I've been using the ancient junkbuster on a home-built for a very long time now and have been thoroughly satisfied (with the exception of not being able to remove block patterns without logging ino the machine, though).
If you've used junkbuster, can you tell me how your solution stacks up to it? I tried Privoxy once, but found it intolerable that I had to wait for the whole page to download to the server (over a modem) to get analyzed before finally being shipped off to the browser.
Thanks in advance.
Re:Common Sense
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm in the Air Force Reserve and while the military does a lot of things right, even the Air Force is just plain clueless about computers and basic security. Right now, to log into a desktop computer, you use the standard login+password combination. Except that, depending on your job, you might also have anywhere from two to five separate passwords to log you into different applications, databases, and internal web sites. Every application was written by a different contractor, so to even dream of single-signon is insane.
Okay, you might be thinking, that's not so bad. After all, you probably have a similar situation on your home machine. I know I do. But I'll bet your home machine doesn't have a password policy like this:
"Passwords must be at least 8 characters, with at least 2 alphabetic and 1 numeric/special character, must begin with an alphabetic character, must not contain special characters other than _, $, or #, must not be a word found in the English dictionary, and must differ in at least 2 character positions from the old password. Also, passwords must contain at least 5 different characters and cannot have a simple sequence of 4 or more characters (for example, 1234 or edcb)."
That is the actual copied-and-pasted password policy for the networked computers in our wing. After about 10 minutes of trying to come up with something memorable that the machine would accept, I finally gave up and it took me an additional 5 minutes to construct a string of random gibberish that the machine would accept. (I have it written down in a post-it in my notebook, of course.)
The traditional rationale for this nonsense is that the more complex a password is, the harder time an attacker will have brute-forcing it or guessing it. But wait a second... if these passwords are all verified by a server sitting across the network (such as a Windows logon), wouldn't brute-forcing the password be impossible remotely? I would think that any kind of login interface, whether local or remote, would have a simple algorithm that makes brute-forcing impossible such as by exponentially increasing the amount of response time for each invalid logon attempt. As for brute-forcing locally, well, you've got much bigger problems on your hands than a few compromised accounts if an attacker is able to run a cracker on your password database itself either on his machine or yours.
My first instinct, when I first read the password policy above, was to wonder whether such a restrictive policy would actually make it easier for an attacker to brute force because it shouldn't be all that difficult for an attacker to build a password cracker that simply skipped all of the enforced restrictions and only tried valid passwords. My question, for someone more educated in statistics or security than I, is this: would filtering for these password restrictions really result in a significantly smaller average search time before a match is found?
Compromise via a guessed password shouldn't even be very much of a consideration either. Guessing a password is more difficult than many would think. Your guesses would have to be fairly well educated and for that you would need to know the person pretty well. I think I've correctly guessed someone's password only once in my lifetime and that was because she was my wife and I already knew several of her other passwords.:P The other option is social engineering, but the effectiveness of that is on a downward spiral, especially in the Air Force, where unrelenting security training is the standard practice.
So what it seems to boil down to is just what the parent comment states in bold. Increasing security complexity is causing users to simply ignore it, making the resulting system less secure rather than more.
As a side note, the Air Force is moving to public-key encryption with the private key being stored in a chip on our ID cards. This is a good start, but they have yet to implement it beyond the network logon. (I asked where I could ge
Hmm, you know, you're right. I didn't notice it at first, but digging deeper I found that almost every single page has that huge advertisement plastered right in the middle of it with the "special discount" link.
Steer clear of www.spywareinfo.com, fellow Slashdotters, if you're looking for an unbiased opinion or perspective.
Oh, c'mon. Please be at least considerate enough to throw it a kill -TERM first, so that it can flush its buffers and compute the point of impact using the coordinates of NASA headquarters.
As a former military aircraft maintainer, I agree with this. (I worked on avionics, though, which are arguably more complex and demanding than "mechanics.") The first thing you have to realize is that military aircraft are coddled and babied to an extreme. There are strict regular inspection and rebuild schedules, the maintenance personnel have to follow written procedures for *everything they do* and face anything from a stern reprimand to possible discharge if they don't. The aircraft are generally flown two, maybe three times a week on average.
Commercial airline maintence, by comparison, is utter chaos. The underpaid, overworked employees are civilians that often come from a 2-year college. All emphasis is on getting the repairs done quickly, and the aircraft are more likely to break down since they're in the air almost more than they're on the ground. After hearing some pretty bad horror stories about several near-catastrophes and boneheaded careless mistakes that would have ended hundreds of lives, I tend to tremble a little each time I step onto a commercial plane.
So obviously, seeing what I've seen and hearing what I've heard, I say pay the maintainers more and give them the resources to do the best job that they possibly can. Sadly, it has to be things like the Concorde accident that pushes corporate airlines to give their maintenance shops better resources and practices rather than common sense.
(Sidenote: after a couple of careless would-be-fatal mishaps at one Air Force base, the commanders of the maintenance sections all agreed that for a year, all maintenance personell were required to ride along on at least one training mission about every three months. Needless to say, the number of mishaps the following year dropped to zero.)
Whoops, I retract the above post. Turns out that you can pay for premium access to the *magazine*, not the game. I was misled by some text on the account creation page. Moderators, do your thing.
Okay, so here's a game whereupon the players gamble with fake money for fun and entertainment. They never see a dime of real money, ever. (Unless they happen to fall into the top 8 when the game is over.)
Note, however, that in order to gain full access to the game, you do indeed have to PAY THEM real money.
Also, without digressing, I would like to mention that it is my firm belief M1 wasn't made with the intent of being the first of part of a trilogy... I believe the trilogy idea came later (when money started pouring in).
Nope. The W Bros (sorry, can't spell their name this time of night) had always planned The Matrix to be a three-part series and, if memory serves me, had all three scripts mostly written in the early 90's. The reason that the first movie was so good and that it stands alone was that the W Bros really thought they wouldn't get the chance to do a second or third movie. Practically everyone at Warner Bros was stunned that these two amateur filmmakers got more money to do The Matrix than many well-known professionals do, so you can imagine that the W Bros felt like they got pretty damn lucky and figured that their luck might not last. The people actually working on the film knew that they had something special on their hands, but practically nobody else really expected much out of it. Heck, I saw the trailer on TV and thought that it looked like just another dumb action flick until I dragged myself into the theatre one boring Sunday afternoon to catch the matinee. Part of the magic of The Matrix was that it blindsided practically everyone with how good it really was.
I think, however, the reason that the second and third installments didn't meet many people's expectations was that they expected them to be more like the first. I personally believe that one of two things may have happened. 1) The W Bros simply got carried away with all the money and resources that they were given by the movie studio and focused too much on the movie itself rather than the movie's story. 2) Perhaps the W Bros intended for all 3 movies to each have different feels. Laurence Fishburne, in Matrix Revisited, summarized each of the scripts by saying that the first movie was about birth, the second movie was about life, and the third movie was about death. I dunno if I'd go that far, but I think he's on the right track.
Agreed. Additionally, I'm tired of people comparing PC gaming to console gaming. There is some overlap in terms of the types of genres and games they can (successfully) cover, but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. I was going to write a long, boring essay on the topic but my time is currently short so I'll summarize it in two bulleted points:
You don't play Quake on a console.
You don't play Final Fantasy on the PC.
And just because you can doesn't mean you should. Case closed. P.S. I can make an exception for console emulators on the PC.
I realize your post was completely tongue-in-cheek, but I have some real advice along these lines.
Did you know that you can often read entire books without leaving the comfort of your home computer. If you're a college student, you have access to a college library, which may likely have access to NetLibrary (http://www.netlibrary.com) and dozens of other electronic resources. Ditto for your community library. Do some looking around, it's incredibly easy to find free access to any kind of information, even libraries full of books.
For example, I was surprised to find that each and every Michigan resident has access to the Michigan eLibrary (http://mel.org) which includes access to a number of magazine, newspaper, and aticle databases as well as a full NetLibrary account. (Non-residents need not apply as you need to input your drivers license number or state ID number for authorization.)
Kazaa is nothing compared to the number of legitimately free resources out there.
<a href="mailto:username%40domain%2ecom">username at domain dot com</a>
It would be ridiculously trivial to write a spambot that catches this, but so far none seem to. My main aggrevation used to be the Microsoft Outlook Virus of the Week, because IE must convert %40 and such to normal characters before caching a web page. These stopped since I recently enabled spam filtering at my email provider.
Er, that first paragraph was supposed to be in italics to indicate that it's quoted from the parent. Could have swore I put the tags in there. Ah well...
You know. I have nothing against BSD. I'm not an avid lover/user of BSD, but I have installed it on several occaisions and played with it. It's a nice OS. I prefer linux cause I like the faster pace and the more...gritty...(for lack of a better term) feel to it. People are/doing/ things in linux. People from all walks and of all levels of skill. BSD doesn't (imo) seem to lend itself to that. It's always seemed to me that BSD considered itself destined for the elite, while linux was an OS for the great unwashed as well.
Yes, that's the impression that I've always come away with too. I once met this one guy at my college who seemed to share some similar interests to me in regards to computers. He seemed pretty friendly and all, but at one point, he asked me which operating system I used at home and at the time I of course told him Linux. His next statement, I shit you not, was, "Oh. You're one of THOSE people." Turns out he dispised anything that wasn't FreeBSD and, to a lesser extent, Win2k. Needless to say, I never talked to him much after that.
With a few exceptions, my experience has been similar with FreeBSD users on mailing lists, IRC, and other forums. Most of the FreeBSD developers, to their credit, are much more professional and won't usually look down their nose at you if you so much as mention Linux, but a few will and do. The one thing that I hate most about the more extreme FreeBSD zealots is their silly "Linux is anti-Microsoft and FreeBSD is pro-UNIX" troll. Really nice how they poo-poo Linux users for not liking Microsoft (which is true for most, I guess), then go ahead and thumb their noses at *every other OS*. Can't hardly see the forest for your heads, guys.
As as OS, I like FreeBSD. I wouldn't use anything else to host the various services on the network. I even have it on my main workstation right now in an effort to become more familiar with it. But it pretty much stops there. I always tell people this: If you want an OS that you can easily set up, stick in a corner, and run your network for decades without intervention, then go with FreeBSD. If you want an OS to put on your workstation, supercomputer, cluster, wristwatch, and TV set-top box, then you'll do better with Linux. Linux distributions may not be as "refined" as FreeBSD. But you'd be hard pressed to find another OS up to as many different kinds of tasks as Linux is, whether frivolous or mission critical.
I like how the slashdot article prodded people to use the mirrors. The only downfall is that MOST OF THE BLOODY MIRRORS ARE MONTHS TO YEARS BEHIND or simply return some sort of 404 or invalid path error.
After dozens of clicks, I finally found that the French seem to have their stuff together:
TTSSH is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.
Less clunky? C'mon. I haven't used TTSSH in a long time, but I remember having nothing but troubles with it. PuTTY configuration is easy (if a little odd at first), the binary is small, and is dead simple to install.
Also, I note that on the TTSSH pages it still says that TTSSH does not support SSH v2 and never will. PuTTY does, which is useful for me, because I use v2 pretty much exclusively on my network.
I agree 100% with what you say. My comment was completely tongue-in-cheek. I was trying to point out that lawsuits, especially unjustified ones, seem to be business as usual for a large number of big companies. I mean, here we are, brave America with the strongest economy in the world, publically proud that we got where we are because of our fair, just, and competitive capitalist system. Yet in reality, these businesses don't really compete anymore. They just sue the pants off other companies, even those that they don't even compete with. That's why it should be "capitalism" with quotation marks.
I argue that most people who say "new Linux users" are not talking about your Mom. She, and others like her, have been comfortably using Windows (or possibly MacOS) and will be reluctant to change. Nobody except for the extreme zealots will be trying to convert her to Linux. "New Linux users" typically refer to the technically-minded growing mass of people becoming interested in Linux and free software via their own devices. People like me, and probably you.
Lets me put it like this. I got into Linux when I was young and fairly inexperienced with computer systems in general. Now that I have a substantial amount of experience with Linux and other UNIXish systems, it would be not be worth my time to simply dump such a huge investment to switch to a completely different platform just because some small percentage of the population says it's a better system, more reliable, costs less money, or whatever. (I wager that this is part of the reason that some NT admins are die-hard anti-Linux zealots.) Your mom, while she may have a much smaller investment in Windows, nonetheless is even less likely than I would be to switch to a different platform because the computer is a much smaller part of her life. The computer is a tool, and it doesn't matter who made the tool, it only matters that it lets her get the job done.
I think that if you bear in mind that the writer meant "new users" as those technically-minded who are starting out with Linux, converting from something similar, or those with the resources to gain an in-depth knowledge of the system, then the points that he makes largely hold true.
Well he's not out for that reason, despite asking lots of money, he's out to cripple Microsoft. Ok, many people here would say that's a good thing (I'd say it's anti-capatalistic, but never mind).
Huh, I thought that was capitalism. Well, here in the US anyway.
When I want to output some Windows stuff to a PDF, I just install the postscript printer driver for an HP Color Laserjet. When you print to file, the resulting file is good old level 2 postscript. Which then means it's only one unix command away from being a PDF.
I know you were joking with this, but a lot of people forget that the most important cost of education is not money, it is time. Any sufficiently-motivated individual can go to the library and learn stuff that could rival a college education. In my local library, I happened to be looking at the computer books and marveled that I could have a halfway decent background on software engineering (minus practical experience of course) if I had the time to page through dozens upon dozens of books. However, what most of us have in short supply, the poor have even less of: time. A lot of them, if not most, work like 50 hours a week and have to take care of a family.
Most of the people that I've heard of using this MIT OCW stuff are already overachieving 4.0 students looking to supplement their current classes. I took a look at some of the OCW content previously and didn't see much that would help me any except for the SICP book which has already been around for ages.
Okay, so China might have Active Directory on their Samba servers, but it wouldn't benefit the rest of us in the least. Why? Well, we still have copyright laws over here. Even though Samba development is spread across the globe, most of the countries that have active developers also have copyright laws that would make the use of unlicensed MS code illegal. It doesn't matter who copied the code, when, or where.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Besides, I'm not so sure I want Microsoft code making Samba any more unpredictable than it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using the ancient junkbuster on a home-built for a very long time now and have been thoroughly satisfied (with the exception of not being able to remove block patterns without logging ino the machine, though).
If you've used junkbuster, can you tell me how your solution stacks up to it? I tried Privoxy once, but found it intolerable that I had to wait for the whole page to download to the server (over a modem) to get analyzed before finally being shipped off to the browser.
Thanks in advance.
I'm in the Air Force Reserve and while the military does a lot of things right, even the Air Force is just plain clueless about computers and basic security. Right now, to log into a desktop computer, you use the standard login+password combination. Except that, depending on your job, you might also have anywhere from two to five separate passwords to log you into different applications, databases, and internal web sites. Every application was written by a different contractor, so to even dream of single-signon is insane.
:P The other option is social engineering, but the effectiveness of that is on a downward spiral, especially in the Air Force, where unrelenting security training is the standard practice.
Okay, you might be thinking, that's not so bad. After all, you probably have a similar situation on your home machine. I know I do. But I'll bet your home machine doesn't have a password policy like this:
"Passwords must be at least 8 characters, with at least 2 alphabetic and 1 numeric/special character, must begin with an alphabetic character, must not contain special characters other than _, $, or #, must not be a word found in the English dictionary, and must differ in at least 2 character positions from the old password. Also, passwords must contain at least 5 different characters and cannot have a simple sequence of 4 or more characters (for example, 1234 or edcb)."
That is the actual copied-and-pasted password policy for the networked computers in our wing. After about 10 minutes of trying to come up with something memorable that the machine would accept, I finally gave up and it took me an additional 5 minutes to construct a string of random gibberish that the machine would accept. (I have it written down in a post-it in my notebook, of course.)
The traditional rationale for this nonsense is that the more complex a password is, the harder time an attacker will have brute-forcing it or guessing it. But wait a second... if these passwords are all verified by a server sitting across the network (such as a Windows logon), wouldn't brute-forcing the password be impossible remotely? I would think that any kind of login interface, whether local or remote, would have a simple algorithm that makes brute-forcing impossible such as by exponentially increasing the amount of response time for each invalid logon attempt. As for brute-forcing locally, well, you've got much bigger problems on your hands than a few compromised accounts if an attacker is able to run a cracker on your password database itself either on his machine or yours.
My first instinct, when I first read the password policy above, was to wonder whether such a restrictive policy would actually make it easier for an attacker to brute force because it shouldn't be all that difficult for an attacker to build a password cracker that simply skipped all of the enforced restrictions and only tried valid passwords. My question, for someone more educated in statistics or security than I, is this: would filtering for these password restrictions really result in a significantly smaller average search time before a match is found?
Compromise via a guessed password shouldn't even be very much of a consideration either. Guessing a password is more difficult than many would think. Your guesses would have to be fairly well educated and for that you would need to know the person pretty well. I think I've correctly guessed someone's password only once in my lifetime and that was because she was my wife and I already knew several of her other passwords.
So what it seems to boil down to is just what the parent comment states in bold. Increasing security complexity is causing users to simply ignore it, making the resulting system less secure rather than more.
As a side note, the Air Force is moving to public-key encryption with the private key being stored in a chip on our ID cards. This is a good start, but they have yet to implement it beyond the network logon. (I asked where I could ge
Hmm, you know, you're right. I didn't notice it at first, but digging deeper I found that almost every single page has that huge advertisement plastered right in the middle of it with the "special discount" link.
Steer clear of www.spywareinfo.com, fellow Slashdotters, if you're looking for an unbiased opinion or perspective.
Oh, c'mon. Please be at least considerate enough to throw it a kill -TERM first, so that it can flush its buffers and compute the point of impact using the coordinates of NASA headquarters.
We are in a battle with Microsoft mainly.
No we aren't. We just want to make quality, free software. Perhaps *you* are battling Microsoft. Good luck with that.
As a former military aircraft maintainer, I agree with this. (I worked on avionics, though, which are arguably more complex and demanding than "mechanics.") The first thing you have to realize is that military aircraft are coddled and babied to an extreme. There are strict regular inspection and rebuild schedules, the maintenance personnel have to follow written procedures for *everything they do* and face anything from a stern reprimand to possible discharge if they don't. The aircraft are generally flown two, maybe three times a week on average.
Commercial airline maintence, by comparison, is utter chaos. The underpaid, overworked employees are civilians that often come from a 2-year college. All emphasis is on getting the repairs done quickly, and the aircraft are more likely to break down since they're in the air almost more than they're on the ground. After hearing some pretty bad horror stories about several near-catastrophes and boneheaded careless mistakes that would have ended hundreds of lives, I tend to tremble a little each time I step onto a commercial plane.
So obviously, seeing what I've seen and hearing what I've heard, I say pay the maintainers more and give them the resources to do the best job that they possibly can. Sadly, it has to be things like the Concorde accident that pushes corporate airlines to give their maintenance shops better resources and practices rather than common sense.
(Sidenote: after a couple of careless would-be-fatal mishaps at one Air Force base, the commanders of the maintenance sections all agreed that for a year, all maintenance personell were required to ride along on at least one training mission about every three months. Needless to say, the number of mishaps the following year dropped to zero.)
Whoops, I retract the above post. Turns out that you can pay for premium access to the *magazine*, not the game. I was misled by some text on the account creation page. Moderators, do your thing.
Okay, so here's a game whereupon the players gamble with fake money for fun and entertainment. They never see a dime of real money, ever. (Unless they happen to fall into the top 8 when the game is over.)
Note, however, that in order to gain full access to the game, you do indeed have to PAY THEM real money.
What a bargain.
Also, without digressing, I would like to mention that it is my firm belief M1 wasn't made with the intent of being the first of part of a trilogy... I believe the trilogy idea came later (when money started pouring in).
Nope. The W Bros (sorry, can't spell their name this time of night) had always planned The Matrix to be a three-part series and, if memory serves me, had all three scripts mostly written in the early 90's. The reason that the first movie was so good and that it stands alone was that the W Bros really thought they wouldn't get the chance to do a second or third movie. Practically everyone at Warner Bros was stunned that these two amateur filmmakers got more money to do The Matrix than many well-known professionals do, so you can imagine that the W Bros felt like they got pretty damn lucky and figured that their luck might not last. The people actually working on the film knew that they had something special on their hands, but practically nobody else really expected much out of it. Heck, I saw the trailer on TV and thought that it looked like just another dumb action flick until I dragged myself into the theatre one boring Sunday afternoon to catch the matinee. Part of the magic of The Matrix was that it blindsided practically everyone with how good it really was.
I think, however, the reason that the second and third installments didn't meet many people's expectations was that they expected them to be more like the first. I personally believe that one of two things may have happened. 1) The W Bros simply got carried away with all the money and resources that they were given by the movie studio and focused too much on the movie itself rather than the movie's story. 2) Perhaps the W Bros intended for all 3 movies to each have different feels. Laurence Fishburne, in Matrix Revisited, summarized each of the scripts by saying that the first movie was about birth, the second movie was about life, and the third movie was about death. I dunno if I'd go that far, but I think he's on the right track.
Fire up your GPS and give me your exact coordinates. A telefragging is in order.
Agreed. Additionally, I'm tired of people comparing PC gaming to console gaming. There is some overlap in terms of the types of genres and games they can (successfully) cover, but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. I was going to write a long, boring essay on the topic but my time is currently short so I'll summarize it in two bulleted points:
And just because you can doesn't mean you should. Case closed.
P.S. I can make an exception for console emulators on the PC.
I realize your post was completely tongue-in-cheek, but I have some real advice along these lines.
Did you know that you can often read entire books without leaving the comfort of your home computer. If you're a college student, you have access to a college library, which may likely have access to NetLibrary (http://www.netlibrary.com) and dozens of other electronic resources. Ditto for your community library. Do some looking around, it's incredibly easy to find free access to any kind of information, even libraries full of books.
For example, I was surprised to find that each and every Michigan resident has access to the Michigan eLibrary (http://mel.org) which includes access to a number of magazine, newspaper, and aticle databases as well as a full NetLibrary account. (Non-residents need not apply as you need to input your drivers license number or state ID number for authorization.)
Kazaa is nothing compared to the number of legitimately free resources out there.
One thing that has worked suprisingly well for me over the years is the old URL-encoding trick. What was once:
<a href="mailto:username@domain.com">username@domain
becomes:
<a href="mailto:username%40domain%2ecom">username at domain dot com</a>
It would be ridiculously trivial to write a spambot that catches this, but so far none seem to. My main aggrevation used to be the Microsoft Outlook Virus of the Week, because IE must convert %40 and such to normal characters before caching a web page. These stopped since I recently enabled spam filtering at my email provider.
Finally, the truth comes out. This explains why FreeBSD is dying.
Er, that first paragraph was supposed to be in italics to indicate that it's quoted from the parent. Could have swore I put the tags in there. Ah well...
You know. I have nothing against BSD. I'm not an avid lover/user of BSD, but I have installed it on several occaisions and played with it. It's a nice OS. I prefer linux cause I like the faster pace and the more
Yes, that's the impression that I've always come away with too. I once met this one guy at my college who seemed to share some similar interests to me in regards to computers. He seemed pretty friendly and all, but at one point, he asked me which operating system I used at home and at the time I of course told him Linux. His next statement, I shit you not, was, "Oh. You're one of THOSE people." Turns out he dispised anything that wasn't FreeBSD and, to a lesser extent, Win2k. Needless to say, I never talked to him much after that.
With a few exceptions, my experience has been similar with FreeBSD users on mailing lists, IRC, and other forums. Most of the FreeBSD developers, to their credit, are much more professional and won't usually look down their nose at you if you so much as mention Linux, but a few will and do. The one thing that I hate most about the more extreme FreeBSD zealots is their silly "Linux is anti-Microsoft and FreeBSD is pro-UNIX" troll. Really nice how they poo-poo Linux users for not liking Microsoft (which is true for most, I guess), then go ahead and thumb their noses at *every other OS*. Can't hardly see the forest for your heads, guys.
As as OS, I like FreeBSD. I wouldn't use anything else to host the various services on the network. I even have it on my main workstation right now in an effort to become more familiar with it. But it pretty much stops there. I always tell people this: If you want an OS that you can easily set up, stick in a corner, and run your network for decades without intervention, then go with FreeBSD. If you want an OS to put on your workstation, supercomputer, cluster, wristwatch, and TV set-top box, then you'll do better with Linux. Linux distributions may not be as "refined" as FreeBSD. But you'd be hard pressed to find another OS up to as many different kinds of tasks as Linux is, whether frivolous or mission critical.
I like how the slashdot article prodded people to use the mirrors. The only downfall is that MOST OF THE BLOODY MIRRORS ARE MONTHS TO YEARS BEHIND or simply return some sort of 404 or invalid path error.
After dozens of clicks, I finally found that the French seem to have their stuff together:
http://ftp.oleane.net/pub/mozilla/
Happy Downloading.
TTSSH is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.
Less clunky? C'mon. I haven't used TTSSH in a long time, but I remember having nothing but troubles with it. PuTTY configuration is easy (if a little odd at first), the binary is small, and is dead simple to install.
TTSSH:
* Download Teraterm
* Install Teraterm
* Download TTSSH
* Unzip TTSSH
* Run TTSSH
PuTTY:
* Download PuTTY
* Run PuTTY
Also, I note that on the TTSSH pages it still says that TTSSH does not support SSH v2 and never will. PuTTY does, which is useful for me, because I use v2 pretty much exclusively on my network.
I agree 100% with what you say. My comment was completely tongue-in-cheek. I was trying to point out that lawsuits, especially unjustified ones, seem to be business as usual for a large number of big companies. I mean, here we are, brave America with the strongest economy in the world, publically proud that we got where we are because of our fair, just, and competitive capitalist system. Yet in reality, these businesses don't really compete anymore. They just sue the pants off other companies, even those that they don't even compete with. That's why it should be "capitalism" with quotation marks.
I argue that most people who say "new Linux users" are not talking about your Mom. She, and others like her, have been comfortably using Windows (or possibly MacOS) and will be reluctant to change. Nobody except for the extreme zealots will be trying to convert her to Linux. "New Linux users" typically refer to the technically-minded growing mass of people becoming interested in Linux and free software via their own devices. People like me, and probably you.
Lets me put it like this. I got into Linux when I was young and fairly inexperienced with computer systems in general. Now that I have a substantial amount of experience with Linux and other UNIXish systems, it would be not be worth my time to simply dump such a huge investment to switch to a completely different platform just because some small percentage of the population says it's a better system, more reliable, costs less money, or whatever. (I wager that this is part of the reason that some NT admins are die-hard anti-Linux zealots.) Your mom, while she may have a much smaller investment in Windows, nonetheless is even less likely than I would be to switch to a different platform because the computer is a much smaller part of her life. The computer is a tool, and it doesn't matter who made the tool, it only matters that it lets her get the job done.
I think that if you bear in mind that the writer meant "new users" as those technically-minded who are starting out with Linux, converting from something similar, or those with the resources to gain an in-depth knowledge of the system, then the points that he makes largely hold true.
Well he's not out for that reason, despite asking lots of money, he's out to cripple Microsoft. Ok, many people here would say that's a good thing (I'd say it's anti-capatalistic, but never mind).
Huh, I thought that was capitalism. Well, here in the US anyway.
I've always found maps.yahoo.com to be more accurate (and less annoying, with an ad-proxy enabled) than mapquest.
When I want to output some Windows stuff to a PDF, I just install the postscript printer driver for an HP Color Laserjet. When you print to file, the resulting file is good old level 2 postscript. Which then means it's only one unix command away from being a PDF.
I know you were joking with this, but a lot of people forget that the most important cost of education is not money, it is time. Any sufficiently-motivated individual can go to the library and learn stuff that could rival a college education. In my local library, I happened to be looking at the computer books and marveled that I could have a halfway decent background on software engineering (minus practical experience of course) if I had the time to page through dozens upon dozens of books. However, what most of us have in short supply, the poor have even less of: time. A lot of them, if not most, work like 50 hours a week and have to take care of a family.
Most of the people that I've heard of using this MIT OCW stuff are already overachieving 4.0 students looking to supplement their current classes. I took a look at some of the OCW content previously and didn't see much that would help me any except for the SICP book which has already been around for ages.
Okay, so China might have Active Directory on their Samba servers, but it wouldn't benefit the rest of us in the least. Why? Well, we still have copyright laws over here. Even though Samba development is spread across the globe, most of the countries that have active developers also have copyright laws that would make the use of unlicensed MS code illegal. It doesn't matter who copied the code, when, or where.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Besides, I'm not so sure I want Microsoft code making Samba any more unpredictable than it is.