zip/unzip is an "engrained part of the Linux user space"? Huh?
The only time that I ever needed it/used it was when someone deploying a Java package only provided a.zip instead of putting a.jar or.tgz or.tbz2 right next to it.
In fact, on redhat at least, I had to go fish it off of the rpm cds as it wasn't on the system by default (for whatever reason).
I agree that they're part of the overall system if they're sent on the CD's as part of the OS, but please. Saying that what amounts to a windows compatability tool is "engrained" is a bit of a stretch, no?
"Well, because companies the world over can and have been auditting periodically open source things for IP violations"
No, they haven't. They couldn't since then they would need to have access to the closed source product, in this case SCO's UNIX. There are no controls, no auditing, nothing; just emailed patches and a CVS.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. When I said companies, I meant closed source/proprietary source type of companies. And they do do audits of open source code, at least in my limited experience.
I never disagreed with the you on the flip side. The open source world doesn't audit against closed source, because there is simply no way to do it.
But frankly, if you want to hide something you have, and you just know someone is giving it away, do you rest on your laurels until some C*O from IBM makes some offhand comment at a convention to check to see if you have IP leaks, or do you do your due diligence periodically, especially with a code base that has been litigated over in the past?
Clearly you wait until the furthest thing from a developer makes a comment in public.
This is why I am saying it is beginning to look like valid claims. You cannot just ignore the fact that everyone who has seen the code under NDA admits that the code is identical, EVEN DOWN TO THE COMMENTS.
I never said that I was ignoring the fact that some journalists and analysts that have seen the code have said that it's identical.
That still doesn't change the fact that nobody that has been through an NDA has given any kind of indication as to the provenance of the code snippits. Have they seen change logs? What were the commit dates? In the diffs, did the sections of code occur organically or did the file and its contents spring forth wholly formed? When did it first appear in Linux?
Frankly as being something of a forensic software engineer for the company I work for, with a huge code base, I'm not at all surprised that code appears in multiple places with the same code and comments. I also wouldn't be surprised if a SCO engineer pulled a subsystem out of Linux and plunked it down in UnixWare with only the copyrights changed. Deadlines loom, people oversell their own talent to keep a job, people want to get past the small problems and tackle the things that interest them.
I don't see the same drivers on the other side. There is also enough anecdotal evidence floating around that Caldera/SCO may have contibuted it themselves. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if the right hand didn't know what the left was doing.
I don't know where you're coming from with your loud revelations that some of SCOs claims might be valid. I still haven't seen anything coming out of Utah that wouldn't be better used around the trees in my back yard.
I'm not a Linux zealot, but I do use it for fun and profit, as part of diverse set of tools.
I've been through this before. I was a commercial user of BSD/386 (later called BSDi) during the winding down of the AT&T/USL lawsuit. That affected me about as much as this does, although there wasn't a slashdot around then for the armchair pundits to scream that USL's case appeared to have merit.
I still maintain that IT LOOKS LIKE THEIR CLAIMS ARE VALID.
Why? Do you know more than the rest of us? Playing devil's advocate?
It is unlikely that SCO copied from Linux,...
Huh? They have both motive and opportunity whereas the opposite is less likely to be true (Linux hacker have access to the vaunted SCO IP). Your reasoning appears to be:
SCO would know the history and wouldn't make such a claim if that would be the case.
Huh, you would trust SCO to *know* the history and speak truthfully about it? After all the back and forthing?
Sorry, but I reserve judgement until far more is known. I don't think trusting SCO *or* IBM *or* Redhat *or* Novell *or* AT&T to put all their cards on the table and be completely frank and honest at this point is more than premature, it's shortsighted. Least of all SCO who very publically have said things that contradict their own story from day to day.
It is VERY LIKELY that a former or current SCO employee or someone who had access to the codebase simply added the code in.
I don't see that as being any more likely than any of the other scenarios talked about here and elsewhere. I myself find it less likely for many of the reasons that the source to Oracle and Windows aren't everywhere. You don't do that unless you want to get sued into the ground.
Which brings us full circle. The SCO v. IBM laysuit: Absolutely unrelated to the copying of files (aside from the fact that SCO brought it up), but completely related to contracts whose full wording is not known to the readers of/.. The Redhat v. SCO lawsuit: Absolutely related to the slander and liable against the Linux community about the copying of files that SCO brought up on the periphery of their suit against IBM. The IBM countersuit v. SCO: Somewhat related to both but muddying the waters just enough to tie it all together.
So what exactly does your former SCO employee have to do with any one of the above lawsuits. According to TFA, SCO claims that the code seen was actually related to another hardware vendor, not IBM and not a former SCO employee.
Why is that so hard for you people to believe?
Well, because companies the world over can and have been auditting periodically open source things for IP violations. If they didn't they're too stupid to exist. You don't think that MS hasn't looked at linux and FreeBSD for some cross contamination? You don't think that Oracle hasn't looked at other database packages? You don't think that Sun looks at Kaffe or gcc? These companies have all the access to do so. There is little or no way for the opposite to take place. Linus doesn't have the source to UnixWare, AIX and Solaris sitting next to the code to Linux (I'm guessing) to do checks against.
Bottom line, SCO has been 2 faced for a while now, selling both it's proprietary offering and it's open source offering. If this is all true, then either someone was very stupid at SCO or sitting on it for years. I vote for stupid because they still claimed to be finding more violations months after their initial lawsuit.
So, to bring this to a conclusion. Without much more information it still does not look "LIKE THEIR CLAIMS ARE VALID" any more than it did in March. Neither the claims that IBM violated a contract, nor that someone has been copying their super secret IP into Linux either at IBM or elsewhere. What does appear, that in a limited number of circumstances the "evidence" they have shown to people indicates that 2 files appear to be the same or similar. No more than that is known. Everything else is still up in the air and conjecture.
Conjecture can be fun and provide hours of rhetoric and discussion but is not something to base authoritative statements on nor yell about in a \. comment.
email as it exists for the most part today, is like sending a postcard. At least that's the rhetoric behind some of the responses from early spammers: "Well someone with that email address opted in for email. Maybe it was the person who had it before you? Don't you want it?" Nobody had this domain before me, thanks.
If they wanted private email, they maybe shoulda used something like PGP or something like TLS to authenticate. I would think that spamvrij.nl didn't get access to any private keys or certificates.
I won't address your first to paragraphs, because I agree with them, mostly.
Technical Solution vs. Political Solution. I agree that the wrong political solution would be bad, and the right technical solution would be great. I disagree that there doesn't have to be some politics to the solution though. The answer to computer cracking is both technical and political (technology to protect yourself and law when the technology isn't keeping up).
Denial of Service Attack. The users that I support are mainly a small set of intellegent people I allow on my systems. They, their spouses and children, know the game, and they appreciate the problem of spam. They don't complain much. The steps I take against spam amount to 3-5 hours a day. Not because I enjoy it, but because if I don't bother, mail becomes so unusable that it'd become worthless (I'm not saying that it just about isn't for me, but others still derive utility from it). In that 3-5 hours a day, I read articles on spam, read up on new techniques, install software that would improve the utility of the system without undue impact to the users, and take an ever increasing corpus of spam and do what I might with it, developing more software internally to take specific action against spam.
I used to spend as much time on security as I now do on spam. It's a zero sum game. Nobody is winning. From the beginning of the year until now, I block a couple hundred additional spam messages a week than I did the week before, but we also get 1000 more total then we did the week before. Last week, at the sendmail level, I blocked 2205 attempts to send spam (not dnsbl, but known bad spammer ips that have passed through our system). Last week spamassassin blocked around 5,000 spams from reaching people's inbox (but saved them for ipaddr blocking). Bayesian filtering in Mozilla and Macintosh Mail took care of another 1000 emails, again saved for ipaddr blocking. Still, about 2000 slipped through those nets. I'm about to try greylisting and putting challenge/response on those mailboxes that want it.
Then there are the joe jobs to deal with.
Malicious? By definition, that is what the spammers are. Penile pill, and worse, emails to children just learning to type.
Undead? They don't seem to sleep, but then when there are enough of them, it really doesn't matter.
I realize that DoS attacks are no fun, and have been through both attack, and sideaffects thereof, on my own systems and people I have worked and consulted for. The purpose of the attack is to deny the owner/operator the utility of their own computers. Some of it can be really bad when it is going on and really hard to recover from. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider spam a DDoS attack. It just started several years ago and hasn't yet finished. There is no easy patch or firewall rule to fix it (other than whitelisting ips which pretty much destroys the utility of the Internet), and the other solutions are just stopgaps to some solutions that are still pretty far out.
In my case, I read the stinkin' message off disk in pine that sendmail graciously placed on the platter while I was busy doing other things. It came into the "house" via the network connection that does in fact go over a wire that comes through a wall.
In the case of other people in the same household, they do do a FETCH from different rooms, but all contained within the same building.
So, are we talking about vampires that have to be invited in or are we talking about spam.
Spam is an unwanted, egregious denial of service attack. For end users it might be a few messages to a hundred. For many people responsible for actual infrastructure it is a DoS attack, nothing more. No better or worse than a worm or syn flood or any other attempt to make some remote system unusable.
Spam legislation will work no better than fax and cell phone protection laws. Get plenty of spam on those as well, and although there are laws "protecting" consumers, they've gotten just as bad using many of the same techniques.
Sadly, outing these people doesn't seem to do much more than that. Spamhaus is an excellent example. There are many people listed on spamhaus by name, and many have addresses associated with them. One live in the same town I live in. The local rag has done several articles on him and he has been vilified on slashdot. Aside from other criminal activities that may sideline him, and unless he's part of the MS suit, spam isn't going to put him away.
Since late last year and early this year, I've captured 59K of spam messages for analysis and possible prosecution/recompense for wasted time. Those 59K of spam doesn't count those blocked by spamassassin and a local implementation of blocking by IP we use here. In the last few weeks I've blocked close to 10K of messages.
Spammers are criminals, plain and simple, in my book.
I wouldn't have modded this a troll, but that's just me. I know far too many people with this attitude.
You have obviously never been a victim of identity theft. You've never had to spend endless hours with credit card companies you've never been a customer of. You've never had to deal with the slime that call themselves "credit reporting agencies" who have your fiscal future in the palm of their hands (unless you're already well-to-do). You've obviously never been hounded by creditors at all hours looking for their pound of flesh. You've never been informed that you have a warrant for your arrest in Texas when you've never been to Texas. You've obviously never attempted to change you SSN. You've obviously never been informed that you drowned in a river while attempting to evade capture and had to prove that you were neither dead nor evasive.
I know people and read about new occurances on a daily basis. It's not fun, it's not funny and you don't get to shrug it off. You either have to deal with it, or face harsh consequences.
There's a reason that the FBI and local law enforcement are dealing with more of this type of crime than ever before. It's easy to do because people don't take the simple precautions to make it difficult. I can tell you that only through bitching at insurance companies and having other people do the same can you get your SSN+1 policy id changed to something else. That only through bitching at the legislature can you make it easy to have you SSN taken of you Driver's License, rather than an ordeal.
Anyone profitting off of personal identifiable information without recourse of some sort for the people whose privacy is being violated should be sued, beaten, incarcerated and/or put of off business.
Problem is most sheeple don't really know what is being done with their information. They don't know that it's being used to get people across borders illegally. They don't know how many billions of dollars are lost each year to businesses and private people. They don't know that they're being abused, because, at least with spam, they don't know that it isn't the norm. They don't know that the reason they're getting the Credit Card solicitations is because they've been rated a good risk by the Credit Reporting Agencies and sold out. They don't know how to get out from under the thumb of business because they think they're supposed to be there.
I applaud any outlet that informs people of their options and that something they have become innured to is actually deviant and underhanded.
Companies choose profit because without it, they fail. Iff companies see their profits fall in such a way that they know it is due to their policies, or lack thereof, will they amend their ways. However that is rarely the case. I know lots of people who go around saying that they will never shop at this place or that because of foo, but I rarely hear that they gave a manager whatfor or wrote a letter to corporate. And there are enough B-to-B aggregators out there who could care less if the people they sell your info to are profitable, as long as they, the aggregators, are profittable.
I found a November 2002 article talking about SCO, high end computing work that they had done with Compaq in the clustering arena and a brief touch on LKP.
I also found Simon Baldwin's resume who has a long history at SCO and who was the "Lead Kernel Engineer and Architect for the Linux Kernel Personality (LKP)" from February of 2000 to "present".
So the LKP stuff was going on quite some time ago. Before or after IBM allegedly put the offending into Linux? Inquiring minds want to know.
And don't forget those other distributors of other fine UNIX utilities with source licensed in a fairly open way AST-OPEN including ksh93 [research.att.com]. Not that it's GPL, or even patent-unencumbered, but some useful, modifiable stuff just the same.
They can't couldn't go after redhat because, and I'm assuming here, redhat doesn't and never has licensed the source from SCO for either one of the SCO Unices.
They needed to make a big splash, and IBM was probably their best pick to legitamize their claims.
Go after Sun? Nah, probably just as unstable and close to the brink as SCO.
Go after HP? Nah, HP has been more of a Johnny-come-lately to the Linux game.
SGI? Love their technology and big iron, but probably as bad or worse off than Sun.
Any other big players? NCR maybe, but not a big Linux player. One of the other companies that are on their last legs or already gone. Nah.
It was IBM or bust and in a big way. After all, if they win they get a cash infusion some time in the future which is good enough for the stock market. Get out the golden parachute, and get out before the appeals overturn it, or reverse suit bankrupt the company.
I'd be surprised if they didn't half expect a play by Novell at some point (if in fact they had been asking Novell for the source (anyone else notice that Darl said they hadn't talked to Novell about buying anything, not if they asked to have a contract clarified that said they already had it or whether they just wanted it signed over?)). If they didn't they were daft. Notice how much spin they've had out?
SCO is a bad actor, all the way around. They can't keep their story straight from one press notice to the next. They don't seem to have their ducks in a row. Despite my admiration for Boies for going up against M$, I have to think he fancies himself David from David and Goliath fame.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
It should just be illegal, plain and simple.
Then there would be no need for a do-not-call/mail/fax/spam list that could provide fodder for the less than savory lot that are spammers.
Back and forth, forth and back.
I'm frankly fed up with the number of things that bombard me and my family on a daily basis.
* mail that looks every bit like a bill or check. * phone calls that show up on caller id as a private residence but are telemarketers * spam that says I can get a great new mortgage on my PO Box * my daughter and son getting viagra and porn spam * spam that says I need to download a windows fix immediately (hint I don't use windows, and don't have it anywhere in my house) * 30-40 mails a week offering credit cards and loans when I've supposedly put a block with all three credit agencies to keep them from selling my info.
It's my info. It's my children's and wife's info. Frankly I'm steamed that so many people have it, and are making more than a little money off of it, at my expense. I think that I should be getting some of that money, and not as loads of unsolicted faxes, mail and email.
And most, if not all, of the marketing and other solicitations I get are beyond insulting. If I want something, I can find it on my own. I don't need stuff crammed down my throat seven ways to Sunday. I'm not stupid and (despite ranting on about the general stupidity of people) I really don't think other people are stupid enough to believe 90% of the stuff I see on a daily basis.
More and more marketing is fraudulent, either bordeline or fullblown. I never opted into any mailing list that offers porn and neither has my daughter. My son is to young to type let alone sign up for credit card spam. Same goes for traditional media (radio and tv and print). Some of the pharma-marketing is just plain crazy. I need to ask my doctor about an allergy medication that cause sever nose-bleeds, a cholesterol mediation that causes renal and liver failure, and a hair tonic that cause sterility. If I need these things, I'm not asking doc' for something by name, he's suggesting things and informing me of side affects, or I'm getting out the magnifying glass to read the 1-2pt font pamphlet that comes with it.
When the dumbies and idiots books came out, I thought it was a bad thing. You don't go around calling people that need help dumb. But maybe they're right. Everything has been dumbed down so much that people can't find the products they want without massive help. People don't have personal responsibilty for anything because they can't be bothered with the details.
Stomach lining, I need a new esophogus and duodenum. Spam has me over a barrel. whitelists, blacklists, baysian, spamassassin, anything to get some relief from the hundreds of spams a day. I'm blocking thousands of adresses, adding a couple hundred a day, and the spam has been increasing lately at a rate of 10-30 per user. It almosts seems like the blocks are having the opposite effect that they should.
I'm more than happy to testify before congress that spam and all the rest just have to stop, we're drowning in crap and it's coming from all sides.
Bill Gates/Paul Allen/Microsoft where either individually or combined large stakeholders in the Human Genome Project when it made it's big press splash, however many years ago that is now. Yep, the project to map the entire DNA structure for the human race has friends in Redmond. We don't make the keyboard more ergonomic, we make your hands work with it.
Can't even reload slashdot today for fear of the Intranet censors from work. Glad I checked it from home first. As a matter of fact, it's become less news for nerds, and more of everything that's print to fit. Some people actually use this site to find useful opensource articles to further the use of opensource within the corporate world. It's hard to take the slashdot.ort URL and give it out if this is the barest level of "reporting" you guys can do. When you guys grow up, don't bother to call. Matt
Slashdot Mirror
zip/unzip is an "engrained part of the Linux user space"? Huh?
.zip instead of putting a .jar or .tgz or .tbz2 right next to it.
The only time that I ever needed it/used it was when someone deploying a Java package only provided a
In fact, on redhat at least, I had to go fish it off of the rpm cds as it wasn't on the system by default (for whatever reason).
I agree that they're part of the overall system if they're sent on the CD's as part of the OS, but please. Saying that what amounts to a windows compatability tool is "engrained" is a bit of a stretch, no?
rm
"Well, because companies the world over can and have been auditting periodically open source things for IP violations"
No, they haven't. They couldn't since then they would need to have access to the closed source product, in this case SCO's UNIX. There are no controls, no auditing, nothing; just emailed patches and a CVS.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. When I said companies, I meant closed source/proprietary source type of companies. And they do do audits of open source code, at least in my limited experience.
I never disagreed with the you on the flip side. The open source world doesn't audit against closed source, because there is simply no way to do it.
But frankly, if you want to hide something you have, and you just know someone is giving it away, do you rest on your laurels until some C*O from IBM makes some offhand comment at a convention to check to see if you have IP leaks, or do you do your due diligence periodically, especially with a code base that has been litigated over in the past?
Clearly you wait until the furthest thing from a developer makes a comment in public.
This is why I am saying it is beginning to look like valid claims. You cannot just ignore the fact that everyone who has seen the code under NDA admits that the code is identical, EVEN DOWN TO THE COMMENTS.
I never said that I was ignoring the fact that some journalists and analysts that have seen the code have said that it's identical.
That still doesn't change the fact that nobody that has been through an NDA has given any kind of indication as to the provenance of the code snippits. Have they seen change logs? What were the commit dates? In the diffs, did the sections of code occur organically or did the file and its contents spring forth wholly formed? When did it first appear in Linux?
Frankly as being something of a forensic software engineer for the company I work for, with a huge code base, I'm not at all surprised that code appears in multiple places with the same code and comments. I also wouldn't be surprised if a SCO engineer pulled a subsystem out of Linux and plunked it down in UnixWare with only the copyrights changed. Deadlines loom, people oversell their own talent to keep a job, people want to get past the small problems and tackle the things that interest them.
I don't see the same drivers on the other side. There is also enough anecdotal evidence floating around that Caldera/SCO may have contibuted it themselves. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if the right hand didn't know what the left was doing.
I don't know where you're coming from with your loud revelations that some of SCOs claims might be valid. I still haven't seen anything coming out of Utah that wouldn't be better used around the trees in my back yard.
I'm not a Linux zealot, but I do use it for fun and profit, as part of diverse set of tools.
I've been through this before. I was a commercial user of BSD/386 (later called BSDi) during the winding down of the AT&T/USL lawsuit. That affected me about as much as this does, although there wasn't a slashdot around then for the armchair pundits to scream that USL's case appeared to have merit.
rm
I still maintain that IT LOOKS LIKE THEIR CLAIMS ARE VALID.
/.. The Redhat v. SCO lawsuit: Absolutely related to the slander and liable against the Linux community about the copying of files that SCO brought up on the periphery of their suit against IBM. The IBM countersuit v. SCO: Somewhat related to both but muddying the waters just enough to tie it all together.
Why? Do you know more than the rest of us? Playing devil's advocate?
It is unlikely that SCO copied from Linux,...
Huh? They have both motive and opportunity whereas the opposite is less likely to be true (Linux hacker have access to the vaunted SCO IP). Your reasoning appears to be:
SCO would know the history and wouldn't make such a claim if that would be the case.
Huh, you would trust SCO to *know* the history and speak truthfully about it? After all the back and forthing?
Sorry, but I reserve judgement until far more is known. I don't think trusting SCO *or* IBM *or* Redhat *or* Novell *or* AT&T to put all their cards on the table and be completely frank and honest at this point is more than premature, it's shortsighted. Least of all SCO who very publically have said things that contradict their own story from day to day.
It is VERY LIKELY that a former or current SCO employee or someone who had access to the codebase simply added the code in.
I don't see that as being any more likely than any of the other scenarios talked about here and elsewhere. I myself find it less likely for many of the reasons that the source to Oracle and Windows aren't everywhere. You don't do that unless you want to get sued into the ground.
Which brings us full circle. The SCO v. IBM laysuit: Absolutely unrelated to the copying of files (aside from the fact that SCO brought it up), but completely related to contracts whose full wording is not known to the readers of
So what exactly does your former SCO employee have to do with any one of the above lawsuits. According to TFA, SCO claims that the code seen was actually related to another hardware vendor, not IBM and not a former SCO employee.
Why is that so hard for you people to believe?
Well, because companies the world over can and have been auditting periodically open source things for IP violations. If they didn't they're too stupid to exist. You don't think that MS hasn't looked at linux and FreeBSD for some cross contamination? You don't think that Oracle hasn't looked at other database packages? You don't think that Sun looks at Kaffe or gcc? These companies have all the access to do so. There is little or no way for the opposite to take place. Linus doesn't have the source to UnixWare, AIX and Solaris sitting next to the code to Linux (I'm guessing) to do checks against.
Bottom line, SCO has been 2 faced for a while now, selling both it's proprietary offering and it's open source offering. If this is all true, then either someone was very stupid at SCO or sitting on it for years. I vote for stupid because they still claimed to be finding more violations months after their initial lawsuit.
So, to bring this to a conclusion. Without much more information it still does not look "LIKE THEIR CLAIMS ARE VALID" any more than it did in March. Neither the claims that IBM violated a contract, nor that someone has been copying their super secret IP into Linux either at IBM or elsewhere. What does appear, that in a limited number of circumstances the "evidence" they have shown to people indicates that 2 files appear to be the same or similar. No more than that is known. Everything else is still up in the air and conjecture.
Conjecture can be fun and provide hours of rhetoric and discussion but is not something to base authoritative statements on nor yell about in a \. comment.
rm
email as it exists for the most part today, is like sending a postcard. At least that's the rhetoric behind some of the responses from early spammers: "Well someone with that email address opted in for email. Maybe it was the person who had it before you? Don't you want it?" Nobody had this domain before me, thanks.
If they wanted private email, they maybe shoulda used something like PGP or something like TLS to authenticate. I would think that spamvrij.nl didn't get access to any private keys or certificates.
RM
I won't address your first to paragraphs, because I agree with them, mostly.
Technical Solution vs. Political Solution. I agree that the wrong political solution would be bad, and the right technical solution would be great. I disagree that there doesn't have to be some politics to the solution though. The answer to computer cracking is both technical and political (technology to protect yourself and law when the technology isn't keeping up).
Denial of Service Attack. The users that I support are mainly a small set of intellegent people I allow on my systems. They, their spouses and children, know the game, and they appreciate the problem of spam. They don't complain much. The steps I take against spam amount to 3-5 hours a day. Not because I enjoy it, but because if I don't bother, mail becomes so unusable that it'd become worthless (I'm not saying that it just about isn't for me, but others still derive utility from it). In that 3-5 hours a day, I read articles on spam, read up on new techniques, install software that would improve the utility of the system without undue impact to the users, and take an ever increasing corpus of spam and do what I might with it, developing more software internally to take specific action against spam.
I used to spend as much time on security as I now do on spam. It's a zero sum game. Nobody is winning. From the beginning of the year until now, I block a couple hundred additional spam messages a week than I did the week before, but we also get 1000 more total then we did the week before. Last week, at the sendmail level, I blocked 2205 attempts to send spam (not dnsbl, but known bad spammer ips that have passed through our system). Last week spamassassin blocked around 5,000 spams from reaching people's inbox (but saved them for ipaddr blocking). Bayesian filtering in Mozilla and Macintosh Mail took care of another 1000 emails, again saved for ipaddr blocking. Still, about 2000 slipped through those nets. I'm about to try greylisting and putting challenge/response on those mailboxes that want it.
Then there are the joe jobs to deal with.
Malicious? By definition, that is what the spammers are. Penile pill, and worse, emails to children just learning to type.
Undead? They don't seem to sleep, but then when there are enough of them, it really doesn't matter.
I realize that DoS attacks are no fun, and have been through both attack, and sideaffects thereof, on my own systems and people I have worked and consulted for. The purpose of the attack is to deny the owner/operator the utility of their own computers. Some of it can be really bad when it is going on and really hard to recover from. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider spam a DDoS attack. It just started several years ago and hasn't yet finished. There is no easy patch or firewall rule to fix it (other than whitelisting ips which pretty much destroys the utility of the Internet), and the other solutions are just stopgaps to some solutions that are still pretty far out.
FWIW.
RM
Faulty, flawed, absurd?
In my case, I read the stinkin' message off disk in pine that sendmail graciously placed on the platter while I was busy doing other things. It came into the "house" via the network connection that does in fact go over a wire that comes through a wall.
In the case of other people in the same household, they do do a FETCH from different rooms, but all contained within the same building.
So, are we talking about vampires that have to be invited in or are we talking about spam.
Spam is an unwanted, egregious denial of service attack. For end users it might be a few messages to a hundred. For many people responsible for actual infrastructure it is a DoS attack, nothing more. No better or worse than a worm or syn flood or any other attempt to make some remote system unusable.
Spam legislation will work no better than fax and cell phone protection laws. Get plenty of spam on those as well, and although there are laws "protecting" consumers, they've gotten just as bad using many of the same techniques.
Sadly, outing these people doesn't seem to do much more than that. Spamhaus is an excellent example. There are many people listed on spamhaus by name, and many have addresses associated with them. One live in the same town I live in. The local rag has done several articles on him and he has been vilified on slashdot. Aside from other criminal activities that may sideline him, and unless he's part of the MS suit, spam isn't going to put him away.
Since late last year and early this year, I've captured 59K of spam messages for analysis and possible prosecution/recompense for wasted time. Those 59K of spam doesn't count those blocked by spamassassin and a local implementation of blocking by IP we use here. In the last few weeks I've blocked close to 10K of messages.
Spammers are criminals, plain and simple, in my book.
I wouldn't have modded this a troll, but that's just me. I know far too many people with this attitude.
You have obviously never been a victim of identity theft. You've never had to spend endless hours with credit card companies you've never been a customer of. You've never had to deal with the slime that call themselves "credit reporting agencies" who have your fiscal future in the palm of their hands (unless you're already well-to-do). You've obviously never been hounded by creditors at all hours looking for their pound of flesh. You've never been informed that you have a warrant for your arrest in Texas when you've never been to Texas. You've obviously never attempted to change you SSN. You've obviously never been informed that you drowned in a river while attempting to evade capture and had to prove that you were neither dead nor evasive.
I know people and read about new occurances on a daily basis. It's not fun, it's not funny and you don't get to shrug it off. You either have to deal with it, or face harsh consequences.
There's a reason that the FBI and local law enforcement are dealing with more of this type of crime than ever before. It's easy to do because people don't take the simple precautions to make it difficult. I can tell you that only through bitching at insurance companies and having other people do the same can you get your SSN+1 policy id changed to something else. That only through bitching at the legislature can you make it easy to have you SSN taken of you Driver's License, rather than an ordeal.
Anyone profitting off of personal identifiable information without recourse of some sort for the people whose privacy is being violated should be sued, beaten, incarcerated and/or put of off business.
Problem is most sheeple don't really know what is being done with their information. They don't know that it's being used to get people across borders illegally. They don't know how many billions of dollars are lost each year to businesses and private people. They don't know that they're being abused, because, at least with spam, they don't know that it isn't the norm. They don't know that the reason they're getting the Credit Card solicitations is because they've been rated a good risk by the Credit Reporting Agencies and sold out. They don't know how to get out from under the thumb of business because they think they're supposed to be there.
I applaud any outlet that informs people of their options and that something they have become innured to is actually deviant and underhanded.
Companies choose profit because without it, they fail. Iff companies see their profits fall in such a way that they know it is due to their policies, or lack thereof, will they amend their ways. However that is rarely the case. I know lots of people who go around saying that they will never shop at this place or that because of foo, but I rarely hear that they gave a manager whatfor or wrote a letter to corporate. And there are enough B-to-B aggregators out there who could care less if the people they sell your info to are profitable, as long as they, the aggregators, are profittable.
Next we'll be have the sack vs. bag argument.
There were facts in the article. I don't recall seeing any facts. Conjecture, rumor, hearsay, yes. Cold hard facts? No.
arg. The first article was November 2000.
And I even previewed.
I'd like to see a timeline.
I found a November 2002 article talking about SCO, high end computing work that they had done with Compaq in the clustering arena and a brief touch on LKP.
I found a February 2001 article just about Linux and SCO integration and LKP.
I found a 2002 SCO Newsletter touting LKP.
I also found Simon Baldwin's resume who has a long history at SCO and who was the "Lead Kernel Engineer and Architect for the Linux Kernel Personality (LKP)" from February of 2000 to "present".
So the LKP stuff was going on quite some time ago. Before or after IBM allegedly put the offending into Linux? Inquiring minds want to know.
And don't forget those other distributors of other fine UNIX utilities with source licensed in a fairly open way AST-OPEN including ksh93 [research.att.com]. Not that it's GPL, or even patent-unencumbered, but some useful, modifiable stuff just the same.
more like the box is complete transparent.
They can't couldn't go after redhat because, and I'm assuming here, redhat doesn't and never has licensed the source from SCO for either one of the SCO Unices.
They needed to make a big splash, and IBM was probably their best pick to legitamize their claims.
Go after Sun? Nah, probably just as unstable and close to the brink as SCO.
Go after HP? Nah, HP has been more of a Johnny-come-lately to the Linux game.
SGI? Love their technology and big iron, but probably as bad or worse off than Sun.
Any other big players? NCR maybe, but not a big Linux player. One of the other companies that are on their last legs or already gone. Nah.
It was IBM or bust and in a big way. After all, if they win they get a cash infusion some time in the future which is good enough for the stock market. Get out the golden parachute, and get out before the appeals overturn it, or reverse suit bankrupt the company.
I'd be surprised if they didn't half expect a play by Novell at some point (if in fact they had been asking Novell for the source (anyone else notice that Darl said they hadn't talked to Novell about buying anything, not if they asked to have a contract clarified that said they already had it or whether they just wanted it signed over?)). If they didn't they were daft. Notice how much spin they've had out?
SCO is a bad actor, all the way around. They can't keep their story straight from one press notice to the next. They don't seem to have their ducks in a row. Despite my admiration for Boies for going up against M$, I have to think he fancies himself David from David and Goliath fame.
It should just be illegal, plain and simple.
Then there would be no need for a do-not-call/mail/fax/spam list that could provide fodder for the less than savory lot that are spammers.
Back and forth, forth and back.
I'm frankly fed up with the number of things that bombard me and my family on a daily basis.
* mail that looks every bit like a bill or check.
* phone calls that show up on caller id as a private residence but are telemarketers
* spam that says I can get a great new mortgage on my PO Box
* my daughter and son getting viagra and porn spam
* spam that says I need to download a windows fix immediately (hint I don't use windows, and don't have it anywhere in my house)
* 30-40 mails a week offering credit cards and loans when I've supposedly put a block with all three credit agencies to keep them from selling my info.
It's my info. It's my children's and wife's info. Frankly I'm steamed that so many people have it, and are making more than a little money off of it, at my expense. I think that I should be getting some of that money, and not as loads of unsolicted faxes, mail and email.
And most, if not all, of the marketing and other solicitations I get are beyond insulting. If I want something, I can find it on my own. I don't need stuff crammed down my throat seven ways to Sunday. I'm not stupid and (despite ranting on about the general stupidity of people) I really don't think other people are stupid enough to believe 90% of the stuff I see on a daily basis.
More and more marketing is fraudulent, either bordeline or fullblown. I never opted into any mailing list that offers porn and neither has my daughter. My son is to young to type let alone sign up for credit card spam. Same goes for traditional media (radio and tv and print). Some of the pharma-marketing is just plain crazy. I need to ask my doctor about an allergy medication that cause sever nose-bleeds, a cholesterol mediation that causes renal and liver failure, and a hair tonic that cause sterility. If I need these things, I'm not asking doc' for something by name, he's suggesting things and informing me of side affects, or I'm getting out the magnifying glass to read the 1-2pt font pamphlet that comes with it.
When the dumbies and idiots books came out, I thought it was a bad thing. You don't go around calling people that need help dumb. But maybe they're right. Everything has been dumbed down so much that people can't find the products they want without massive help. People don't have personal responsibilty for anything because they can't be bothered with the details.
Stomach lining, I need a new esophogus and duodenum. Spam has me over a barrel. whitelists, blacklists, baysian, spamassassin, anything to get some relief from the hundreds of spams a day. I'm blocking thousands of adresses, adding a couple hundred a day, and the spam has been increasing lately at a rate of 10-30 per user. It almosts seems like the blocks are having the opposite effect that they should.
I'm more than happy to testify before congress that spam and all the rest just have to stop, we're drowning in crap and it's coming from all sides.
enough.
It was copyrighted, not patented, and I believe Paul McCartney, formerly of Beatles fame, purchased the copyright some time ago.
Matt
Bill Gates/Paul Allen/Microsoft where either individually or combined large stakeholders in the Human Genome Project when it made it's big press splash, however many years ago that is now. Yep, the project to map the entire DNA structure for the human race has friends in Redmond. We don't make the keyboard more ergonomic, we make your hands work with it.
Can't even reload slashdot today for fear of the Intranet censors from work. Glad I checked it from home first. As a matter of fact, it's become less news for nerds, and more of everything that's print to fit. Some people actually use this site to find useful opensource articles to further the use of opensource within the corporate world. It's hard to take the slashdot.ort URL and give it out if this is the barest level of "reporting" you guys can do. When you guys grow up, don't bother to call. Matt