After all, who really needs to do WHOIS look ups on government sites
How every sysadmin on the globe who would like to tell you that there's a problem with your servers, routers or users? Whois tells me who to contact (and sometimes, if it's a live attack, abuse@whoever.tld just doesn't cut it).
Maybe I should just firewall.gov - after all, if they are too afraid to post harmless whois info, everyone with a clear mind should stay out of the blast radius.
I don't know what the whole hype is about, and why nobody stops and asks if we really want a "single sign-on", any of them.
Yes, it's easier and people are lazy. From a security POV, however, it's a nightmare come true - everything from your banking details to your private e-mail protected by:
a) a single, usually bad, password on your side b) the security of a central database on the server side
I was talking about 2 companies delivering well over 2 mbit straight to your home. Normal ADSL (768 kb) is more common.
Cable is broader, but it's a shared medium. I don't know much about what the actual performance is, since it's a fringe market in most of europe, as is sat - there just aren't so many places in the old world that are 100 miles away from the next supermarket.:-)
Things have changed rapidly over here during the past few years, which is what the articles says when it mentions "growth".
For example, there are now 2 competing broadband ADSL companies in my hometown, one offering 2mbit download, the other 1.5 (2x768). Both are flatrate. Other cities are very similiar, and it's selling itself. One company I know actually stopped all their advertisement because they were getting customers faster than they could handle.
There are also Internet Terminals next to the public phones in many places, where you can throw in a or two or use your phone card and surf the web while waiting for your train. These, too, have appeared largely during the last year or two.
Internet cafes seem to be closing, which shows that more people have access at home and just don't need them anymore. Those I know all get their major revenue from online gamers, not from people surfing.
why, oh why is everyone so hyped about the xbox? aside from the fact that the M$ marketing department know perfectly well how to generate hype and sell crap, I mean?
honestly, did anyone here expect anything else? in its entire history, ICANN has been nothing but a catastrophic failure. in fact, so much that I wouldn't be surprised if there were some intention behind it. not that I knew which one, but I just don't believe anymore that someone with honest intentions could screw up so royally - not once or twice, but in a row.
looks a lot like DMCA to me. while the whole geekdom agrees that DMCA is the worst law ever, just last year congress published an essay saying, essentially, that they were very pleased and it worked exactly as advertised.
ICANN probably works exactly as intended, too. that's where I'd start to look if I could bring myself to care anymore.
You have the question of why the Roman goverment didn't simple produce the body of Jesus when his cult they tried to squash started spreading rumors that he was up and roaming about.
at the time of those alleged events, they probably couldn't care less for the umpteenth silly cult of one of their hundred fringe provinces. later, when the cult people became criminals, that was all there was to it. I doubt the average roman cared for what those idiots believed in, much like your average american doesn't need to know anything about islam in order to bomb a couple thousand afghans into oblivion.
Partly. All the built-in tools (level and gui editor, etc) work just fine, of course. The external tools (exporters, etc) don't. Then again, it's not much of a loss because they're for windos programs anyway. Most of them should run in wine, though. I know for sure the map2dif one does.
why have they ceased development? that's the part of the article I don't get. I guess they're pissed, but why stop working on the thing, is there a specific reason I missed?
almost everything said here about price fixing, market delays and other reasons for region coding has already been said last year. I've collected most of it on my DeCSS page.
actually, he has a point. the net was designed to withstand nukes, not politicians and lawyers. it's shown an unexpected resilience so far, but it may really be necessary to - as freenet puts it - "rewire the internet". aside from ICANN and censorship laws, domain, trademark and patent mess, the usual spam and script-kiddie problems, when you stop to think about it, some days its really surprising that the net is still standing at all.
> Has there ever been an industry which has survived solely on > the basis of legislation?
yepp, the law industry.
see, most laws are drafted by lawyers ("law expert advisors to congress"), then litigated in front of a lawyer/judge panel by opposing/collaborating lawyers (attornies). a perfect closed system, works like charm.
There is no trusted 3rd party for this kind of problems. Relying on a single instance of trust will just mean that when the trust center gets hacked, we have a world-wide panic.
What we need is GPG (or other PKI) checking. md5 sums can be exchanged, too (and usually reside on the same server anyways), GPG signatures aren't subject to easy faking.
However, it's not quite that simple because you also need to distribute the public keys somehow, and in a trusted way. The problem is solveable, but non-trivial.
Tried this out a while ago, and I don't like it, but that's a personal preference.
The concept is a little weird, because it varies somewhat from the usual input methods where the computer just waits passively until you've (clicked a button|pressed a key|made a stroke).
There are, however, a number of very intriguing ideas in this one, especially the prediction part./me being a fan of xstroke (full-screen handwriting recognition for the Linux ipaq), I'd love to see something like that ported, e.g. using prediction to tilt the results of the recognized character.
As I see it, these two concepts on palm-device input (you can forget about keyboards at that size) are opposites: Handwriting recognition builds on an activity the human operator is very familiar with, but the computers still have a lot to catch up to before they have even a fraction of the handwriting recognition powers of almost every human, especially in the area of context (current recognition is by the letter, not by the word). Dasher, on the other hand, uses a very unusual and new method, but allows for great precision because it does what computers can do very well - choose from clearly demarked options.
In the end, maybe a combination will emerge, e.g. handwriting recognition that if it isn't quite sure will show the characters it things you could've meant somewhere on the screen and allows you to choose the right one with a quick stroke in the right direction.
explain to me what happened to companies like egghead, and bigstar, and DrKoop, and (Insert your favorite failed.com here)
I didn't say that market share alone is a magic lamp. However, if anyone than M$ has realized just how much money a monopoly position is worth. They have a history of giving stuff away (free or selling it very cheaply) until their market share dominates. Why would they change an effective business strategy?
Even if it's true that M$ loses $150 on every xbox sold, they won't care much. They've calculated losses of a few billion over the first four or so years of xbox business, so they're definitely in it for the long run.
Now, what helps you most in the long run? Market share. What will hacking the xbox so that mame runs on it do? Hm, how about raise it's market share because a couple thousand/.'ers run out and buy one?
M$ lost money on windos piracy, too. They didn't give a damn until they had the monopoly, then they started cracking down on people with the BSA squad.
They won't attack the mod chips or the mame porters. Not just now and not for a while. Once there's an xbox in every house, then the gloves will come off.
There are essentially two approaches to security: Proactive and reactive.
Good coding, auditing and QA are proactive. They are expensive, boring, take a lot of time and you are never sure that there's nothing left that slipped through anyway.
Which is why most code, both free and proprietary software, relies mostly on reactive security (though they will always pay lip service and often more to at least good coding).
In proactive security, there should be little difference between free and proprietary software, as the bugs are found and fixed before the product gets shipped.
Free software shines in reactive security, however. The blinding speed with which bugs get fixed is impressive. I found that Mozilla overflow that made the news recently, and it took the Mozilla team about a week to come up with a fix. My experience with commercial vendors is that it'll take them a week to come back to you and ask for more details. If they give a damn at all. For example, there are critical bugs in IE that have gone unfixed for months and are still there. That outlook==worm problem won't go away this century, either.
It's not the number of bugs that counts, it's the severity and the speed of bugfixes. Give me 10 light apache bugs that are fixed within the week any day, but keep that 2 critical IIS bugs that take a quarter to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, who really needs to do WHOIS look ups on government sites
.gov - after all, if they are too afraid to post harmless whois info, everyone with a clear mind should stay out of the blast radius.
How every sysadmin on the globe who would like to tell you that there's a problem with your servers, routers or users? Whois tells me who to contact (and sometimes, if it's a live attack, abuse@whoever.tld just doesn't cut it).
Maybe I should just firewall
I don't know what the whole hype is about, and why nobody stops and asks if we really want a "single sign-on", any of them.
Yes, it's easier and people are lazy. From a security POV, however, it's a nightmare come true - everything from your banking details to your private e-mail protected by:
a) a single, usually bad, password on your side
b) the security of a central database on the server side
Sounds like a desaster waiting to happen.
so it's allegedly talking on UDP port 2002 with the other nodes.
so you do, of course, have a firewall that blocks everything but the few ports you need.
you don't? what the fuck are you doing on the 'net?
careless driving is illegal. careless server administration should probably be, too.
strace runs just fine.
/. "junk filter" doesn't let me, no matter how much I try. Sorry, you'll have to verify for yourself.
I wanted to attach a few lines as proof here, but
I was talking about 2 companies delivering well over 2 mbit straight to your home. Normal ADSL (768 kb) is more common.
:-)
Cable is broader, but it's a shared medium. I don't know much about what the actual performance is, since it's a fringe market in most of europe, as is sat - there just aren't so many places in the old world that are 100 miles away from the next supermarket.
Things have changed rapidly over here during the past few years, which is what the articles says when it mentions "growth".
For example, there are now 2 competing broadband ADSL companies in my hometown, one offering 2mbit download, the other 1.5 (2x768). Both are flatrate. Other cities are very similiar, and it's selling itself. One company I know actually stopped all their advertisement because they were getting customers faster than they could handle.
There are also Internet Terminals next to the public phones in many places, where you can throw in a or two or use your phone card and surf the web while waiting for your train. These, too, have appeared largely during the last year or two.
Internet cafes seem to be closing, which shows that more people have access at home and just don't need them anymore. Those I know all get their major revenue from online gamers, not from people surfing.
how about asia? they should be close, too. while the % of population online would be much smaller, the base numbers would be much higher.
I'm fairly sure they'd give you $100 if you go out and buy one of their $40,000 cars in return. :-)
why, oh why is everyone so hyped about the xbox? aside from the fact that the M$ marketing department know perfectly well how to generate hype and sell crap, I mean?
honestly, did anyone here expect anything else? in its entire history, ICANN has been nothing but a catastrophic failure. in fact, so much that I wouldn't be surprised if there were some intention behind it. not that I knew which one, but I just don't believe anymore that someone with honest intentions could screw up so royally - not once or twice, but in a row.
looks a lot like DMCA to me. while the whole geekdom agrees that DMCA is the worst law ever, just last year congress published an essay saying, essentially, that they were very pleased and it worked exactly as advertised.
ICANN probably works exactly as intended, too. that's where I'd start to look if I could bring myself to care anymore.
You have the question of why the Roman goverment didn't simple produce the body of Jesus when his cult they tried to squash started spreading rumors that he was up and roaming about.
at the time of those alleged events, they probably couldn't care less for the umpteenth silly cult of one of their hundred fringe provinces.
later, when the cult people became criminals, that was all there was to it. I doubt the average roman cared for what those idiots believed in, much like your average american doesn't need to know anything about islam in order to bomb a couple thousand afghans into oblivion.
Do the various tools work under Linux as well?
Partly. All the built-in tools (level and gui editor, etc) work just fine, of course.
The external tools (exporters, etc) don't. Then again, it's not much of a loss because they're for windos programs anyway. Most of them should run in wine, though. I know for sure the map2dif one does.
why have they ceased development? that's the part of the article I don't get. I guess they're pissed, but why stop working on the thing, is there a specific reason I missed?
almost everything said here about price fixing, market delays and other reasons for region coding has already been said last year. I've collected most of it on my DeCSS page.
and a Linux client is in the works.
What are you smoking? I'm working on a Torque project, on Linux, as we speak. The engine has had Linux support pretty much from the start.
actually, he has a point. the net was designed to withstand nukes, not politicians and lawyers. it's shown an unexpected resilience so far, but it may really be necessary to - as freenet puts it - "rewire the internet".
aside from ICANN and censorship laws, domain, trademark and patent mess, the usual spam and script-kiddie problems, when you stop to think about it, some days its really surprising that the net is still standing at all.
80% of mail coming from hotmail isn't much better.
> Of course you'd never get goodies like this from the big boys
> (aka Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic).
what a surprise, given that the big players were part of the cartel that developed the whole CSS bullshit.
> Has there ever been an industry which has survived solely on
> the basis of legislation?
yepp, the law industry.
see, most laws are drafted by lawyers ("law expert advisors to congress"), then litigated in front of a lawyer/judge panel by opposing/collaborating lawyers (attornies). a perfect closed system, works like charm.
There is no trusted 3rd party for this kind of problems. Relying on a single instance of trust will just mean that when the trust center gets hacked, we have a world-wide panic.
What we need is GPG (or other PKI) checking. md5 sums can be exchanged, too (and usually reside on the same server anyways), GPG signatures aren't subject to easy faking.
However, it's not quite that simple because you also need to distribute the public keys somehow, and in a trusted way. The problem is solveable, but non-trivial.
Tried this out a while ago, and I don't like it, but that's a personal preference.
/me being a fan of xstroke (full-screen handwriting recognition for the Linux ipaq), I'd love to see something like that ported, e.g. using prediction to tilt the results of the recognized character.
The concept is a little weird, because it varies somewhat from the usual input methods where the computer just waits passively until you've (clicked a button|pressed a key|made a stroke).
There are, however, a number of very intriguing ideas in this one, especially the prediction part.
As I see it, these two concepts on palm-device input (you can forget about keyboards at that size) are opposites:
Handwriting recognition builds on an activity the human operator is very familiar with, but the computers still have a lot to catch up to before they have even a fraction of the handwriting recognition powers of almost every human, especially in the area of context (current recognition is by the letter, not by the word).
Dasher, on the other hand, uses a very unusual and new method, but allows for great precision because it does what computers can do very well - choose from clearly demarked options.
In the end, maybe a combination will emerge, e.g. handwriting recognition that if it isn't quite sure will show the characters it things you could've meant somewhere on the screen and allows you to choose the right one with a quick stroke in the right direction.
explain to me what happened to companies like egghead, and bigstar, and DrKoop, and (Insert your favorite failed .com here)
I didn't say that market share alone is a magic lamp. However, if anyone than M$ has realized just how much money a monopoly position is worth. They have a history of giving stuff away (free or selling it very cheaply) until their market share dominates. Why would they change an effective business strategy?
Even if it's true that M$ loses $150 on every xbox sold, they won't care much. They've calculated losses of a few billion over the first four or so years of xbox business, so they're definitely in it for the long run.
/.'ers run out and buy one?
Now, what helps you most in the long run? Market share. What will hacking the xbox so that mame runs on it do? Hm, how about raise it's market share because a couple thousand
M$ lost money on windos piracy, too. They didn't give a damn until they had the monopoly, then they started cracking down on people with the BSA squad.
They won't attack the mod chips or the mame porters. Not just now and not for a while. Once there's an xbox in every house, then the gloves will come off.
Only if it's a Linux version of an ancient game. ;)
no, only if it's an AAA game for Linux that was going to the trashcan because of lack of updates, and now doesn't.
There are essentially two approaches to security: Proactive and reactive.
Good coding, auditing and QA are proactive. They are expensive, boring, take a lot of time and you are never sure that there's nothing left that slipped through anyway.
Which is why most code, both free and proprietary software, relies mostly on reactive security (though they will always pay lip service and often more to at least good coding).
In proactive security, there should be little difference between free and proprietary software, as the bugs are found and fixed before the product gets shipped.
Free software shines in reactive security, however. The blinding speed with which bugs get fixed is impressive.
I found that Mozilla overflow that made the news recently, and it took the Mozilla team about a week to come up with a fix. My experience with commercial vendors is that it'll take them a week to come back to you and ask for more details. If they give a damn at all.
For example, there are critical bugs in IE that have gone unfixed for months and are still there. That outlook==worm problem won't go away this century, either.
It's not the number of bugs that counts, it's the severity and the speed of bugfixes. Give me 10 light apache bugs that are fixed within the week any day, but keep that 2 critical IIS bugs that take a quarter to fix.