGee ' s Alice, a gothic horror version of the classic tale; based on the game by Electronic Arts Studio: Dimension Status: Horror master Wes Craven directs. The game: A sunglasses-wearing all-American hero blows away bad guys with machine guns; 3D Realms Studio: Dimension Status: In limbo. Star Angelina Jolie was attached to the sequel before the original Tomb Raider opened. The game: Amateur taxi drivers take to the sidewalks and crowded streets, picking up customers and delivering them to their destinations unscathed; Sega Studio: No distributor yet. Brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber(Montana) currently are writing the screenplay.
And the four articles it used:
* Jolie, Thornton Say They Are Grateful for New Son (Lycos 03/14/02)
* Video games get the reel treatment (USA Today 03/14/02)
* Will Hollywood's 'Tomb' be a box office 'Raider?' (USA Today 03/14/02)
* Coming soon to a bigger screen (USA Today 03/14/02)
Ravers? Anyone who wanted to play music, but didn't want to carry around a rack of speakers? Someone who had an mp3 player, and wanted to let everyone listen, but didn't have anything to do so? The fact that it's about mouse sized means that it's a lot more portable than speakers.
And it's got the gee-whiz factor. You setting up a speaker and playing sound is boring. Me flipping some little device onto a table, and getting music is cool.;)
But I have to say I liked the Tron game itself (the Arcade version) better. It had the Spider Battle, the Tank Battle (the hardest one), the Lightcycle Battle (the easiest of them all) and the MCP battle. It was 4 games in one, plus it had both a spinny control and a joystick! It was, to say the least, an excellent game.
Re:WAHKAAA! ..it's just not the same.
on
Return of the Dragon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In Deed - the _entire_ point of Bruce Lee's skill was that he did things other people couldn't. Hell, he did things with his body we didn't think bodies could do. So they think that now they can find some guy who studied Jeet Kun Do, or whatever it is they are saying he has mastered, and he'll move like Bruce?
The point is, nobody moves like Bruce. That's why we watch him. I'm thinking this will be bad not only for the moral reasons (which bug me immensely), but for the technical/practical reasons. And hell, why not just call it Tekken 8: The Movie. Starring Law.
I'm not sure what exactly the cheese worm does, but I wonder if it couldn't have just such effects:
I assume it changes the configs of whatever program allows the expliot. Picture this: A large (very large) and profitable (read: With expensive lawyers) company is running a very strange, very custom version of Foo (where Foo what cheese fixes). This Foo was coded in about 30 hours, at $200 an hour ($6000), and is key to their business. It may be outdated, and vulnerable, but they have an underpaid Malaysian coder working on the new version - it'll be a week or so.
In comes Cheese worm. "Oh, dear. You have a problem with your Foo! I'll just fix that for you."
Boom. The custom Foo (which was able to be altered by Cheese, but is now horribly hosed) stops completely. VLC loses a lot of money, and a lot of customers, before they can get the custom version back (it was hand coded, and Foo-writers, the consulting company, kept the source and gained all rights to reinstall).
Suddenly, Cheese's author is not so happy, and I don't think "I was just trying to help" is going to fly when he gets sued.
You just don't go in and make changes to people's boxes. Warn, alert, suggest. Not change.
I wondered if someone would catch that - that was my very first thought - this could be the beginning of a set of 'net wars - people write new viruses, sec teams write new patches, and they roam the net breaking and fixing boxes. Benefit is that you can't break a box that has been fixed.
Problem is that 1. I do _not_ want those worms coming in to my boxes. Granted, if they hit me, I'm probably not keeping up with patches. And it's my own fault. But still. 2. Bandwidth. If this really did take off, you'd have hundreds of worms flying around the net constantly, sucking up bandwidth, generating traffic, making firewall logs _insane_. Just not good, I'd say.
Perhaps if you got a nice little email, sent to root@yourip, that informed you of the virus.
It's a nice idea, but ultimately a problem, I think. I know we have a need for secure boxes, and that if Joe Q. Admin's box gets hit, mine are more vulnerable, but still....
Exactly - it would seem to me that, unless Gracenote could prove that freedb.org is violating their copyright, this lawsuit hasn't a chance to pass. So I would bet that a large portion of the suit will be trying to do exactly that - attack freedb.org as copyright infringers. They couldn't sue freedb.org directly, but they can sue someone else, and make the issue whether freedb.org infringed. It gets the case in a US court, where it is relevant, but lets a US court rule on a non-US company.
My current favorite (I'm paraphrasing) was a spam for a miraculous 12,000 year old recipe for Dutch Bread (which was discovered by accident by a housewife, yet), which (wait for it) when eaten, would (can you believe it) Stop Hunger! YES! Food that stops hunger! I never would have thought. For something like $39.95 I could have the receipe.
You need the registrant information, simply to contact people. Whether or not you put your actual info down is another thing entirely - as long as it goes to an email address that gets to you, then put whatever you want.
I've tracked down a number of spammers using a chain of whois info (whois the spam domain. Find out who owns it. Whois the owner. Find their owner. Whois that owner. Find a contact email and number. Yell/LART as desired). I've contacted businesses based on their domain and info provided - I'd say you put up as much as you want, but there must be some way to contact you. Someone suggested a front that you register with, and they then pass the info. Fine. As long as I can get to the source, I don't care.
And I don't put my info in registrations - I put down my first name, last initial, and an email alias. The rest of it is either company info or a po box.
Protect your own privacy, and limit as little as you can at the base.
Indeed. Getting things out of evidence is a pain and a half. Once it goes in, it rarely comes out. If you can get publicity, and maybe the EFF involved, you might get your personal info back.
And the SJ Games reference is here - they eventually got their equipment plus a good chunk of change back. So there is hope.
Slashdot Mirror
This comment amuses me greatly.
Either you haven't actually worked as an admin, or you have been lucky enough to find the perfect bosses up until now.
The first line starts it off. If you've been given responsibility....given the rights to stop whatever you see fit.
Heh. Police have been given the responsibility to prevent crime. Do they have the right to stop whatever they see fit? Nah.
Sysadmins are given the responsibility of making the network function as the users need it to function. They have been given the right to be paged when it breaks, and the right to lots of coffee. In an ideal world, yeah, you have full rights. You do what you want. In the real world, you do what you can.
And you _always_ need to be backed up by management, for the simple fact that they manage you. If you're not backed up, then they will, at the very least, put you under a lot of pressure, and at the worst, simply fire you for causing more work for them (You pissed off teachers. Teachers are bitching. Lots of them. Easiest fix: Explain to all the profs why they should be happy, or fire the admin in a market full of out of work admins? You can guess which they'll usually pick).
This post is a nice theory. I would love if the world was like this.
Tisn't.
Wonder what they'd do at that point. Wonder what they'd do if someone purposefully renamed a component, and repointed all references, then installed their spyware? And then, say, sued them for lost time, expense, data, etc?
It's an amusing thought exercise.
And as a note: No, just because you click "Okay" doesn't give them license to do anything. The courts do use phrases like "reasonable" and "expected" when looking at contracts. If I wrote up a contract for cell phone service, and added a clause that "By signing, you give me the right to loot and pillage your house, shoot your tv, and bury you alive," I wouldn't suddenly be allowed to do those things. Common sense (sorta) usually prevails.
In Deed.
Because lots and lots and lots of people use Office. So by showing that Office runs on OS X, Apple is showing you that even that will work.
Besides, it supports the "MS should be making software, not OS'es" theory.
Hell, Apple used to use Office X to promote OS X - they commented that Office X was more advanced and faster than Office 2000 on a PC.
Mac OS is not synonymous with "No-microsoft."
I noticed that too. But I checked, and the team spells INIOSES, which doesn't seem to be any kind of satire or pun. Things do actually happen on April 1 occasionally. The fact that the diver's name was Monty Halls (cf Monty Hall of Let's Make A Deal) was a bit bothersome as well, but I don't see the BBC putting up a story like this 10 days after April Fool's....
And if you do this, every user will request support on every product you include. Even if you put some sort of disclaimer on the cd. They will want you to fully troubleshoot their ICQ client, mIRC, Eudora, and all.
I'd say include the basics. A browser. Eudora. Then on your web page, put a link with "Extra software." And let them find it.
Do you really want some 75 yr old woman calling helpdesk and yelling because she "found this icq thing and can't figure it out, and there's all this por-no-graphy!"?
In Deed. Maybe it was deleted immediately, unread. I'd liken email summons to leaving the summons at someone's door. You can't insure that someone has read it - just that you sent it to the location they were at.
Hell, how do they know that _I_ read it? What if my roommate routinely downloads my mail and deletes it, to be a punk? What if it was d/l'ed, and crashed in mid read, corrupting the mail?
It's just a bad idea, imho.
The other issue is that I would be willing to bet that techs at Dell (at least frontline techs) are _required_ to do that. I doubt the Dell procedures manual says "If customer knows what they are doing, skip steps 1-15, and RMA drive." You should have asked to be escalated to someone who would actually be able to be flexible. If he was just being an ass, he would have said "No, he'll say the same thing." If he couldn't do anything, he'd say "Hold on, let me get you someone."
Whether the guy 1. Was an idiot, 2. Was bored, and didn't want you on the phone interrupting his surfing of personal web sites and email or 3. Just couldn't do a damn thing is really irrelevant to the outcome. Any of the 3 means that he couldn't/wouldn't do anything but follow his support procedures.
Some phone agents do know better, they just can't do anything. Some are morons.
Heh.
... well, I'm not sure. It was listed under "Will Hollywood's 'Tomb' be a box office 'Raider?'" which was news about: Lara Croft, Angelina Jolie, video game, Tomb Raider Chronicles Web, Max Payne.
Here's a story on
Here's the summary:
After the success of last year ' s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and high expectations for Resident Evil, out Friday, studios are booting up for more. The game: Alice in Wonderland gets a twisted remake in American McGee ' s Alice, a gothic horror version of the classic tale; based on the game by Electronic Arts Studio: Dimension Status: Horror master Wes Craven directs. The game: A sunglasses-wearing all-American hero blows away bad guys with machine guns; 3D Realms Studio: Dimension Status: In limbo. Star Angelina Jolie was attached to the sequel before the original Tomb Raider opened. The game: Amateur taxi drivers take to the sidewalks and crowded streets, picking up customers and delivering them to their destinations unscathed; Sega Studio: No distributor yet. Brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber(Montana) currently are writing the screenplay.
And the four articles it used:
* Jolie, Thornton Say They Are Grateful for New Son (Lycos 03/14/02)
* Video games get the reel treatment (USA Today 03/14/02)
* Will Hollywood's 'Tomb' be a box office 'Raider?' (USA Today 03/14/02)
* Coming soon to a bigger screen (USA Today 03/14/02)
Hmmmm.
Ravers? Anyone who wanted to play music, but didn't want to carry around a rack of speakers? Someone who had an mp3 player, and wanted to let everyone listen, but didn't have anything to do so? The fact that it's about mouse sized means that it's a lot more portable than speakers.
;)
And it's got the gee-whiz factor. You setting up a speaker and playing sound is boring. Me flipping some little device onto a table, and getting music is cool.
But I have to say I liked the Tron game itself (the Arcade version) better. It had the Spider Battle, the Tank Battle (the hardest one), the Lightcycle Battle (the easiest of them all) and the MCP battle. It was 4 games in one, plus it had both a spinny control and a joystick! It was, to say the least, an excellent game.
In Deed - the _entire_ point of Bruce Lee's skill was that he did things other people couldn't. Hell, he did things with his body we didn't think bodies could do. So they think that now they can find some guy who studied Jeet Kun Do, or whatever it is they are saying he has mastered, and he'll move like Bruce?
The point is, nobody moves like Bruce. That's why we watch him. I'm thinking this will be bad not only for the moral reasons (which bug me immensely), but for the technical/practical reasons. And hell, why not just call it Tekken 8: The Movie. Starring Law.
And man, just think about how boring it will be to watch while they level up....
"Why are they running in circles, mommy?" "They need to gain a couple more levels, sweetie." "This sucks, mommy!"
I'm not sure what exactly the cheese worm does, but I wonder if it couldn't have just such effects:
I assume it changes the configs of whatever program allows the expliot. Picture this: A large (very large) and profitable (read: With expensive lawyers) company is running a very strange, very custom version of Foo (where Foo what cheese fixes). This Foo was coded in about 30 hours, at $200 an hour ($6000), and is key to their business. It may be outdated, and vulnerable, but they have an underpaid Malaysian coder working on the new version - it'll be a week or so.
In comes Cheese worm. "Oh, dear. You have a problem with your Foo! I'll just fix that for you."
Boom. The custom Foo (which was able to be altered by Cheese, but is now horribly hosed) stops completely. VLC loses a lot of money, and a lot of customers, before they can get the custom version back (it was hand coded, and Foo-writers, the consulting company, kept the source and gained all rights to reinstall).
Suddenly, Cheese's author is not so happy, and I don't think "I was just trying to help" is going to fly when he gets sued.
You just don't go in and make changes to people's boxes. Warn, alert, suggest. Not change.
I wondered if someone would catch that - that was my very first thought - this could be the beginning of a set of 'net wars - people write new viruses, sec teams write new patches, and they roam the net breaking and fixing boxes. Benefit is that you can't break a box that has been fixed.
Problem is that 1. I do _not_ want those worms coming in to my boxes. Granted, if they hit me, I'm probably not keeping up with patches. And it's my own fault. But still. 2. Bandwidth. If this really did take off, you'd have hundreds of worms flying around the net constantly, sucking up bandwidth, generating traffic, making firewall logs _insane_. Just not good, I'd say.
Perhaps if you got a nice little email, sent to root@yourip, that informed you of the virus.
It's a nice idea, but ultimately a problem, I think. I know we have a need for secure boxes, and that if Joe Q. Admin's box gets hit, mine are more vulnerable, but still....
Exactly - it would seem to me that, unless Gracenote could prove that freedb.org is violating their copyright, this lawsuit hasn't a chance to pass. So I would bet that a large portion of the suit will be trying to do exactly that - attack freedb.org as copyright infringers. They couldn't sue freedb.org directly, but they can sue someone else, and make the issue whether freedb.org infringed. It gets the case in a US court, where it is relevant, but lets a US court rule on a non-US company.
Bastards.
My current favorite (I'm paraphrasing) was a spam for a miraculous 12,000 year old recipe for Dutch Bread (which was discovered by accident by a housewife, yet), which (wait for it) when eaten, would (can you believe it) Stop Hunger! YES! Food that stops hunger! I never would have thought. For something like $39.95 I could have the receipe.
Boggled my mind.
You need the registrant information, simply to contact people. Whether or not you put your actual info down is another thing entirely - as long as it goes to an email address that gets to you, then put whatever you want.
I've tracked down a number of spammers using a chain of whois info (whois the spam domain. Find out who owns it. Whois the owner. Find their owner. Whois that owner. Find a contact email and number. Yell/LART as desired). I've contacted businesses based on their domain and info provided - I'd say you put up as much as you want, but there must be some way to contact you. Someone suggested a front that you register with, and they then pass the info. Fine. As long as I can get to the source, I don't care.
And I don't put my info in registrations - I put down my first name, last initial, and an email alias. The rest of it is either company info or a po box.
Protect your own privacy, and limit as little as you can at the base.
So there.
And the SJ Games reference is here - they eventually got their equipment plus a good chunk of change back. So there is hope.