Require any company that handles personal / sensitive information to NEVER be connected to the Internet. Better: No WI-FI... EVER. Even better: Disallow PC's altogether... mainframe style.
Security breaches have no economic impact on most companies, so therefore, they do nothing about them. It's often too costly to handle data safely.
I applaud federal regulations in this area. Did I really just type that?
During my career in network security, there has never been a software based firewall I couldn't compromise. I had the unfortunate task of reverse engineering the competition (firewalls).
There are so many problems in the basic network stack (in Windows) that a hardware firewall is your only realistic alternative. With hardware, you only have to worry about your open ports.
Anything basic will do. Investing in a Cisco PIX is usually a waste of money. I've tunneled a remote shell through port 80 using IIS, making an $80k PIX worthless. Exploits are generally simple, so fragment reconstruction is unnecessary.
With Windows, the mantra "good enough" rules. All of the packet filtering in the world won't save your server. The best thing you can do is attach a $50 LinkSys firewall and be done with it. Keep a copy of Ghost handy for when it gets compromised.
Hmm. How can they really tell? They're dogs, after all. Don't doctors tell us such indisputable facts like how MDMA (Ecstasy) creates holes in your brain?
I can't tell if this is a good thing or not. Why would you want to freeze someone indefinately? Demolition Man wasn't THAT great of a movie.
News articles, like this one, have a way of being read by my bosses who mistake their content entirely. "I just heard that Java is free, can you look into that?"
Believe it or not, people wanted BeOS. Windows 3.1 was garbage, despite any nostalgia you might have for it. They couldn't give it away, not because of lack of demand, but secret contractual restrictions with Microsoft.
Remember, that Windows 95 didn't run Windows 3.1 applications very well... it mostly didn't at all, in my experience. That moment in time was a critical transition from Win16 to Win32.
Like every Microsoft anti-trust solution, it gets "solved" years after the competitors market has eroded.
Remember Lotus? Caldera? AT&T? Be?
Be filed their anti-trust case, and was forced to sell their assets for pennies on the dollar to Palm. Palm received the settlement, but Be as a company was dead.
Be's claim was valid. Even when they offered to give it away for free to PC manufacturers, no one bit. Microsoft threatened to refuse sale of their O/S to any manufacturer that sold a competitor.
I once had IBM e-Services come out for a visit. They were deploying some test equipment (RS/6000) servers and WebSphere for us.
They had a guy that did nothing but open boxes. There were four training staff persons for all two of us that needed training. We had three account reps.
IBM has some talented workers, but simply too many. I applaud their staff cuts... I disapprove of replacing talented staff with cheaper labor.
Hell, dropping OS/2 legacy support could probably save them a few million... or any of the other several hundred divisions operating at a loss.
I remember an MCSE's job I took over, once upon a time. He installed a server at the office without plugging it into the switch. He thought that you needed a server to do peer to peer networking. An MCSE should know better. A home user has no chance.
To my point:
You either get networking or you don't. My beer-drinking brother is still too amazed by the whole "wireless" thing to understand it. My mother will never understand what the word "network" means.
Unless it plugs in and works by itself, it's too hard for grandma.
I keep wondering if advances in prothetics will slow research into regrowing limbs. Once the replacement becomes better than the real thing, will people trade in their real arms for fake ones?
Aibo needs a guard function for the neighborhood cats. Just bark and move a bit when there's any meowing around. If they pee on my door one more time, I'm gonna' set bear traps.
On a Windows machine, you don't need to download anything. Just plug it into the Internet with a publically accessible IP address sometime. I'm not even being paranoid right now.
There are BOOTP attacks, buffer overflows for every type of service, even exploits against the network stack.
On my old company honeynet, we couldn't keep our machines up for more than a week. All recent "SP2 blah blah" patches. Both Windows XP and 2000. We even turned on the Windows "Firewall."
It's not a totally hopeless situation. You definately need a *HARDWARE* firewall with Windows. Relying on your ISP to block ports is unwise. Using Outlook is unwise. Opening Word documents from email is unwise.
I've even gone as far as to remove the VB & J Script engines from my machine. Less components = less to break. Who really even scripts MS Office documents anyway? When you connect your machine to every other person in the world, take some precautions for heavens sake.
This is just what every script kiddie needs... the anarchist cookbook equivalent for virus writers.
I've worked as an adware author. It's already frighteningly easy to write a worm, virus, or other malignant type of application... without an instruction manual.
Books like these never address the root causes that enable such applications to exist. It's not fully a home owner's fault if an intruder enters an open door, but they should share the blame.
Vim is a great editor for HTML handcoding. Unfortunately, WYSIWYG editors are just plain awful. It's taken years just to get them usable. It'll take more years to create a decent replacement for handcoding.
GoLive, @#(*&!! horrible, will hopefully be discontinued soon so that no one else has to buy it by mistake. Frontpage is and always will be a joke. That leaves you with Dreamweaver. It's *ok*, but the WYSIWYG mode should be called YMMV.
I'd recommend firing off an angry email to every tool publisher out there then hire some starving college student for pennies on the dollar. It'll save you the tremendous headache of using a tool that's not even close to ready.
Better yet, try implementing a pre-built template for Wordpress or Mambo. These not only manage content for you, but include rudimentary HTML editors.
Well, I'd have to think that software publishers wouldn't kill support... it woulndn't make sense to alienate the entire installed Apple user base. The dual-binary format executables are an elegant way to support both. For how long is the question.
I can definately see the newest & hottest applications preferring one platform or the other. I anticipate a pending war fought by developers on both sides. Some demanding an extension the G5 lifespan, and others demanding total phase-out.
Shaders are an entirely different technology. It would take forever to render 3D on a Pentium with programmable shaders. It would also take forever to do common (non-graphical) operations on a GPU.
Graphics processors are highly specialized chips. It's the specialization that gives them the speed. When they talk in terms of number crunching, the comparison is always to a standard CPU.
What I really meant was that I'd feel better if Apple were to offer both PPC and x86 in parallel... not drop the G5 after the transition is complete. Just keeping the G5 platform available for compatibility testing even.
I have a feeling that they will probably keep the line alive a bit longer than they have announced. This happened to some extent with the G4's. Time will tell.
True. A lot of what AltiVec has been used for has been accelerating simple graphics that the antiquated 3D cards can't handle. The new GCC has a much revamped auto-vectorization feature that was expected to really show what AltiVec can do for everyday apps.
Graphics cards can't do MPEG4 or AAC encoding... two areas where the PowerPC is several times faster than Intel. For number crunching, my G5 smokes an Intel. I can only hope that they don't announce the new PowerMac as 40% cheaper *AND* 40% slower.
Then again, It's perfectly possible that Apple is giving Intel AltiVec to include in the next P4 line. Apple owns the rights to license the PowerPC and AltiVec.
Don't know, don't care. I just want a similar performance boost over the PC, not a step backward.
The problem is when developers eventually "forget" to compile for PPC... when the platform gets "too old" or what have you. This is the same problem NeXT had with their fat binaries. Some developers became "elitest."
There's also this little problem:
The G5 can encode MPEG *FASTER* than real-time, where the Pentium is still 4-8 times slower. How are they going to compensate? Are all Mac's going to need quads? There goes any cost savings.
This transition would be great by any other name. If, for instance, they continued G5 harware on the high-end, at least for a year or two... but ending the line completely? What about developers that depend on AltiVec? What about people (like me) that just bought a damn G5 dualie this weekend!?!?!?
I've owned 10 or so Palm & Handspring units, a few PocketPC PDAs, and I also own an Apple Newton. I don't like the PocketPC platform, but I have to give Microsoft credit for going their own way in the PDA market... popular or not.
If anyone remembers, Palm Software started out offering a pen input program called Grafitti for the Apple Newton. The Palm Pilot is little more than a Newton clone with Grafitti. It's not strayed too far from the Apple roots over the years.
The user experience is the same. The applictions, from the way that they work to the features they offer, are modeled after the ancient PDA. I think that they do this, not because it's best, but because they haven't had an original idea to begin with.
Just look at the bundled PocketTunes media player. The buttons look like iTunes. The brushed aluminum skin, is identical to the metal look of iTunes. Even the icons are like iTunes. At least the media player on the PocketPC looks like Windows Media Player - not iTunes.
Why can't "innovators" like Palm, find their own way? I find it hard to believe that Apple does music the best, right, and only way... or that the way to success is imitation.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be rather difficult to shut down Bittorrent if it's in Mozilla & Opera... where's the Mozilla integration already?
Best news I read all morning.
Require any company that handles personal / sensitive information to NEVER be connected to the Internet. Better: No WI-FI... EVER. Even better: Disallow PC's altogether... mainframe style.
Security breaches have no economic impact on most companies, so therefore, they do nothing about them. It's often too costly to handle data safely.
I applaud federal regulations in this area. Did I really just type that?
During my career in network security, there has never been a software based firewall I couldn't compromise. I had the unfortunate task of reverse engineering the competition (firewalls).
There are so many problems in the basic network stack (in Windows) that a hardware firewall is your only realistic alternative. With hardware, you only have to worry about your open ports.
Anything basic will do. Investing in a Cisco PIX is usually a waste of money. I've tunneled a remote shell through port 80 using IIS, making an $80k PIX worthless. Exploits are generally simple, so fragment reconstruction is unnecessary.
With Windows, the mantra "good enough" rules. All of the packet filtering in the world won't save your server. The best thing you can do is attach a $50 LinkSys firewall and be done with it. Keep a copy of Ghost handy for when it gets compromised.
Hmm. How can they really tell? They're dogs, after all. Don't doctors tell us such indisputable facts like how MDMA (Ecstasy) creates holes in your brain?
I can't tell if this is a good thing or not. Why would you want to freeze someone indefinately? Demolition Man wasn't THAT great of a movie.
News articles, like this one, have a way of being read by my bosses who mistake their content entirely. "I just heard that Java is free, can you look into that?"
Believe it or not, people wanted BeOS. Windows 3.1 was garbage, despite any nostalgia you might have for it. They couldn't give it away, not because of lack of demand, but secret contractual restrictions with Microsoft.
Remember, that Windows 95 didn't run Windows 3.1 applications very well... it mostly didn't at all, in my experience. That moment in time was a critical transition from Win16 to Win32.
Alternate O/S's would have hurt that effort.
Be is still going... it's now known as Zeta, developed at YellowTab. Nowhere near where it should be, but still limping along.
Like every Microsoft anti-trust solution, it gets "solved" years after the competitors market has eroded.
Remember Lotus? Caldera? AT&T? Be?
Be filed their anti-trust case, and was forced to sell their assets for pennies on the dollar to Palm. Palm received the settlement, but Be as a company was dead.
Be's claim was valid. Even when they offered to give it away for free to PC manufacturers, no one bit. Microsoft threatened to refuse sale of their O/S to any manufacturer that sold a competitor.
Active Desktop had this channel subscription policy. Netscape Navigator had channels.
This technology, years ago, was hyped as "push." It went nowhere. RSS isn't REALLY that different, it's just more general purpose.
Is RSS worth the hype? Sadly, I think yes, but not this much.
Ahh. An entire book to say "Don't do it yourself"
I once had IBM e-Services come out for a visit. They were deploying some test equipment (RS/6000) servers and WebSphere for us.
They had a guy that did nothing but open boxes. There were four training staff persons for all two of us that needed training. We had three account reps.
IBM has some talented workers, but simply too many. I applaud their staff cuts... I disapprove of replacing talented staff with cheaper labor.
Hell, dropping OS/2 legacy support could probably save them a few million... or any of the other several hundred divisions operating at a loss.
I remember an MCSE's job I took over, once upon a time. He installed a server at the office without plugging it into the switch. He thought that you needed a server to do peer to peer networking. An MCSE should know better. A home user has no chance.
To my point:
You either get networking or you don't. My beer-drinking brother is still too amazed by the whole "wireless" thing to understand it. My mother will never understand what the word "network" means.
Unless it plugs in and works by itself, it's too hard for grandma.
I never thought of it that way. I can totally see pr0n sites selling 3rd arms.
I keep wondering if advances in prothetics will slow research into regrowing limbs. Once the replacement becomes better than the real thing, will people trade in their real arms for fake ones?
Aibo needs a guard function for the neighborhood cats. Just bark and move a bit when there's any meowing around. If they pee on my door one more time, I'm gonna' set bear traps.
On a Windows machine, you don't need to download anything. Just plug it into the Internet with a publically accessible IP address sometime. I'm not even being paranoid right now.
There are BOOTP attacks, buffer overflows for every type of service, even exploits against the network stack.
On my old company honeynet, we couldn't keep our machines up for more than a week. All recent "SP2 blah blah" patches. Both Windows XP and 2000. We even turned on the Windows "Firewall."
It's not a totally hopeless situation. You definately need a *HARDWARE* firewall with Windows. Relying on your ISP to block ports is unwise. Using Outlook is unwise. Opening Word documents from email is unwise.
I've even gone as far as to remove the VB & J Script engines from my machine. Less components = less to break. Who really even scripts MS Office documents anyway? When you connect your machine to every other person in the world, take some precautions for heavens sake.
This is just what every script kiddie needs... the anarchist cookbook equivalent for virus writers.
I've worked as an adware author. It's already frighteningly easy to write a worm, virus, or other malignant type of application... without an instruction manual.
Books like these never address the root causes that enable such applications to exist. It's not fully a home owner's fault if an intruder enters an open door, but they should share the blame.
No way. Chicago... Longhorn... great progress
Vim is a great editor for HTML handcoding. Unfortunately, WYSIWYG editors are just plain awful. It's taken years just to get them usable. It'll take more years to create a decent replacement for handcoding. GoLive, @#(*&!! horrible, will hopefully be discontinued soon so that no one else has to buy it by mistake. Frontpage is and always will be a joke. That leaves you with Dreamweaver. It's *ok*, but the WYSIWYG mode should be called YMMV. I'd recommend firing off an angry email to every tool publisher out there then hire some starving college student for pennies on the dollar. It'll save you the tremendous headache of using a tool that's not even close to ready. Better yet, try implementing a pre-built template for Wordpress or Mambo. These not only manage content for you, but include rudimentary HTML editors.
Well, I'd have to think that software publishers wouldn't kill support... it woulndn't make sense to alienate the entire installed Apple user base. The dual-binary format executables are an elegant way to support both. For how long is the question. I can definately see the newest & hottest applications preferring one platform or the other. I anticipate a pending war fought by developers on both sides. Some demanding an extension the G5 lifespan, and others demanding total phase-out.
Shaders are an entirely different technology. It would take forever to render 3D on a Pentium with programmable shaders. It would also take forever to do common (non-graphical) operations on a GPU. Graphics processors are highly specialized chips. It's the specialization that gives them the speed. When they talk in terms of number crunching, the comparison is always to a standard CPU.
What I really meant was that I'd feel better if Apple were to offer both PPC and x86 in parallel... not drop the G5 after the transition is complete. Just keeping the G5 platform available for compatibility testing even. I have a feeling that they will probably keep the line alive a bit longer than they have announced. This happened to some extent with the G4's. Time will tell.
True. A lot of what AltiVec has been used for has been accelerating simple graphics that the antiquated 3D cards can't handle. The new GCC has a much revamped auto-vectorization feature that was expected to really show what AltiVec can do for everyday apps. Graphics cards can't do MPEG4 or AAC encoding... two areas where the PowerPC is several times faster than Intel. For number crunching, my G5 smokes an Intel. I can only hope that they don't announce the new PowerMac as 40% cheaper *AND* 40% slower. Then again, It's perfectly possible that Apple is giving Intel AltiVec to include in the next P4 line. Apple owns the rights to license the PowerPC and AltiVec. Don't know, don't care. I just want a similar performance boost over the PC, not a step backward.
The problem is when developers eventually "forget" to compile for PPC... when the platform gets "too old" or what have you. This is the same problem NeXT had with their fat binaries. Some developers became "elitest."
There's also this little problem:
The G5 can encode MPEG *FASTER* than real-time, where the Pentium is still 4-8 times slower. How are they going to compensate? Are all Mac's going to need quads? There goes any cost savings.
This transition would be great by any other name. If, for instance, they continued G5 harware on the high-end, at least for a year or two... but ending the line completely? What about developers that depend on AltiVec? What about people (like me) that just bought a damn G5 dualie this weekend!?!?!?
I've owned 10 or so Palm & Handspring units, a few PocketPC PDAs, and I also own an Apple Newton. I don't like the PocketPC platform, but I have to give Microsoft credit for going their own way in the PDA market... popular or not. If anyone remembers, Palm Software started out offering a pen input program called Grafitti for the Apple Newton. The Palm Pilot is little more than a Newton clone with Grafitti. It's not strayed too far from the Apple roots over the years. The user experience is the same. The applictions, from the way that they work to the features they offer, are modeled after the ancient PDA. I think that they do this, not because it's best, but because they haven't had an original idea to begin with. Just look at the bundled PocketTunes media player. The buttons look like iTunes. The brushed aluminum skin, is identical to the metal look of iTunes. Even the icons are like iTunes. At least the media player on the PocketPC looks like Windows Media Player - not iTunes. Why can't "innovators" like Palm, find their own way? I find it hard to believe that Apple does music the best, right, and only way... or that the way to success is imitation.