If only all malware was this easy to detect. Unfortunately, despite the proliferation of automatic virus scanners, "firewalls," and various other techniques, infections still occur.
The main problem is the current monoculture in desktop operating systems. No matter what you think of Microsoft, no matter what you think of Windows, you have to admit that having 90% marketshare of a single OS on desktop operating systems is the biggest part of the problem. The second biggest part of the problem was not designing network security into the OS from day one, but instead attempting to bolt it on on an OS that has always been designed to be a highly integrated one-size-fits-all solution.
The parent was talking about downloading the.torrent file, not actually using it with a bittorrent client. There's a difference.
OTOH, I agree with another poster on this thread that no matter how you view it, although the.torrent file itself does not violate copyright, you could still get into legal hot water.
I have an excuse ready to get out of any legal threats.
And no, I'm not posting it here.
99% of the excuses that Slashdotters have come up with for legal threats probably won't work at all. I sincerely hope you're one of the edge cases. In any respect, if I were you, I would run your excuse past a lawyer before attempting to use it.
I agree with you in principle, but in actuality users expect things to behave in certain ways due to the proliferation of applications that have always handled in that way.
he trunc() function amplifies the error range, so you would get something like 2.00 (+1.00|-0.00). In practice the person writing the functions just has to know about the problem and deal with it in an application specific manner.
The trunc() function on Google Spreadsheet amplifies the error range, but it doesn't on OpenOffice.org Calc, and I would wager that it also doesn't on Excel.
However, carrying out his example on OpenOffice.org Calc 2.2 results in 3.00. So while it's likely a binary representation problem, it's also probably a bug.
Agreed. Otherwise, all known operating systems have this "bug" as well, since if you have a file in $HOME with global read permissions and then subsequently revoke those permissions, if another user copied that file before you revoke those permissions, they still have access to that particular version of the file, or, more accurately, that copy of the file.
Hell, reality has the same "bug": If a book publisher publishes a book, and then later it is discovered that the book contains content that the general public shouldn't have, tough cookies. The number of books sold will still exist, plus any copies that are later made from those originally sold, illegal or not.
Does anyone know how to patch reality?
Sorry, but those are the breaks. Unless, as you say, you're going to DRM everything, you're not going to be able to control copies of anything published.
If it makes you feel better, my first PC was a 4.77 mHz PC/XT clone with 640K of RAM and a 20 MB MFM HDD that I reformatted with an added RLL controller to get 30 MB. I had a 1200 BPS modem that I thought was FAST.
I remember thinking with 30 MB, I'd never run out of disk space...
Probably the reason you needed a GB is that Dell laptops typically tend to use Intel 8xx, 9xx, and GMA graphics adapters. Typically these use main memory for video RAM, which eat up a big chunk if say, 128 MB or more is dedicated to the to the graphics card, you'll see significant slowdowns, especially if she's running a bunch of memory hogging apps (MySpace messenger, AIM and YIM come to mind). Additionally, some other things that teenage girls like to install are either spyware or memory pigs or both: fancy cursors, fancy unicorn search toolbars, etc., bleh.
256 Mb is enough for a lightly used Gnome desktop. My mom has one, and it's working fine for her.
Your mom should try XFCE. It's much more lightweight, and for light usage it can be configured to look and act almost exactly like GNOME. I run XFCE on Xubuntu on my 512 MB Dell Latitude with its puny 1.5 Ghz Pentium M processor, and it flys!
Who said I was joking? Well, except for the bit at the end about Kevin Mitnick.;) Well, I was half-kidding (because I already knew about Mitnick's sweet corporate job and books on security); Mitnick did get some bad treatment during his imprisonment.
I googled for the ecrime howto but couldn't find it. Link please.
Try reading this zine and this zine, too. This is also recommended. Try here, too. Start searching forums, IRC, etc. Subscribe to all the major vulnerability sites, too. Learn to code, if you don't already know how. Get skills in C, assembler, Java, SQL, Visual Basic, Python, PHP, Perl, Unix, Linux, Windows, DNS, TCP/IP, routing protocols, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. Understand how networks and systems work, architecturally speaking, from a high-level all the way down to the physical hardware.
The learning curve is pretty steep for anyone who wishes to ascend beyond the level of 'l337 skr1p7 k1dd13'.
Be aware, however, that the penalties for getting caught are very high. Think Kevin Mitnick.
Not really. I don't know about other providers, but this is how it works with Sprint: when your contract is up (or you are signing up for a new contract), you get either a $150 or a $200 credit (aka "instant savings"), depending on the phone you want. The "cheapest brick phone," as you put it, really costs $150, so if you get one, you end up paying $0 for your phone. If the phone is more expensive, you end up paying the difference. The Rumor2 by LG is $250. They give you the $150 service credit on that phone, so the net cost is $100. (They happen to have a mail-in rebate on that phone right now, so the end cost to you is $50 after the $50 mail-in rebate).
Obviously what happens here is that the $150 credit people end up subsidizing the $200 credit people by $50.
Optionally, on renewing, instead of taking the phone, you can have that same $150 applied to your bill.
So, no, you don't really get penalized at the same rate.
Any project of sufficient complexity will likely have multiple release candidates, just because once all the release critical bugs are found and fixed... more will be found....
The term "release candidate" is actually entirely self-explanatory and leaves less wiggle room for misrepresenting the status of a project than "alpha" or "beta". The final release should be identical to the last RC. In practice there's often some small changes made or diagnostic/debugging code removed; but any actual changes in functionality or any non-trivial fix should cause another RC to be made. It is a bit of a balancing act between cost/time and thoroughness though.
Agreed. I think we're saying the same thing just in different ways.
The thing I'm wondering about is your statement that Vista RC1 was not actually a candidate for release. When did Microsoft actually say this? Just because more fixes and changes were made after RC1 doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't a release candidate. Maybe Microsoft had more internal release candidates that were never made public?
As much as the thought of millions of pampered city dwellers wailing helplessly in the darkness might amuse me, I can not imagine that their lives are so different to country people as to make survival a difficult prospect. Yes, it could take days for the power to come back. But people will make it. Business will make it. Society and civilization as we know it, will probably make it.
If we were talking about a few days, I'd agree with you. But we're talking months or years before the power infrastructure could be rebuilt from the massive, permanent damage TFA is is talking about.
Folks in the countryside usually have the means to be entirely self-sufficient: they can grow their own food, slaughter their own pigs and chickens and cows, etc.
Folks in the city don't have this luxury. Sure, I can grow a few vegetables in my yard, but surely I don't have near enough land to raise animals for meat or even enough vegetables to last for that long. Where would we get our food? There would be no means to ship the food after a few days when the fuel runs out in all the trucks and trains that transport our food.
Furthermore, folks raised in the city don't know how to be self-sufficient. You might take it for granted if you have knowledge of how to milk a cow or how to grow tomatoes or how to raise chickens and pigs, but there are many city dwellers who have never even seen a real, live cow outside of a petting zoo.
This isn't another one of those 'doomsday scenarios'. This is the real deal. Imagine massive, permanent, physical damage to the entire electrical grid. What happened a few years ago was not anything like that. Sure, a few transformers went out, but not on the massive scale they're talking about here.
I disagree. Intel is behind the 8-ball with Larrabee. They're promising things already delivered by NVidia and AMD and I'm pretty sure they had to license NVidia patents to release Larrabee.
It's widely grokked that current Intel graphics chipsets suck for gaming or high-performance computing and the only way they are going to compete with NVidia and AMD in this arena is with Larrabee.
A proper release candidate should be something that could be signed off as the official release if testing goes ok, however, it's widely known that there's going to be multiple release candidates.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, exactly. Any open source project of reasonable complexity has at least 2-3 release candidates, usually more for really big releases like when they merge a development branch with the main trunk. The difference between a 'beta' and 'release candidate' seems to be that with a release candidate you are saying that the code is more or less frozen; you're not going to change much unless there are serious showstopper bugs. With a beta there's a little more flexibility.
I would expect that Microsoft's development methods internally aren't all that different.
According to The Linux Laptop Wiki, you probably need to pass "noapic acpi=noirq" to your kernel to fix the both the SATA and and the 8139 problems (educated guess on the SATA). (FWIW, I have had 3 different machines with RTL 8139 chipsets and have had no problems whatsoever, so this problem is likely specific to the Toshiba.) You also should try Tux On Ice, which will at least give you a working suspend feature.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination, an Amiga fan. I never owned an Amiga, and the only time I ever used one was at a friend's house -- one time -- when I had to logon to a BBS to check my private mail.
I simply admire the Amiga as a computer that was well ahead of its time, something I didn't understand when I was 16 and 18 years old and lacked the imagination and insight to understand. I look back to those days and realize how stupid I was for making fun of all the Amiga users.:)
Then all you need to do is ask your provider for an IPv6 range and put some records in your DNS, enable your clients for IPv6, tell your routers that they'll from now on see IPv6 addresses as well (usually already in the firmware or it's in an upgrade somewhere)
I was with you until the bold portion. The thing is, if you are running enterprise-grade equipment, great. Many SOHO businesses, OTOH, are using consumer routers. Most of these do not support IPV4 OOTB and are not capable of being an IPV4-IPV6 gateway without modification.
SOHO users may be better off building a firewall/router out of a cheap PC. Home users are kind of out of luck unless they are tech savvy.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, I'm the author of Conficker and the payload is to get a first post on slashdot.
That's it? You wrote a worm to get a first post on Slashdot? Damn. How lame are you?
If only all malware was this easy to detect. Unfortunately, despite the proliferation of automatic virus scanners, "firewalls," and various other techniques, infections still occur.
The main problem is the current monoculture in desktop operating systems. No matter what you think of Microsoft, no matter what you think of Windows, you have to admit that having 90% marketshare of a single OS on desktop operating systems is the biggest part of the problem. The second biggest part of the problem was not designing network security into the OS from day one, but instead attempting to bolt it on on an OS that has always been designed to be a highly integrated one-size-fits-all solution.
The parent was talking about downloading the .torrent file, not actually using it with a bittorrent client. There's a difference.
OTOH, I agree with another poster on this thread that no matter how you view it, although the .torrent file itself does not violate copyright, you could still get into legal hot water.
I have an excuse ready to get out of any legal threats.
And no, I'm not posting it here.
99% of the excuses that Slashdotters have come up with for legal threats probably won't work at all. I sincerely hope you're one of the edge cases. In any respect, if I were you, I would run your excuse past a lawyer before attempting to use it.
Of course it's a bug. log10(1000) is 3, so truncating it should yield 3.
Oh, there he goes again, making sense!
I agree with you in principle, but in actuality users expect things to behave in certain ways due to the proliferation of applications that have always handled in that way.
he trunc() function amplifies the error range, so you would get something like 2.00 (+1.00|-0.00). In practice the person writing the functions just has to know about the problem and deal with it in an application specific manner.
The trunc() function on Google Spreadsheet amplifies the error range, but it doesn't on OpenOffice.org Calc, and I would wager that it also doesn't on Excel.
Probably right. In 32-bit Python:
math.log(1000,10)
2.9999999999999996
However, carrying out his example on OpenOffice.org Calc 2.2 results in 3.00. So while it's likely a binary representation problem, it's also probably a bug.
Agreed. Otherwise, all known operating systems have this "bug" as well, since if you have a file in $HOME with global read permissions and then subsequently revoke those permissions, if another user copied that file before you revoke those permissions, they still have access to that particular version of the file, or, more accurately, that copy of the file.
Hell, reality has the same "bug": If a book publisher publishes a book, and then later it is discovered that the book contains content that the general public shouldn't have, tough cookies. The number of books sold will still exist, plus any copies that are later made from those originally sold, illegal or not.
Does anyone know how to patch reality?
Sorry, but those are the breaks. Unless, as you say, you're going to DRM everything, you're not going to be able to control copies of anything published.
If it makes you feel better, my first PC was a 4.77 mHz PC/XT clone with 640K of RAM and a 20 MB MFM HDD that I reformatted with an added RLL controller to get 30 MB. I had a 1200 BPS modem that I thought was FAST.
I remember thinking with 30 MB, I'd never run out of disk space...
This doesn't sound like Echelon or Carnivore, but more like spyware being installed on computers.
Probably the reason you needed a GB is that Dell laptops typically tend to use Intel 8xx, 9xx, and GMA graphics adapters. Typically these use main memory for video RAM, which eat up a big chunk if say, 128 MB or more is dedicated to the to the graphics card, you'll see significant slowdowns, especially if she's running a bunch of memory hogging apps (MySpace messenger, AIM and YIM come to mind). Additionally, some other things that teenage girls like to install are either spyware or memory pigs or both: fancy cursors, fancy unicorn search toolbars, etc., bleh.
I agree. You probably just pissed off some Microsoft fanboys.
Is there anyway we could please let this meme drop? It's getting really old. Seriously.
256 Mb is enough for a lightly used Gnome desktop. My mom has one, and it's working fine for her.
Your mom should try XFCE. It's much more lightweight, and for light usage it can be configured to look and act almost exactly like GNOME. I run XFCE on Xubuntu on my 512 MB Dell Latitude with its puny 1.5 Ghz Pentium M processor, and it flys!
Who said I was joking? Well, except for the bit at the end about Kevin Mitnick. ;) Well, I was half-kidding (because I already knew about Mitnick's sweet corporate job and books on security); Mitnick did get some bad treatment during his imprisonment.
I googled for the ecrime howto but couldn't find it. Link please.
Try reading this zine and this zine, too. This is also recommended. Try here, too. Start searching forums, IRC, etc. Subscribe to all the major vulnerability sites, too. Learn to code, if you don't already know how. Get skills in C, assembler, Java, SQL, Visual Basic, Python, PHP, Perl, Unix, Linux, Windows, DNS, TCP/IP, routing protocols, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. Understand how networks and systems work, architecturally speaking, from a high-level all the way down to the physical hardware.
The learning curve is pretty steep for anyone who wishes to ascend beyond the level of 'l337 skr1p7 k1dd13'.
Be aware, however, that the penalties for getting caught are very high. Think Kevin Mitnick.
Not really. I don't know about other providers, but this is how it works with Sprint: when your contract is up (or you are signing up for a new contract), you get either a $150 or a $200 credit (aka "instant savings"), depending on the phone you want. The "cheapest brick phone," as you put it, really costs $150, so if you get one, you end up paying $0 for your phone. If the phone is more expensive, you end up paying the difference. The Rumor2 by LG is $250. They give you the $150 service credit on that phone, so the net cost is $100. (They happen to have a mail-in rebate on that phone right now, so the end cost to you is $50 after the $50 mail-in rebate).
Obviously what happens here is that the $150 credit people end up subsidizing the $200 credit people by $50.
Optionally, on renewing, instead of taking the phone, you can have that same $150 applied to your bill.
So, no, you don't really get penalized at the same rate.
Any project of sufficient complexity will likely have multiple release candidates, just because once all the release critical bugs are found and fixed... more will be found. ...
The term "release candidate" is actually entirely self-explanatory and leaves less wiggle room for misrepresenting the status of a project than "alpha" or "beta". The final release should be identical to the last RC. In practice there's often some small changes made or diagnostic/debugging code removed; but any actual changes in functionality or any non-trivial fix should cause another RC to be made. It is a bit of a balancing act between cost/time and thoroughness though.
Agreed. I think we're saying the same thing just in different ways.
The thing I'm wondering about is your statement that Vista RC1 was not actually a candidate for release. When did Microsoft actually say this? Just because more fixes and changes were made after RC1 doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't a release candidate. Maybe Microsoft had more internal release candidates that were never made public?
As much as the thought of millions of pampered city dwellers wailing helplessly in the darkness might amuse me, I can not imagine that their lives are so different to country people as to make survival a difficult prospect. Yes, it could take days for the power to come back. But people will make it. Business will make it. Society and civilization as we know it, will probably make it.
If we were talking about a few days, I'd agree with you. But we're talking months or years before the power infrastructure could be rebuilt from the massive, permanent damage TFA is is talking about.
Folks in the countryside usually have the means to be entirely self-sufficient: they can grow their own food, slaughter their own pigs and chickens and cows, etc.
Folks in the city don't have this luxury. Sure, I can grow a few vegetables in my yard, but surely I don't have near enough land to raise animals for meat or even enough vegetables to last for that long. Where would we get our food? There would be no means to ship the food after a few days when the fuel runs out in all the trucks and trains that transport our food.
Furthermore, folks raised in the city don't know how to be self-sufficient. You might take it for granted if you have knowledge of how to milk a cow or how to grow tomatoes or how to raise chickens and pigs, but there are many city dwellers who have never even seen a real, live cow outside of a petting zoo.
This isn't another one of those 'doomsday scenarios'. This is the real deal. Imagine massive, permanent, physical damage to the entire electrical grid. What happened a few years ago was not anything like that. Sure, a few transformers went out, but not on the massive scale they're talking about here.
Intel doesn't need either AMD or NVIDIA.
I disagree. Intel is behind the 8-ball with Larrabee. They're promising things already delivered by NVidia and AMD and I'm pretty sure they had to license NVidia patents to release Larrabee.
It's widely grokked that current Intel graphics chipsets suck for gaming or high-performance computing and the only way they are going to compete with NVidia and AMD in this arena is with Larrabee.
A proper release candidate should be something that could be signed off as the official release if testing goes ok, however, it's widely known that there's going to be multiple release candidates.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, exactly. Any open source project of reasonable complexity has at least 2-3 release candidates, usually more for really big releases like when they merge a development branch with the main trunk. The difference between a 'beta' and 'release candidate' seems to be that with a release candidate you are saying that the code is more or less frozen; you're not going to change much unless there are serious showstopper bugs. With a beta there's a little more flexibility.
I would expect that Microsoft's development methods internally aren't all that different.
According to The Linux Laptop Wiki, you probably need to pass "noapic acpi=noirq" to your kernel to fix the both the SATA and and the 8139 problems (educated guess on the SATA). (FWIW, I have had 3 different machines with RTL 8139 chipsets and have had no problems whatsoever, so this problem is likely specific to the Toshiba.) You also should try Tux On Ice, which will at least give you a working suspend feature.
On the plus side, crap consumer routers have a nasty habit of dropping dead every 18 months, so you can deal with legacy hardware by just waiting.
Funny, I've had my LinkSys WRT54G for about 2.5 years and it sti
I am not by any stretch of the imagination, an Amiga fan. I never owned an Amiga, and the only time I ever used one was at a friend's house -- one time -- when I had to logon to a BBS to check my private mail.
I simply admire the Amiga as a computer that was well ahead of its time, something I didn't understand when I was 16 and 18 years old and lacked the imagination and insight to understand. I look back to those days and realize how stupid I was for making fun of all the Amiga users. :)
Then all you need to do is ask your provider for an IPv6 range and put some records in your DNS, enable your clients for IPv6, tell your routers that they'll from now on see IPv6 addresses as well (usually already in the firmware or it's in an upgrade somewhere)
I was with you until the bold portion. The thing is, if you are running enterprise-grade equipment, great. Many SOHO businesses, OTOH, are using consumer routers. Most of these do not support IPV4 OOTB and are not capable of being an IPV4-IPV6 gateway without modification.
SOHO users may be better off building a firewall/router out of a cheap PC. Home users are kind of out of luck unless they are tech savvy.