Another show on whether the market is driven by the customers or the manufacturers.
I remember back when Mr. Gates had to check how strong his influence on the hardware market is for the first time, and he came up with the windos keys. For a while, you could buy both kinds of keyboars - with, or without them. But almost all manufacturers quickly went with just one kind (cheaper, of course). I made it a point of explicitly buying those without. Not so much because I hate windos (I do), but because those additional keys made typing more difficult for me, as other keys became smaller than I was used to.
The same will almost certainly happen with the motherboards. For a while, there will be both, then manufacturers cut costs and go with just one kind. It's our job as customers to make sure it's the one we like. The problem being that the voice of the customers may or may not count.
Yeah, right. For fun, I put my own domain into their little URL box.
They correctly identify it as running Apache.
Then, 5 times the size, there's an ad that says "Despite what we've written above so small that you might miss it, this site might really be running (big font)M$ IIS(/big font) and our server masking tool (click here to buy)".
Let me guess how they arrived at their results: Probe 10k random servers, add the total sales volume of our server software as IIS percentage.:)
I was using 2.20 until recently. After updating to 2.60, the level of spam still coming through the filter dropped right off. It's about 1 msg. per day now, used to be at least 5 times that.
It's just a bit too obvious that he was hoping for a severe slashdotting, driving his own numbers ("look, editor, how many people read my articles!") and the ad numbers of his paper up.
If you are a clueless newbie who should've stayed with windos and who is unable to RTFM, the parent is true.
If you know even a little what the heck you're doing, or are willing to learn, it's flamebait and lies.
Debian follows the original Unix philosophy:
The machine should assume that the user is the brighter of the two.
I like that principle, but it may indeed not be true for everyone. In that case, do use an OS or a distro that does the thinking for you. (this is not meant as an insult, though I realize it sounds like one.)
Had about 20 users. It was almost instantly run over by the C64.
Commodore Amiga Atari 520 ST
Yeah, the Amiga has a cult following still, it should at least be mentioned. The Atari - while some argued that it was technically superior, it definitely had a short existence and few fans.
Acorn Archimedes (arguably the best home PC OS of the 80's anywhere in the world)
Absolutely. It sets standards that I don't think anyone else in the 80s even came close to. Unfortunately, though, it too was very much a niche product.
It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.
You got it.
Mergers and acquisitions are good for the companies involved. As the market is a zero-sum game whenever it is not creating something, that means someone else suffers loss of equal size. Usually, it's the customer. Sometimes, it's the competition.
Unfortunately, for the total user experience, we'd have to upgrade the whole internet...
Here's your idiot card, now play somewhere else.
The people who require the entire world to change in order to solve a real problem are already bad enough. We don't need clueless people with the same approach for a feature that they like, thank you.
As many other comments have pointed out, the tax approach is shortsighted and irrelevant.
However, it has long been proposed that micropayment directly between sender and receipient would solve the problem.
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
Every time you send me a mail, you also transfer a token with it that is worth, say, 1 cent. In a normal communication, when we both send mails back and forth, this will more or less level out. Maybe at the end of the year you owe me 20 cent or the other way around, no big deal. In fact, I can just send you a 20-cent token and we're even.
Mail without tokens would be bounced with an appropriate error. Or you can decide to accept them anyways and filter them however you like (e.g. in a special "cheap crap" folder).
Mailing lists and other legit mass-mailings can be solved in one of two ways:
a) When you subscribe, you send a token for x cents, and you'll receive the next x mails. This is cool for newsletters and other periodic things where the number of mailings per time-frame can be reasonably safely guessed. So in effect, you're subscribing to the next x newsletters, say 3 weeks. Same for web-based sign-ups. When you sign up to my online game, I send you the initial password by mail. I'd simply add another text field to the page where you paste your 1-cent token. Very much like a "please include a self-addressed envelope with postage paid".
b) Whitelists. My mailing list would send out token-less mails and if they bounce as "insufficient payment", I'd handle that just like any other bounce, e.g. after 3 bounces you get automatically unsubscribed.
There are many fine points to sort out, but they are, essentially, all trivial.
The article says "responding", not "replying by mail".
If you don't know that 99.999% of spam uses forged From: addresses, you've been living under a small rock somewhere deep in the darkest forest for the past few years.
The problem, of course, is that responding by phone or snail-mail takes even more of my time.
That said, responding is the wrong approach.
Spam is a business. So hit them where it hurts: The bottom line. Our current anti-spam laws are misguided at best. They attack the spam mechanics, not the spam business.
Actually, the EU has teeth. It probably isn't any less corrupt than the current US regime, but it's a different kind of corruption, and to more and smaller groups.
Plus, Monty of the EU antitrust division is not exactly known for being a guy you can buy. He actually appears to have a sadistic liking to showing large corporations just where their power ends.
He is absolutely right. You don't need perfect code for security. You need well-designed security procedures in your operating system, and more importantly, a fail-safe(*) core system.
(As in: It always fails towards the secure side. Design software like you would an elevator: Always take failure into account and make sure the people/processes inside are still safe.)
So does anyone know what exactly they are selling? Which apps besides the kernel are in?
I haven't contributed to the kernel, but I have written code for a few other GPL programs. I'd love to know if my code is in there. You see - they already lost a court case about their FUD campaign over here in Germany. Not a good start for further lawsuits for them.:)
If shutting your machine down is the minimum required to prevent future attacks on me and others (yes, almost all self-defense laws do include not only defending yourself, but also defending others), then that is exactly my point.
I could firewall myself. But that wouldn't prevent you from attacking others. It also wouldn't stop further attacks on me - it'd just make them inconsequential. However, they are still occuring. Just because your blows don't hurt me doesn't mean I have to put up with them.
Thanks to this correction (also to the other, which yes is a typo and was pointed out to me already).
There has been much feedback from the community ever since I posted it, and I will update it soon (have a conference talk to do that takes priority right now).
How to 0wn the Internet in your Spare Time is a pretty good approach to this as well.
I've read that one, and it is referenced in my paper.:)
However, the author makes a good start in terms of preventing that initial spread.
Chapter 4.5.1 of my paper shows how to circumvent that questionabe protection.
But there are several schools of thought related to detecting anomalous traffic and, for example, shutting it off at source, or automatically rate limiting it.
That is the correct approach. Until worms earn polymorph capabilities, of course. Unless you are ready to risk a fairly large false positives quota. Remember, most of the recent worms spread as web-traffic.
having to prepare a presentation on, you guessed it, worm spread in corporate networks
You might want to check out chapter 8.2 of my paper. There I show how to wipe out a corporate LAN in under 60 seconds.
otherwise this could cause some major legal problems...
I assert my right to self-defense. You attack me, I'll attack you in exactly the same way (you see, I already know you're vulnerable to that exploit), and shut you down so you can't continue to attack. I won't wipe you or patch you or do any permanent damage.
"you" and "me" can be either we as persons or our respective servers. It doesn't matter technically, so I fail to see why it should matter legally.
That said, I practice what I preach. I've had a "give me code red and I'll shut you down" script on my webserver for half a year now. There have been zero complaints or legal actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Another show on whether the market is driven by the customers or the manufacturers.
I remember back when Mr. Gates had to check how strong his influence on the hardware market is for the first time, and he came up with the windos keys.
For a while, you could buy both kinds of keyboars - with, or without them. But almost all manufacturers quickly went with just one kind (cheaper, of course). I made it a point of explicitly buying those without. Not so much because I hate windos (I do), but because those additional keys made typing more difficult for me, as other keys became smaller than I was used to.
The same will almost certainly happen with the motherboards. For a while, there will be both, then manufacturers cut costs and go with just one kind.
It's our job as customers to make sure it's the one we like. The problem being that the voice of the customers may or may not count.
Yeah, right. For fun, I put my own domain into their little URL box.
:)
They correctly identify it as running Apache.
Then, 5 times the size, there's an ad that says "Despite what we've written above so small that you might miss it, this site might really be running (big font)M$ IIS(/big font) and our server masking tool (click here to buy)".
Let me guess how they arrived at their results: Probe 10k random servers, add the total sales volume of our server software as IIS percentage.
The version he's using might make the difference.
I was using 2.20 until recently. After updating to 2.60, the level of spam still coming through the filter dropped right off. It's about 1 msg. per day now, used to be at least 5 times that.
Try http://www.backports.org for woody packets of SpamAssassin 2.60 (and other software)
Aside from that, installing 2.60 into your home directory is absolutely painless. Just did that, before I learned about the backports.org website.
Can we moderate the article at -1 Troll, please?
:)
It's just a bit too obvious that he was hoping for a severe slashdotting, driving his own numbers ("look, editor, how many people read my articles!") and the ad numbers of his paper up.
Probably submitted the story himself, too.
I guess the difference is this:
If you are a clueless newbie who should've stayed with windos and who is unable to RTFM, the parent is true.
If you know even a little what the heck you're doing, or are willing to learn, it's flamebait and lies.
Debian follows the original Unix philosophy:
The machine should assume that the user is the brighter of the two.
I like that principle, but it may indeed not be true for everyone. In that case, do use an OS or a distro that does the thinking for you. (this is not meant as an insult, though I realize it sounds like one.)
Debian may be good to have around, but other distros have passed it in the areas that matter to most people
Which would be what, exactly?
For my primary server (web, mail, database, DNS, etc.) that which matters most is rock solid stability.
I had enough uptime to have it roll over (this is at 497 days and a few hours, in case you care). That's what I want in a server.
For the desktop, where I want a 2.6 kernel and the latest goodies, there's sid.
interpreters/compilers for other languages (notably Logo and Pascal - I forgot the package that I once futilely used).
:)
Oxford Pascal. I still have the book.
Commodore Vic 20
Had about 20 users. It was almost instantly run over by the C64.
Commodore Amiga
Atari 520 ST
Yeah, the Amiga has a cult following still, it should at least be mentioned. The Atari - while some argued that it was technically superior, it definitely had a short existence and few fans.
Acorn Archimedes (arguably the best home PC OS of the 80's anywhere in the world)
Absolutely. It sets standards that I don't think anyone else in the 80s even came close to. Unfortunately, though, it too was very much a niche product.
Let's see if their bandwidth can handle it. If it's not one site pulling, but a couple hundred, then our lines shouldn't be the problem. :)
It seems as if mergers and acqusitions always have some negative effect on the customer.
You got it.
Mergers and acquisitions are good for the companies involved. As the market is a zero-sum game whenever it is not creating something, that means someone else suffers loss of equal size. Usually, it's the customer. Sometimes, it's the competition.
Anyone got a crawler for mp3.com? Time to make a full copy as long as we still can.
250k songs at ~5-6 MB each will require about 1.5 TB of storage. Easily within the reach of a small group of dedicated music fans.
Hell, put it up as a permanent bittorrent archive and distribute it around.
Unfortunately, for the total user experience, we'd have to upgrade the whole internet...
Here's your idiot card, now play somewhere else.
The people who require the entire world to change in order to solve a real problem are already bad enough. We don't need clueless people with the same approach for a feature that they like, thank you.
As many other comments have pointed out, the tax approach is shortsighted and irrelevant.
However, it has long been proposed that micropayment directly between sender and receipient would solve the problem.
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
Every time you send me a mail, you also transfer a token with it that is worth, say, 1 cent.
In a normal communication, when we both send mails back and forth, this will more or less level out. Maybe at the end of the year you owe me 20 cent or the other way around, no big deal. In fact, I can just send you a 20-cent token and we're even.
Mail without tokens would be bounced with an appropriate error. Or you can decide to accept them anyways and filter them however you like (e.g. in a special "cheap crap" folder).
Mailing lists and other legit mass-mailings can be solved in one of two ways:
a) When you subscribe, you send a token for x cents, and you'll receive the next x mails. This is cool for newsletters and other periodic things where the number of mailings per time-frame can be reasonably safely guessed. So in effect, you're subscribing to the next x newsletters, say 3 weeks.
Same for web-based sign-ups. When you sign up to my online game, I send you the initial password by mail. I'd simply add another text field to the page where you paste your 1-cent token. Very much like a "please include a self-addressed envelope with postage paid".
b) Whitelists. My mailing list would send out token-less mails and if they bounce as "insufficient payment", I'd handle that just like any other bounce, e.g. after 3 bounces you get automatically unsubscribed.
There are many fine points to sort out, but they are, essentially, all trivial.
The article says "responding", not "replying by mail".
If you don't know that 99.999% of spam uses forged From: addresses, you've been living under a small rock somewhere deep in the darkest forest for the past few years.
The problem, of course, is that responding by phone or snail-mail takes even more of my time.
That said, responding is the wrong approach.
Spam is a business. So hit them where it hurts: The bottom line. Our current anti-spam laws are misguided at best. They attack the spam mechanics, not the spam business.
Make spamming unprofitable, and it'll go away.
Sure, all of Europe could convert to Linux...
More likely, EU would tell the WTO to go stand in a corner and declare any and all Microsoft software to be in the Public Domain.
Actually, the EU has teeth. It probably isn't any less corrupt than the current US regime, but it's a different kind of corruption, and to more and smaller groups.
Plus, Monty of the EU antitrust division is not exactly known for being a guy you can buy. He actually appears to have a sadistic liking to showing large corporations just where their power ends.
He is absolutely right. You don't need perfect code for security. You need well-designed security procedures in your operating system, and more importantly, a fail-safe(*) core system.
(As in: It always fails towards the secure side. Design software like you would an elevator: Always take failure into account and make sure the people/processes inside are still safe.)
So does anyone know what exactly they are selling? Which apps besides the kernel are in?
:)
I haven't contributed to the kernel, but I have written code for a few other GPL programs. I'd love to know if my code is in there.
You see - they already lost a court case about their FUD campaign over here in Germany. Not a good start for further lawsuits for them.
MS is going to do one patch pack per month. Whaddaya think that will do to fast worms?
Nothing. By definition, fast worms live on a timescale of minutes, not months.
Thank you for confirming my argument.
If shutting your machine down is the minimum required to prevent future attacks on me and others (yes, almost all self-defense laws do include not only defending yourself, but also defending others), then that is exactly my point.
I could firewall myself. But that wouldn't prevent you from attacking others. It also wouldn't stop further attacks on me - it'd just make them inconsequential. However, they are still occuring. Just because your blows don't hurt me doesn't mean I have to put up with them.
Not if I have a destructive worm as outlined in chapter 8.1 of my paper. :)
Thanks to this correction (also to the other, which yes is a typo and was pointed out to me already).
There has been much feedback from the community ever since I posted it, and I will update it soon (have a conference talk to do that takes priority right now).
How to 0wn the Internet in your Spare Time is a pretty good approach to this as well.
:)
I've read that one, and it is referenced in my paper.
However, the author makes a good start in terms of preventing that initial spread.
Chapter 4.5.1 of my paper shows how to circumvent that questionabe protection.
But there are several schools of thought related to detecting anomalous traffic and, for example, shutting it off at source, or automatically rate limiting it.
That is the correct approach. Until worms earn polymorph capabilities, of course. Unless you are ready to risk a fairly large false positives quota.
Remember, most of the recent worms spread as web-traffic.
having to prepare a presentation on, you guessed it, worm spread in corporate networks
You might want to check out chapter 8.2 of my paper. There I show how to wipe out a corporate LAN in under 60 seconds.
Yes, I am serious.
otherwise this could cause some major legal problems...
I assert my right to self-defense. You attack me, I'll attack you in exactly the same way (you see, I already know you're vulnerable to that exploit), and shut you down so you can't continue to attack. I won't wipe you or patch you or do any permanent damage.
"you" and "me" can be either we as persons or our respective servers. It doesn't matter technically, so I fail to see why it should matter legally.
That said, I practice what I preach. I've had a "give me code red and I'll shut you down" script on my webserver for half a year now. There have been zero complaints or legal actions.
# zgrep default.ida access.log* | wc -l
1475