a) Right. It just was extremely controversial with those who didn't use it (i.e. everyone else, like 99% of the Internet users)
b) Right, it wasn't controversial. Everyone agreed that it's a bloody fucking stupid thing.
c) Right, it wasn't the Sitefinder page itself that we all hated, it was Verisigns "bend over, here we come" attitude of forcing it on everyone, whether they wanted to or not.
Now that's three ways how he's saying the truth. Can't really argue with that, can you?
Anyone got a good SpamAssassin or procmail rule to filter out the backscatter?
I couldn't care less if it weren't for the flood of "you sent us an infected mail" spam that has been flooding my inbox for days because some stupid morons don't know that auto-notifications on virus scanners should be smashes, crucified, cooked in hot oil and quartered before being shot through the head with a shotgun because all the recent viruses fake the damn sender address.
Pretty obvious. Yes, part of it is a debian mirror for the SELinux packages, that's how apt-get gets in there.
All these numbers are from February, i.e. as fresh as they can be.
What do they show? At least as far as I am concerned, the "95% of the people use IE" is a myth, a lie, a marketing gimmick, whatever you want to call it.
Which is exactly why don't want it in the hands of corporations or corporate bodies such as ICANN. By their very nature, they view everyone as one of * competitor * supplier * customer (sometimes more than one at a time)
I wonder daily just when the court will stand up and scramble to find the proper legalese words for "Ok, I've had it. Get out of my eyes, case thrown out with extreme prejudice. Come back and I'll have you thrown into maximum security just for the fun of it."
Another solution that won't work, mostly because it doesn't contain the magical phrases "shotgun" and "spammers head".
Seriously, though: Spammers have been breaking into computers for years now. The current international spam mafias run bot-networks of several hundred-thousand machines each.
So sending mail will cost money (stamp, warrenty, tax - no matter the mechanics). Why exactly should the spammers care? It's not like they're sending from their machines or spending their money.
The serious, working solution to spam is two words: Jail time.
You can give out two copies to a friend, I guess (although that's illegal)
Depends on whether your legal system is already fucked up, or is still in the process of being screwed over.
In most of europe, the legal concept of the "private copy" is not yet dead. It's being choked, of course, and the RIAA would love to put it out of its misery. What it means essentially is that you are explicitly allowed to make copies for personal purposes, such as backups, or to have a seperate CD in your car, or giving them away to friends. The later has through court cases been limited to a vague "reasonable numbers", which generally is translated to "a couple, no more than half a dozen" by lawyers.
Since the band is located in Germany, and the Privatkopie (private copy) is still in german law, making a copy and giving it away is absolutely legal for their customers here.
Don't you think that maybe (just maybe) you are blowing things a little bit out of proportion?
I absolutely do.
But it is voicing the thoughts that most people don't dare to think that makes a difference between a discussion and an endless rehash of the same old ideas.
You know, someone just might get a good, less extreme, solution off this. Or not, but it was worth the try.
With 200 known top-spammers and their addresses on the internet, that's a decent living. Well, until you run out of spammers, but maybe the first one is out of hospital by then and you can repeat.
Hm, beat up 5 spammers a month = $5k income. The 200 known ones will last you for 40 months, or just over three years. Definitely a sustainable career.
Damn, forgot to figure in that you won't have a monopoly. If 10 people do that, you're empty after 4 months.
Who out there is saying, "Oh, look, this message got past all my spam filters and contains a lot of jumbled, garbled nonsense text alongside a plug for herbal penis enlarging pills. This must be legitimate. Now, where's my credit card,"
About 0.01% of the recipients. Which translates to a thousand sales in a 10-mio. spam bombing run.
Are people actually buying penis enlarging pills and patches, herbal viagra, mortgage refinancing, credit repair kits, or any of that stuff? Enough to put millions of dollars a month into the hands of career spammers?
I'd like to hear your opinion on how someone raping, torturing and finally killing a child should be punished.
I don't know. I'm not a "law-system in a box". If this is a serious question, give me more details and a day or two and I will give you a well-thought-out personal opinion.
Or Osama Bin Laden for that matter.
To the best of my knowledge, he has not been actually convicted of any crime so far, has he?
or you believe that sending a bunch of 0s and 1s over an Internet connection is the worst crime a human can commit.
No, I don't. But you obviously believe that sending a bunch of guys with boxcutters to the US is. Spotted the point? It's not what you do, its the impact you have. Raping a young girl is technically (penetration of penis into vagina) the same act as loving sex. Of course it isn't, because technicallities aren't everything. Context and impact are vastly more important.
A single spammer would be a slight annoyance. A million spammers is a disaster.
Nope. Read spamhaus - 200 spammers are responsible for 90% of the spam. Not "a million".
By the same logic that lets you judge spammers by the total damage caused by spam, the RIAA should also be allowed to judge pirates by the total damage caused by piracy. Wouldn't surprise me if they went for the death penalty too.
Me neither. But you cleverly avoided the core of my argument: Spammers damage society as a whole. Their crime is like polution: There'll be a few deaths, but overall, no major damage to any one individual. Just a bit of damage to all of us.
I fail to see how MP3 copying falls into that same category.
Now while we can argue about whether or not it's a bit excessive, I'm taking bets that the sudden and brutal death of, say, the top 20 US spammers would bring spam down to 1995 levels almost instantly.
In addition to the 20 cretins that we are rid of, the next 20 might also realize just who will be filling the freed-up slots, and a good part of them will move into something that resembles honest work.
Now for the "may be excessive" part: Wars have been fought and thousands been killed for less. Spammers commit a crime that is not very much realized in the modern world - they attack the common. They don't rob one guy a lot, they rob everyone a little. In other times, there would have been no hesitations to subject them to the most drastic penalties.
In fact, the death penalty should be modified for spammers to make sure it's slow and painful. A literal death by a thousand needle pricks might be very appropriate to the crime. Just pinch them once for every spam they sent.
Microsoft taking a non-solution to a widely known problem 5 years after everyone else came up with it and turning it into a proprietary product they will no doubt force into their market using every dirty trick they can muster.
Eh, I should add I'm talking about their spam solution, not any of the other 200 things they've done that could be likewise described.
Maybe it is strange to americans, because you have a different culture.
In the US, everything is mangled through the court system, and the government is - at least on paper - weak and limited.
In the EU, many things are handled by the bureaucracy, and the courts are generally seen as a last resort.
Both systems have their advantages and shortcomings. While the EU probably has the most convulted and bloated bureaucracy on the planet, the US is a giant job-guarantee program for lawyers and so lawsuit-happy that it is sickening.
Monti has teeth, and he can be an outright asshole if he wants to - in other words, exactly the right person for this job.
What's 100 mio? Just a show of teeth, not a bite. Almost certainly (as with prior cases), it won't be "pay and continue", it'll be "pay and stop, and if you don't stop, we'll be doubling the fine and ask again, repeating until you do stop."
This is then the 3rd or 4th Linux code audit project to fail. (I was a participant in 2 others)
Why? Because auditing code is
* difficult and tricky * unrewarding * lots of hard work
It simply isn't something you want to do unless you are as passionate and fanatic about your project as the OpenBSD guys are.
Re:How did this virus spread so easily?
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, if you don't hide the extension, then each of us here would be constantly dealing with dumb users who have renamed "Document1.doc" to "Report" (no extension).
And that would be a problem exactly why?
Oh, you mean, winDOS is still relying on file extensions? Man, I had thought we have something like the 21st century by now.
Blaming the AV companies for the failure of the IT personnel of other organizations to evaluate and properly configure their mail gateway AV software seems like a load of crap to me.
How is it OK to blame the admin for not changing the configuration, but not OK to blame the developer for not having a proper default config?
Besides, sending these e-mails arguably provides a positive service, because self-propagating e-mail viruses are everyone's problem, and a bit of vigilance on each person's part is required to prevent one of these viruses from becoming a worldwide problem.
Bullshit. There is not a single windos system in my home. Why exactly should I worry about the 12517th windos virus?
Moreover, for me and many others, these automated responses actually are a larger problem. I haven't had a single virus mail in my inbox ever since I told spamassassin to give anything with a windos executable attachment an insane score. But I have been flooded with the backscatter.
Infoworld claims the result could be 'devastating'
True. We are extremely lucky that destructive worms are (so far) only being written by morons, idiots, losers and wannabe hackers.
I've shown last year that it's possible to destroy (as in: wipe the disk) millions of machines with a worm in less time than the AV companies need to update their patterns.
Why isn't it happening? Because the people with both the skills and the criminal energy to do it all work for the spammers and other crime syndicates and have other uses (read: Zombie networks) for the victims.
Too bad. 40 mio. pissed windos users might be what it takes to get some fundamental changes done. Like, say, safe defaults and no automatic execution of downloaded code.
I mean, it can't be that hard. In an hour or two, there will be at least a dozen replies in here from people who say they run windos and have never gotten a single virus. Just copy their config and make it the default.;)
Never, ever, ever publish your first level. It will suck, no matter what you think about it.
This repeats when you switch games and start making levels for a new game. And yes, it will still be true if you've made levels for Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 and are starting on Doom III. Your first level will be crap.
And no, building a small one to throw it away doesn't work, either. You can't cheat this law any more than you can cheat gravity.
I remember my own first levels. As I used to be a #1 level maker for a Q3 mod for a while, I've also seen the first levels of many other people. People who are hailed and worshipped today. Their first levels sucked so badly, it made me cringe.
I've done level design for a ton of games, starting with Doom. I've probably done about a hundred levels, not counting the trials and the many I never finished. Here's my not-so-nice summary:
Doom/Doom2, etc. level editors all sucked. This was partly compensated for by those games essentially being 2D, so the editors didn't have to be very complicated, and they weren't.
Duke Nukem 3D had the best editor for an FPS, hands down. It had its quirks, but editing was easy and you had immediate feedback.
Quake3: I have a very strong love/hate relationship with radiant. On the one hand, it does its job pretty well. On the other, it has bugs and quirks that have driven me insane at times.
Age of Wonders had a pretty good editor, though editing all the parameters got tedious and there were way too many dialogs and windows.
Vampire. This has got to be the worst editor. Ever. You can essentially do nothing with it except put down props into levels you built with some external tools, then load scripts that you had to write somewhere else, tie them to characters you had to build externally - you get the idea.
Savage. I haven't yet used it very much, but from what I've seen it looks very, very nice.
Tribes and Tribes II - very good editors, though you had to build the structures externally, and some manual editing of script files was necessary if you wanted special effects.
Civ2 - quite a nice editor, but missing functionality to do repetitive tasks automatically.
Combat Mission - this is a very good editor, one of the best I have seen. It is very easy to handle and you can set up very complex and interesting missions easily.
Do the deserve it? Yes. Have they been asking for it? Absolutely.
SCO aren't only the bully, they are the bully who has the rules on his side. "The system" is pretty guilty of aiding and supporting their dirty tricks. So it was only a matter of time until someone stepped outside the rules to get even.
Actually, I'm surprised it's just a small DDoS. I'd have more expected that their LAN gets wasted.
Slashdot Mirror
how big is your site?
January:
76979 visits (battlemaster.org)
53209 visits (lemuria.org)
268 visits (selinux.lemuria.org)
Nowhere near 22 mio., but except for the SELinux part big enough to not be skewed by random "5 mozilla people came over" events.
"Site Finder was not controversial with users"
Hm, let's see:
a) Right. It just was extremely controversial with those who didn't use it (i.e. everyone else, like 99% of the Internet users)
b) Right, it wasn't controversial. Everyone agreed that it's a bloody fucking stupid thing.
c) Right, it wasn't the Sitefinder page itself that we all hated, it was Verisigns "bend over, here we come" attitude of forcing it on everyone, whether they wanted to or not.
Now that's three ways how he's saying the truth. Can't really argue with that, can you?
Anyone got a good SpamAssassin or procmail rule to filter out the backscatter?
I couldn't care less if it weren't for the flood of "you sent us an infected mail" spam that has been flooding my inbox for days because some stupid morons don't know that auto-notifications on virus scanners should be smashes, crucified, cooked in hot oil and quartered before being shot through the head with a shotgun because all the recent viruses fake the damn sender address.
My personal site:Different numbers. This site has all kinds of weird stuff on it, some Linux-specific.
My SELinux site:Pretty obvious. Yes, part of it is a debian mirror for the SELinux packages, that's how apt-get gets in there.
All these numbers are from February, i.e. as fresh as they can be.
What do they show? At least as far as I am concerned, the "95% of the people use IE" is a myth, a lie, a marketing gimmick, whatever you want to call it.
... not user-as-consumer."
Which is exactly why don't want it in the hands of corporations or corporate bodies such as ICANN. By their very nature, they view everyone as one of
* competitor
* supplier
* customer
(sometimes more than one at a time)
I wonder daily just when the court will stand up and scramble to find the proper legalese words for "Ok, I've had it. Get out of my eyes, case thrown out with extreme prejudice. Come back and I'll have you thrown into maximum security just for the fun of it."
Another solution that won't work, mostly because it doesn't contain the magical phrases "shotgun" and "spammers head".
Seriously, though: Spammers have been breaking into computers for years now. The current international spam mafias run bot-networks of several hundred-thousand machines each.
So sending mail will cost money (stamp, warrenty, tax - no matter the mechanics). Why exactly should the spammers care? It's not like they're sending from their machines or spending their money.
The serious, working solution to spam is two words: Jail time.
You can give out two copies to a friend, I guess (although that's illegal)
Depends on whether your legal system is already fucked up, or is still in the process of being screwed over.
In most of europe, the legal concept of the "private copy" is not yet dead. It's being choked, of course, and the RIAA would love to put it out of its misery.
What it means essentially is that you are explicitly allowed to make copies for personal purposes, such as backups, or to have a seperate CD in your car, or giving them away to friends. The later has through court cases been limited to a vague "reasonable numbers", which generally is translated to "a couple, no more than half a dozen" by lawyers.
Since the band is located in Germany, and the Privatkopie (private copy) is still in german law, making a copy and giving it away is absolutely legal for their customers here.
Don't you think that maybe (just maybe) you are blowing things a little bit out of proportion?
I absolutely do.
But it is voicing the thoughts that most people don't dare to think that makes a difference between a discussion and an endless rehash of the same old ideas.
You know, someone just might get a good, less extreme, solution off this. Or not, but it was worth the try.
Any spammer or every spammer?
With 200 known top-spammers and their addresses on the internet, that's a decent living. Well, until you run out of spammers, but maybe the first one is out of hospital by then and you can repeat.
Hm, beat up 5 spammers a month = $5k income. The 200 known ones will last you for 40 months, or just over three years. Definitely a sustainable career.
Damn, forgot to figure in that you won't have a monopoly. If 10 people do that, you're empty after 4 months.
*sigh*, could've been so easy.
Who out there is saying, "Oh, look, this message got past all my spam filters and contains a lot of jumbled, garbled nonsense text alongside a plug for herbal penis enlarging pills. This must be legitimate. Now, where's my credit card,"
About 0.01% of the recipients. Which translates to a thousand sales in a 10-mio. spam bombing run.
Are people actually buying penis enlarging pills and patches, herbal viagra, mortgage refinancing, credit repair kits, or any of that stuff? Enough to put millions of dollars a month into the hands of career spammers?
Yes.
I'd like to hear your opinion on how someone raping, torturing and finally killing a child should be punished.
I don't know. I'm not a "law-system in a box". If this is a serious question, give me more details and a day or two and I will give you a well-thought-out personal opinion.
Or Osama Bin Laden for that matter.
To the best of my knowledge, he has not been actually convicted of any crime so far, has he?
or you believe that sending a bunch of 0s and 1s over an Internet connection is the worst crime a human can commit.
No, I don't. But you obviously believe that sending a bunch of guys with boxcutters to the US is.
Spotted the point? It's not what you do, its the impact you have. Raping a young girl is technically (penetration of penis into vagina) the same act as loving sex. Of course it isn't, because technicallities aren't everything. Context and impact are vastly more important.
A single spammer would be a slight annoyance. A million spammers is a disaster.
Nope. Read spamhaus - 200 spammers are responsible for 90% of the spam. Not "a million".
By the same logic that lets you judge spammers by the total damage caused by spam, the RIAA should also be allowed to judge pirates by the total damage caused by piracy. Wouldn't surprise me if they went for the death penalty too.
Me neither. But you cleverly avoided the core of my argument: Spammers damage society as a whole. Their crime is like polution: There'll be a few deaths, but overall, no major damage to any one individual. Just a bit of damage to all of us.
I fail to see how MP3 copying falls into that same category.
Why exactly was the parent modded as Funny?
Now while we can argue about whether or not it's a bit excessive, I'm taking bets that the sudden and brutal death of, say, the top 20 US spammers would bring spam down to 1995 levels almost instantly.
In addition to the 20 cretins that we are rid of, the next 20 might also realize just who will be filling the freed-up slots, and a good part of them will move into something that resembles honest work.
Now for the "may be excessive" part:
Wars have been fought and thousands been killed for less.
Spammers commit a crime that is not very much realized in the modern world - they attack the common. They don't rob one guy a lot, they rob everyone a little. In other times, there would have been no hesitations to subject them to the most drastic penalties.
In fact, the death penalty should be modified for spammers to make sure it's slow and painful. A literal death by a thousand needle pricks might be very appropriate to the crime. Just pinch them once for every spam they sent.
Microsoft taking a non-solution to a widely known problem 5 years after everyone else came up with it and turning it into a proprietary product they will no doubt force into their market using every dirty trick they can muster.
Eh, I should add I'm talking about their spam solution, not any of the other 200 things they've done that could be likewise described.
Maybe it is strange to americans, because you have a different culture.
In the US, everything is mangled through the court system, and the government is - at least on paper - weak and limited.
In the EU, many things are handled by the bureaucracy, and the courts are generally seen as a last resort.
Both systems have their advantages and shortcomings. While the EU probably has the most convulted and bloated bureaucracy on the planet, the US is a giant job-guarantee program for lawyers and so lawsuit-happy that it is sickening.
Monti has teeth, and he can be an outright asshole if he wants to - in other words, exactly the right person for this job.
What's 100 mio? Just a show of teeth, not a bite. Almost certainly (as with prior cases), it won't be "pay and continue", it'll be "pay and stop, and if you don't stop, we'll be doubling the fine and ask again, repeating until you do stop."
This is then the 3rd or 4th Linux code audit project to fail. (I was a participant in 2 others)
Why? Because auditing code is
* difficult and tricky
* unrewarding
* lots of hard work
It simply isn't something you want to do unless you are as passionate and fanatic about your project as the OpenBSD guys are.
On the other hand, if you don't hide the extension, then each of us here would be constantly dealing with dumb users who have renamed "Document1.doc" to "Report" (no extension).
And that would be a problem exactly why?
Oh, you mean, winDOS is still relying on file extensions? Man, I had thought we have something like the 21st century by now.
Blaming the AV companies for the failure of the IT personnel of other organizations to evaluate and properly configure their mail gateway AV software seems like a load of crap to me.
How is it OK to blame the admin for not changing the configuration, but not OK to blame the developer for not having a proper default config?
Besides, sending these e-mails arguably provides a positive service, because self-propagating e-mail viruses are everyone's problem, and a bit of vigilance on each person's part is required to prevent one of these viruses from becoming a worldwide problem.
Bullshit. There is not a single windos system in my home. Why exactly should I worry about the 12517th windos virus?
Moreover, for me and many others, these automated responses actually are a larger problem. I haven't had a single virus mail in my inbox ever since I told spamassassin to give anything with a windos executable attachment an insane score. But I have been flooded with the backscatter.
Infoworld claims the result could be 'devastating'
;)
True. We are extremely lucky that destructive worms are (so far) only being written by morons, idiots, losers and wannabe hackers.
I've shown last year that it's possible to destroy (as in: wipe the disk) millions of machines with a worm in less time than the AV companies need to update their patterns.
Why isn't it happening? Because the people with both the skills and the criminal energy to do it all work for the spammers and other crime syndicates and have other uses (read: Zombie networks) for the victims.
Too bad. 40 mio. pissed windos users might be what it takes to get some fundamental changes done. Like, say, safe defaults and no automatic execution of downloaded code.
I mean, it can't be that hard. In an hour or two, there will be at least a dozen replies in here from people who say they run windos and have never gotten a single virus. Just copy their config and make it the default.
have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?
No, I've felt sorry that it runs only on mac hardware. I'd put it unto my notebook right away, if that would work, and tripple-boot Linux/OpenBSD/OSX.
There's also the "magic word" on level design:
Never, ever, ever publish your first level. It will suck, no matter what you think about it.
This repeats when you switch games and start making levels for a new game. And yes, it will still be true if you've made levels for Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 and are starting on Doom III. Your first level will be crap.
And no, building a small one to throw it away doesn't work, either. You can't cheat this law any more than you can cheat gravity.
I remember my own first levels. As I used to be a #1 level maker for a Q3 mod for a while, I've also seen the first levels of many other people. People who are hailed and worshipped today. Their first levels sucked so badly, it made me cringe.
I've done level design for a ton of games, starting with Doom. I've probably done about a hundred levels, not counting the trials and the many I never finished. Here's my not-so-nice summary:
Doom/Doom2, etc. level editors all sucked. This was partly compensated for by those games essentially being 2D, so the editors didn't have to be very complicated, and they weren't.
Duke Nukem 3D had the best editor for an FPS, hands down. It had its quirks, but editing was easy and you had immediate feedback.
Quake3: I have a very strong love/hate relationship with radiant. On the one hand, it does its job pretty well. On the other, it has bugs and quirks that have driven me insane at times.
Age of Wonders had a pretty good editor, though editing all the parameters got tedious and there were way too many dialogs and windows.
Vampire. This has got to be the worst editor. Ever. You can essentially do nothing with it except put down props into levels you built with some external tools, then load scripts that you had to write somewhere else, tie them to characters you had to build externally - you get the idea.
Savage. I haven't yet used it very much, but from what I've seen it looks very, very nice.
Tribes and Tribes II - very good editors, though you had to build the structures externally, and some manual editing of script files was necessary if you wanted special effects.
Civ2 - quite a nice editor, but missing functionality to do repetitive tasks automatically.
Combat Mission - this is a very good editor, one of the best I have seen. It is very easy to handle and you can set up very complex and interesting missions easily.
I'm not a great fan of Media Player, though it does it's job pretty well,
Whether or not it does is of absolutely no consequence to the matter at hand.
but doesn't the modern definition of a desktop OS contain a media player?
No, it doesn't. Please do remove your head from Mr. Gates ass, it's getting crowded in there.
Is this ethical? No.
Do the deserve it? Yes.
Have they been asking for it? Absolutely.
SCO aren't only the bully, they are the bully who has the rules on his side. "The system" is pretty guilty of aiding and supporting their dirty tricks. So it was only a matter of time until someone stepped outside the rules to get even.
Actually, I'm surprised it's just a small DDoS. I'd have more expected that their LAN gets wasted.