As for the number of 48-50 year olds that had access to PC's in their teens - zero. The PC was released in 1980. Prior to that, I don't know and really don't care - it was just a statement to illustrate a point. Besides, the PC was 10k in '80... doubt all that many people had access to them. My guess is that ready access to them wasn't available until people were within +/- a couple years of my own age bracket.
Security is a modern day myth, and thinking of the idea of having it is almost a joke. I'd have to disagree with this. While I make no assumptions that what I do is 100% secure, there are always things that you can do to greatly reduce your risk.
The point I always stress when consulting for various customers is that the amount of time and effort you need to put into security is directly proportional to the value of the information you are looking to protect. If the information you are attempting to protect is worth millions, you better be willing to spend a good chunk of time and money to protect it... if it is the value of a small, personal coin collection, a $50 safe and a "free puppies" sign is all you need to seek out. Can someone take a baseball bat to your dog and an acetylene torch to your safe after breaking a window out of your house - sure... but that is (unfortunately) the screwed up, random chance you take in being a member of the human race.
Your points are well stated, however they are still script kiddies, maybe I don't follow the sought after wikipedia description, but too me, these kids annoyed thousands and we're caught, maybe it is a call for attention, but should we really be spending time debating about it or getting out there and stopping it? I have actually spent several year of my life dedicated to just that effort. I am the author of a pair of Linux firewall distributions (Coyote Linux and Wolverine VPN Firewall) and regularly consult for companies to help them adapt to the ever-changing landscape of Internet based threats. In addition, I do what I can to educate my own children about the dangers and risks of being exposed to the Internet and the possible ramifications of "script kiddie" behavior.
During my youth and period of arrogant idiocy, I got myself in enough trouble to have a couple sit-down conversations with the Feds. I have no doubt that similar behavior to my own would turn out VERY bad for today's youth... when it comes to Virus writing - just don't do it:P
Not many - but how many 40 or 50 year olds had access to a PC when they were in their teens?
I am personally at an age that had I been born much earlier, I would not have had the option of learning to code a virus for a PC in my teens. I am 34 and easy access to PC hardware was a new concept when I was in my early teens. Home computer networks and mass adoption of the Internet didn't start until the early 90's... about the time I was your age.
All that being said, it is in the vast majority of teens' natures to take risks and seek attention. A computer crime, particularly an Internet crime has a reach that far exceeds anything my father could dreamed of. There is very little a 15 year old could have done in there parents basement in the US that would have affected someone in Australia (geographical locations are arbitrary) when he was a teen.
Last but not least, when I was a teenage and wrote my first PC virus (yeah, yeah... I did it too) that completely baffled the system administrators at my high school - I was supposedly one of the world's "elite". The statistics stated that perhaps only 10,000 people in the world had the knowledge to do so... reading that statistic was what actually inspired me to see if I could. So, I bought several books on x86 assembly language and got my hands on as many viruses as possible, printed reams of disassembled virus bytecode, and stepped through countless lines of instructions in DOS's debug.exe to watch them in action. After a few months was able to craft a completely unique virus that was prolific as hell and slipped right through the Antivirus applications' (of that day and time) scanners.
Now I hear my kids' friends talking about how they write viruses... I had an entertaining discussion with a 14 year old at one point claiming he was one of the reasons that I have a job (I own a small PC security consulting company), yet from the remainder of the discussion it was pretty clear that he wouldn't know a PCI slot from DIMM socket if he was put on the spot to identify them.
I guess my point is - the bar has been drastically lowered for entry into the virus writing world. About anyone with the ability to use notepad and search google can write a VBScript app that will spread itself via Email (or a Perl script for those who would like to jump on the down-with-windows bandwagon). This being the case, it fits into the teenage rebel without a clue mentality quite nicely. The percentage of kids that are actually gifted programmers hasn't really changed but the number of kids tinkering with scripts and programming certainly has - which is precisely where the stereotype of the teen script-kiddie comes from. (The word "kiddie" has a basis in reality as well).
Don't get me wrong - I am not putting you down. For all I know you could have an IQ of 200 and have graduated high school at 12. However, the vast majority of people are complete idiots - with the level of skill needed to write viruses and the average computer user now being part of that majority. By the time people are in their 20's/30's there are slightly more important things to do (job, family, etc) than try to mess with the computer of someone halfway across the globe to gain a +1 to e-peen size. So, yes, it is a pretty safe assumption that script kiddies will be in their teens.
I... I... I... just lost about 50 IQ points reading over the page. I had to do about 20 double takes to convince myself that I was actually looking at a power cable for a 120v AC piece of equipment. You think it might be fake - but no, the site is chock full of such devices at prices that would make Bill Gates himself blush.
The gene pool needs a few gallons of Bleach added.
I think I am actually "dumber" after learning that horse shit like that is actually being sold.
Ya know, I always wondered why most places weren't more efficient about the cooling of their datacenters... particularly in the winter. Like it'll be 20 degrees F outside and they're STILL running A/C for the computers. WTF? Just vent a small amount of the outside air into the datacenter and you're done. Or better yet, just blow in the air from the offices and send them warm, data center heated air. There is a lot more to environmental conditioning than temperature. In particular, the humidity of a datacenter is also very important - if humidity needs to be removed from the air, this is typically accomplished with refrigeration (take a look at a dehumidifier some time - it is just an air conditioner that keeps both the heating and cooling coils in the same room). Most datacenters I have worked in are buried in the middle of the office building - to pipe outside air in, you would still need a set of ducts, blowers, etc. It would also require a great deal of filtration to remove outdoor contaminants from the air. I live in North-Eastern Ohio where the climate is quite humid in the summer and the amount of salt used in the winter to melt snow would cause servers to corrode much the way our cars do (walking along side a busy street in the winter, you can actually get a taste of salt in your mouth from the amount of it being powdered and rendered airborne by passing vehicles).
Another question, why do we vent the exhaust from our refrigerators into the house during the summer? Just seems like there's a lot you could do to save energy just by moving what would outerwise be waste heat to places where it can either be used or at least not cause a larger cooling problem. Mainly because a fridge does not have "exhaust" - the heat is radiated off of a set of large set of pipes on the back of the unit. In addition, with proper insulation, a modern, high-efficiency fridge doesn't need to run that often - I would venture a guess that the amount of energy needed to contain, extract and move the heat generated to the outdoors would likely exceed the saving of not having that amount of heat being compensated for by central AC.
The biggest difference here is the new license push from MS. The "Software Assurance" program sucks for many big businesses. In the long run it is MUCH more expensive for many large companies as the cost of the licensing would be a discount *only* if they were ready to deploy the lastest MS operating system as soon as it shipped... in reality, most large companies do not upgrade that fast - hence the cost/year is actually higher under the Assurance program.
Do anyone *really* think Microsoft would implement such a program if it didn't up their profit margins?
I may be off base here, but from my observations of spending many years working on my own personal clunkers -
I think you might be confusing an EGR valve with a smog pump. The EGR (Exhaust Gas Recycler) valve is a vaccuum controlled value which allows a varied amount of the exhaust gas back into the intake manifold based on the amount of vaccuum applied to it (The more air the engine is pulling, the more exhaust you can safely mix without choking off the O2 supply).
The smog pump simply feeds fresh air into the exhaust manifold in an attempt to help burn off any fuel/combustible gases exiting the pistons. While this technique does reduce the amount of carbon monoxide (superheated CO + O2 = more CO2 and less CO), it also skews the emmissions test results by diluting the exhaust with clean air.
The smog pumps that were present on 2 of the vehicles I owned and had to work on had simple rubber hoses for the pump's intake and exhaust... if engine exhaust gases were to flow into one of these directly out of the exhaust manifold, it would turn to jelly.
I also replaced my share of EGR valves. An EGR stuck in the open position would pretty much kill an engine.
Any vehicle can be made to seem less polluting if you feed fresh air into the exhaust stream.
Well, a fairly small UPS will run a cable modem and a VOIP box for quite some time.
In addition, as long as there is a cell tower that has power in your area some services will automatically reroute your call if your Internet goes down.
I currently have a Vonage account that performs this function. From your "control panel" (on their web site), you can specify any number that should automatically receive your calls if your Internet connection should drop.
However, if you are implementing a VPN between Linux and a device such as a Cisco PIX, you can't use OpenVPN.
The fact of the matter is - Openswan implements an industry standard VPN implementation, OpenVPN does not.
Not that it is a cause for great concern, but OpenVPN connections are also vulnerable to connection cutting (see the many, many recent stories about TCP/IP connection cutting DoS attacks), IPSEC is not.
I have the NVidia drivers working on the 2.6.5 kernel under FC1. The 4k stacks is part of the Red Hat patch set. NVidia also has real problems with SELinux fully enabled.
I tried FC2 test 2 on my Toshiba laptop and after several hours of tweaking and recompiling I was starting to get the feeling I was installing Gentoo. FC2 test 2 was horribly broken on my laptop... this was immediately evident when on the very first boot of the system, Kudzu sent the computer into deep guru meditation with a blue text screen full of high ASCII chars.
You simply need to install a vanilla kernel to get the NVidia driver working.
A hardware firewall implementation is intended to allow firewall software to process data at a much faster rate. Higher packet matching and filtering rates and less load on the CPU itself.
There are several such co-processing units available for encryption already. Just because you install a security co-processor doesn't mean your system is secure.
With Gigabit networks, it is very handy to be able to offload functions like packet matching to a chip other than the main processor. Even a with a very fast main processor, you will notice a severe system load with a complex firewall ruleset and a traffic load that can theoretically hit 120MB/s.
This is one of the reasons that ultra-high end routers and firewalls are so much more efficient at handing large traffic loads... they have processors specifically designed and dedicated to processing Ethernet/IP/whatever traffic.
My real question is how open is the spec? I would love to see security co-processor support in the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is still lagging behind Free/OpenBSD in that it will not make use of crypto cards.
There are ways around using a remotely accessible, global back-door. My embedded firewall product provides an option of booting up in a "diagnostic" mode (much like setting the configuration value for a cisco router) that boots the device without loading the configuration (hence, it does not set the admin passwords and does not enable network access).
This does, of course, require that the firewall itself be physically secured. Personally, I would rather trust someone to lock their firewall in a closet/rack than assume a remote backdoor would never be discovered.
While I would have to agree that TCP/IP is a necessary function of any modern OS, your justification could also be applied to everything else that has people grumbling about when it comes to the software being embedded into Windows.
Everyone and their brother has a digital camera and would like to be able to digitally store home videos. How many people you know these days that don't use a web browser or email? Personally, I have 1 grandparent that does not use the Internet... she is 83 years old and has Alzheimer's.
I would say the very multi media features that Microsoft just got hit with a $630M fine for are today's "big thing".
Does this mean that bundling media player into the OS is not a direct shot at Real, Apple (for QT), or other such media companies? Does the addition of CD burning capabilities into XP not indicate a shot at Padus, Ahead, and Roxio?
Don't get me wrong... I am a die hard Linux junkie , run a consulting business based on it, and maintain 2 distributions. Most of Microsoft's business practices are appalling - but I can definitely see the driving factors and why they are pushing hard to keep certain features in the OS.
My mother, sister, and aunt were all ecstatic when they got their first Windows XP machines. As they put it - this is the first version of Windows that "just works" for them. Translation - it had all the widgets and gizmo's they wanted without being forced to choose... the very thing the tech community wants and those that read the "dummy's" books are afraid of.
Hmm. personally I get a kick out of Robot Wars (and so does my son) and think The Screen Savers sucks. There's a hell of a lot more technology involved in building any one of the robots than they cover in several seasons of The Screen Savers. However, I probably appreciate it more because of the amount of time I have spent using a solding iron and watching my father (who works as a metal fabricator and owns a complete metal shop for restoring old hot rods).
Drives me nuts when someone asks me if I watch the screen savers (usually refered to as "TSS" in chats and emails) because I am "into computers".
I just can't respect a show that is commonly refered to by a set of initials that also happens to also refer to Toxic Shock Syndrom. Tampon TV.
Money is much like energy... it is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form (or hands).
If NASA spends 3 billion on developing space techs, the 3 billion has not simply disappeared into a void. The companies supplying techs and products have real employees with real bills that get paid... not to mention, the more people on a payroll, the more they put that payroll back into the economy. A similiar thing happens at NASA itself, if it needs 100 employees to accomplish the task, they aren't working for free and they probably don't live in grass huts.
I had the exact same reaction when they made their initial announcement about the pricing changes.
However, after installing a few Fedora systems and putting it though its paces, I actually find it easier to convince my customers (I am a self-employed network design/security contractor) to switch to Linux.
I have found that for the PHB types, the Enterprise products are an easier sell than the original "free" alternatives (RH9 et al). For many of the suits, the fact that they have a version that costs money, includes supports, and has clearly defined SLA's seems to be a more appealing option.
For those customers with small pocket books or simply looking to seriously cut the cost of running their business, Fedora is a perfect fit.
One of the things I really, really love about Fedora is how easy it is to create your own update services. By simply mirroring an update site or YUM archive, I can set up an update distribution server in a customer's datacenter in all of about 20 minutes... all updates can then be done at the speed of their LAN. It even works with Red Hat's up2date client. Top it off with the fact that sites like freshrpms have put together community efforts to greatly extend the software library for Fedora beyond the base product (which can easily be integrated in a site's installation and update services).
All in all, I applaud Red Hat for their vision of what would be best for the Free Software community and corporations alike.
In the case of your School, it should be as simple as getting people to realize that ((RedHat == good) >= (Red Hat's Fedora Project == good)).
You are assuming that everyone lives in an urban area. As a teenager I lived in a small town which was largely surrounded by country side, farms, and sparsely placed houses. The telephone junction boxes were ripe for the picking... a pair of alligator clips and a $9 phone from the local electronics store later and we were prank calling Japan and finding other stupid ways to generate $500 phone bills for some unsuspecting saps.
Alomost every house in the neighborhood I live in now as a "telephone network interface" attached to it which is secured with a flat head screw... in side is a jack that doesn't even require a pair of alligator clips to hook up to.
Think again about how "secure" your phone system really is.
Re:Nice, but not a ton of info from it.
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Kylix in Limbo
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Only Camel Wide Lites...
Try developing a web administrator for an Embedded system in Perl... as most of my development work is done for embedded systems, interpreted languages are never an option.
Your post goes back to my original point about not having learned to use the language. If you have every used the TWebModule and PageProducers to create CGI apps, you might have a different view of Delphi as a CGI languange.
I currently have a web administrator written for my commericial product that consists of a 30k SSL enabled web server, a 60k Kylix CGI app, and about 50k of HTML and graphics... try coming up a system administrator utility in Perl for 140k of disk space - can't be done.
Re:Nice, but not a ton of info from it.
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Kylix in Limbo
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Um, I bought both v2 and v3 for $249.00 each.
For a commercial RAD GUI development tool for Linux, I found the price quite reasonable. Particularly when they also release a version for free for those looking to GPL application development.
I, for one, will be very disappointed if they abandon this product. I use it on a nearly daily basis for system and web application development. I currently have a commercial firewall application that contains roughly 20,000 lines of Kylix code. In addition, my web billing system, customer management, and most of the background database tasks that run on my servers have been written in Kylix.
Anyone that goes on about Delphi not begin a real programming language has never actually learned to use it. I personally work with C, C++, Delphi, Perl, and Visual Basic... Delphi is by far the most productive language for database, web/cgi, and general utility work I have used. Granted, it would not be good to write a kernel or a 3D game, but that is not what I use it for.
I would agree that the init system in general could use an overhaul, however, the idea of writing a replacement init for "*Linux*" in Python is not going to fly. Maybe a replacement init for Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, or other large distro.
Neither of my distros will benefit in the slightest from this sort of system. Coyote Linux and the Wolverine Firewall and VPN Server use a busybox init application. Coyote fits on a 1.44Mb floppy and Wolverine installs in 7.5Mb. This would not be possible if either system's init relied on Python.
The embedded Linux market will have no use for something that requires a Python interpreter. Not to mention, Bash shell scripting and Python source code are very different animals. Having to learn the basics of shell scripting to reconfigure the way your system boots is a far cry less complex than having to learn Python.
As an embedded Linux developer, this project gets an emphatic thumbs down (as do most interpreted programming languages, though). They have their place in larger systems, but "Linux" is no such system, it is just a kernel. If he wants to write an init replacement, he should target a given set of distros, not the kernel itself.
Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying "This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way"?
No, just convince people that you deal with on a professional level to only give credit to emails with a PGP signature on it.
PGP and GPG are pretty simple to set up... it drives me nuts how many of my customers won't even look into it when I suggest they should use to for trusted / sensitive email content. To me it just makes good business sense.
RIGHT... because nobody ever hacks, cracks, or pirates stuff on Windows. Never mind the fact that the most widely pirated piece of software in existance is Windows itself.
Provided you are modifying the unit for your own purposes and not redistributing the Liksys binary code, how exactly does this qualify as pirating?
Personally, I run my business on Linux and have implemented it in several companies where the Linux system itself was replacing a pirated copy of Linux.
A lot of people get hung up on the human power plant issue with the Matrix. However, they did try to cover the fact that humans would make a poor power source...
When Morpheus is explaining to Neo that he is a Duracell, he makes that comment that "...combined with a form of Fusion, the machines found all the power they would ever need".
The assumption that humans are some form of required ingredient for fusion is a little silly, but less so than the idea that I could plug an extension cord into my ass to power the laptop I am using.
Unless you spend all day chatting on IRC or playing UT2k3/NWN on your box and that is the best you can put it to use, having your system compromised can be very serious.
Personally, I use my computers for my online banking, my business billing/invoicing system, not to mention the fact that I have quite a bit of sensitive personal and business information stored in spread sheets and oo.org documents.
This type of thinking (getting hacked is no big deal, so I will be lazy about security) is a very good portion why we have so damn many Internet Worms floating around and why the Internet is a playground for script kiddies in the first place.
If you don't care about what happens to your box, do me a favor and disconnect it from the same world wide network that my boxes are connected to, please. I really don't what you contributing to the next time my company gets hit with a DoS or something similiar.
Slashdot Mirror
The point I always stress when consulting for various customers is that the amount of time and effort you need to put into security is directly proportional to the value of the information you are looking to protect. If the information you are attempting to protect is worth millions, you better be willing to spend a good chunk of time and money to protect it... if it is the value of a small, personal coin collection, a $50 safe and a "free puppies" sign is all you need to seek out. Can someone take a baseball bat to your dog and an acetylene torch to your safe after breaking a window out of your house - sure... but that is (unfortunately) the screwed up, random chance you take in being a member of the human race. Your points are well stated, however they are still script kiddies, maybe I don't follow the sought after wikipedia description, but too me, these kids annoyed thousands and we're caught, maybe it is a call for attention, but should we really be spending time debating about it or getting out there and stopping it? I have actually spent several year of my life dedicated to just that effort. I am the author of a pair of Linux firewall distributions (Coyote Linux and Wolverine VPN Firewall) and regularly consult for companies to help them adapt to the ever-changing landscape of Internet based threats. In addition, I do what I can to educate my own children about the dangers and risks of being exposed to the Internet and the possible ramifications of "script kiddie" behavior.
During my youth and period of arrogant idiocy, I got myself in enough trouble to have a couple sit-down conversations with the Feds. I have no doubt that similar behavior to my own would turn out VERY bad for today's youth... when it comes to Virus writing - just don't do it
Not many - but how many 40 or 50 year olds had access to a PC when they were in their teens?
I am personally at an age that had I been born much earlier, I would not have had the option of learning to code a virus for a PC in my teens. I am 34 and easy access to PC hardware was a new concept when I was in my early teens. Home computer networks and mass adoption of the Internet didn't start until the early 90's... about the time I was your age.
All that being said, it is in the vast majority of teens' natures to take risks and seek attention. A computer crime, particularly an Internet crime has a reach that far exceeds anything my father could dreamed of. There is very little a 15 year old could have done in there parents basement in the US that would have affected someone in Australia (geographical locations are arbitrary) when he was a teen.
Last but not least, when I was a teenage and wrote my first PC virus (yeah, yeah... I did it too) that completely baffled the system administrators at my high school - I was supposedly one of the world's "elite". The statistics stated that perhaps only 10,000 people in the world had the knowledge to do so... reading that statistic was what actually inspired me to see if I could. So, I bought several books on x86 assembly language and got my hands on as many viruses as possible, printed reams of disassembled virus bytecode, and stepped through countless lines of instructions in DOS's debug.exe to watch them in action. After a few months was able to craft a completely unique virus that was prolific as hell and slipped right through the Antivirus applications' (of that day and time) scanners.
Now I hear my kids' friends talking about how they write viruses... I had an entertaining discussion with a 14 year old at one point claiming he was one of the reasons that I have a job (I own a small PC security consulting company), yet from the remainder of the discussion it was pretty clear that he wouldn't know a PCI slot from DIMM socket if he was put on the spot to identify them.
I guess my point is - the bar has been drastically lowered for entry into the virus writing world. About anyone with the ability to use notepad and search google can write a VBScript app that will spread itself via Email (or a Perl script for those who would like to jump on the down-with-windows bandwagon). This being the case, it fits into the teenage rebel without a clue mentality quite nicely. The percentage of kids that are actually gifted programmers hasn't really changed but the number of kids tinkering with scripts and programming certainly has - which is precisely where the stereotype of the teen script-kiddie comes from. (The word "kiddie" has a basis in reality as well).
Don't get me wrong - I am not putting you down. For all I know you could have an IQ of 200 and have graduated high school at 12. However, the vast majority of people are complete idiots - with the level of skill needed to write viruses and the average computer user now being part of that majority. By the time people are in their 20's/30's there are slightly more important things to do (job, family, etc) than try to mess with the computer of someone halfway across the globe to gain a +1 to e-peen size. So, yes, it is a pretty safe assumption that script kiddies will be in their teens.
I... I... I... just lost about 50 IQ points reading over the page. I had to do about 20 double takes to convince myself that I was actually looking at a power cable for a 120v AC piece of equipment. You think it might be fake - but no, the site is chock full of such devices at prices that would make Bill Gates himself blush.
The gene pool needs a few gallons of Bleach added.
I think I am actually "dumber" after learning that horse shit like that is actually being sold.
The biggest difference here is the new license push from MS. The "Software Assurance" program sucks for many big businesses. In the long run it is MUCH more expensive for many large companies as the cost of the licensing would be a discount *only* if they were ready to deploy the lastest MS operating system as soon as it shipped... in reality, most large companies do not upgrade that fast - hence the cost/year is actually higher under the Assurance program.
Do anyone *really* think Microsoft would implement such a program if it didn't up their profit margins?
I may be off base here, but from my observations of spending many years working on my own personal clunkers -
I think you might be confusing an EGR valve with a smog pump. The EGR (Exhaust Gas Recycler) valve is a vaccuum controlled value which allows a varied amount of the exhaust gas back into the intake manifold based on the amount of vaccuum applied to it (The more air the engine is pulling, the more exhaust you can safely mix without choking off the O2 supply).
The smog pump simply feeds fresh air into the exhaust manifold in an attempt to help burn off any fuel/combustible gases exiting the pistons. While this technique does reduce the amount of carbon monoxide (superheated CO + O2 = more CO2 and less CO), it also skews the emmissions test results by diluting the exhaust with clean air.
The smog pumps that were present on 2 of the vehicles I owned and had to work on had simple rubber hoses for the pump's intake and exhaust... if engine exhaust gases were to flow into one of these directly out of the exhaust manifold, it would turn to jelly.
I also replaced my share of EGR valves. An EGR stuck in the open position would pretty much kill an engine.
Any vehicle can be made to seem less polluting if you feed fresh air into the exhaust stream.
Well, a fairly small UPS will run a cable modem and a VOIP box for quite some time.
In addition, as long as there is a cell tower that has power in your area some services will automatically reroute your call if your Internet goes down.
I currently have a Vonage account that performs this function. From your "control panel" (on their web site), you can specify any number that should automatically receive your calls if your Internet connection should drop.
Granted, IPSEC can be a pain to configure.
However, if you are implementing a VPN between Linux and a device such as a Cisco PIX, you can't use OpenVPN.
The fact of the matter is - Openswan implements an industry standard VPN implementation, OpenVPN does not.
Not that it is a cause for great concern, but OpenVPN connections are also vulnerable to connection cutting (see the many, many recent stories about TCP/IP connection cutting DoS attacks), IPSEC is not.
I have the NVidia drivers working on the 2.6.5 kernel under FC1. The 4k stacks is part of the Red Hat patch set. NVidia also has real problems with SELinux fully enabled.
I tried FC2 test 2 on my Toshiba laptop and after several hours of tweaking and recompiling I was starting to get the feeling I was installing Gentoo. FC2 test 2 was horribly broken on my laptop... this was immediately evident when on the very first boot of the system, Kudzu sent the computer into deep guru meditation with a blue text screen full of high ASCII chars.
You simply need to install a vanilla kernel to get the NVidia driver working.
No. Think of it as a co-processor.
A hardware firewall implementation is intended to allow firewall software to process data at a much faster rate. Higher packet matching and filtering rates and less load on the CPU itself.
There are several such co-processing units available for encryption already. Just because you install a security co-processor doesn't mean your system is secure.
With Gigabit networks, it is very handy to be able to offload functions like packet matching to a chip other than the main processor. Even a with a very fast main processor, you will notice a severe system load with a complex firewall ruleset and a traffic load that can theoretically hit 120MB/s.
This is one of the reasons that ultra-high end routers and firewalls are so much more efficient at handing large traffic loads... they have processors specifically designed and dedicated to processing Ethernet/IP/whatever traffic.
My real question is how open is the spec? I would love to see security co-processor support in the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is still lagging behind Free/OpenBSD in that it will not make use of crypto cards.
There are ways around using a remotely accessible, global back-door. My embedded firewall product provides an option of booting up in a "diagnostic" mode (much like setting the configuration value for a cisco router) that boots the device without loading the configuration (hence, it does not set the admin passwords and does not enable network access).
This does, of course, require that the firewall itself be physically secured. Personally, I would rather trust someone to lock their firewall in a closet/rack than assume a remote backdoor would never be discovered.
While I would have to agree that TCP/IP is a necessary function of any modern OS, your justification could also be applied to everything else that has people grumbling about when it comes to the software being embedded into Windows.
Everyone and their brother has a digital camera and would like to be able to digitally store home videos. How many people you know these days that don't use a web browser or email? Personally, I have 1 grandparent that does not use the Internet... she is 83 years old and has Alzheimer's.
I would say the very multi media features that Microsoft just got hit with a $630M fine for are today's "big thing".
Does this mean that bundling media player into the OS is not a direct shot at Real, Apple (for QT), or other such media companies? Does the addition of CD burning capabilities into XP not indicate a shot at Padus, Ahead, and Roxio?
Don't get me wrong... I am a die hard Linux junkie , run a consulting business based on it, and maintain 2 distributions. Most of Microsoft's business practices are appalling - but I can definitely see the driving factors and why they are pushing hard to keep certain features in the OS.
My mother, sister, and aunt were all ecstatic when they got their first Windows XP machines. As they put it - this is the first version of Windows that "just works" for them. Translation - it had all the widgets and gizmo's they wanted without being forced to choose... the very thing the tech community wants and those that read the "dummy's" books are afraid of.
Hmm. personally I get a kick out of Robot Wars (and so does my son) and think The Screen Savers sucks. There's a hell of a lot more technology involved in building any one of the robots than they cover in several seasons of The Screen Savers. However, I probably appreciate it more because of the amount of time I have spent using a solding iron and watching my father (who works as a metal fabricator and owns a complete metal shop for restoring old hot rods).
Drives me nuts when someone asks me if I watch the screen savers (usually refered to as "TSS" in chats and emails) because I am "into computers".
I just can't respect a show that is commonly refered to by a set of initials that also happens to also refer to Toxic Shock Syndrom. Tampon TV.
I think the author has a beautiful point here.
Money is much like energy... it is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form (or hands).
If NASA spends 3 billion on developing space techs, the 3 billion has not simply disappeared into a void. The companies supplying techs and products have real employees with real bills that get paid... not to mention, the more people on a payroll, the more they put that payroll back into the economy. A similiar thing happens at NASA itself, if it needs 100 employees to accomplish the task, they aren't working for free and they probably don't live in grass huts.
I had the exact same reaction when they made their initial announcement about the pricing changes.
However, after installing a few Fedora systems and putting it though its paces, I actually find it easier to convince my customers (I am a self-employed network design/security contractor) to switch to Linux.
I have found that for the PHB types, the Enterprise products are an easier sell than the original "free" alternatives (RH9 et al). For many of the suits, the fact that they have a version that costs money, includes supports, and has clearly defined SLA's seems to be a more appealing option.
For those customers with small pocket books or simply looking to seriously cut the cost of running their business, Fedora is a perfect fit.
One of the things I really, really love about Fedora is how easy it is to create your own update services. By simply mirroring an update site or YUM archive, I can set up an update distribution server in a customer's datacenter in all of about 20 minutes... all updates can then be done at the speed of their LAN. It even works with Red Hat's up2date client. Top it off with the fact that sites like freshrpms have put together community efforts to greatly extend the software library for Fedora beyond the base product (which can easily be integrated in a site's installation and update services).
All in all, I applaud Red Hat for their vision of what would be best for the Free Software community and corporations alike.
In the case of your School, it should be as simple as getting people to realize that ((RedHat == good) >= (Red Hat's Fedora Project == good)).
You are assuming that everyone lives in an urban area. As a teenager I lived in a small town which was largely surrounded by country side, farms, and sparsely placed houses. The telephone junction boxes were ripe for the picking... a pair of alligator clips and a $9 phone from the local electronics store later and we were prank calling Japan and finding other stupid ways to generate $500 phone bills for some unsuspecting saps.
Alomost every house in the neighborhood I live in now as a "telephone network interface" attached to it which is secured with a flat head screw... in side is a jack that doesn't even require a pair of alligator clips to hook up to.
Think again about how "secure" your phone system really is.
Only Camel Wide Lites...
Try developing a web administrator for an Embedded system in Perl... as most of my development work is done for embedded systems, interpreted languages are never an option.
Your post goes back to my original point about not having learned to use the language. If you have every used the TWebModule and PageProducers to create CGI apps, you might have a different view of Delphi as a CGI languange.
I currently have a web administrator written for my commericial product that consists of a 30k SSL enabled web server, a 60k Kylix CGI app, and about 50k of HTML and graphics... try coming up a system administrator utility in Perl for 140k of disk space - can't be done.
Um, I bought both v2 and v3 for $249.00 each.
For a commercial RAD GUI development tool for Linux, I found the price quite reasonable. Particularly when they also release a version for free for those looking to GPL application development.
I, for one, will be very disappointed if they abandon this product. I use it on a nearly daily basis for system and web application development. I currently have a commercial firewall application that contains roughly 20,000 lines of Kylix code. In addition, my web billing system, customer management, and most of the background database tasks that run on my servers have been written in Kylix.
Anyone that goes on about Delphi not begin a real programming language has never actually learned to use it. I personally work with C, C++, Delphi, Perl, and Visual Basic... Delphi is by far the most productive language for database, web/cgi, and general utility work I have used. Granted, it would not be good to write a kernel or a 3D game, but that is not what I use it for.
I would agree that the init system in general could use an overhaul, however, the idea of writing a replacement init for "*Linux*" in Python is not going to fly. Maybe a replacement init for Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, or other large distro.
Neither of my distros will benefit in the slightest from this sort of system. Coyote Linux and the Wolverine Firewall and VPN Server use a busybox init application. Coyote fits on a 1.44Mb floppy and Wolverine installs in 7.5Mb. This would not be possible if either system's init relied on Python.
The embedded Linux market will have no use for something that requires a Python interpreter. Not to mention, Bash shell scripting and Python source code are very different animals. Having to learn the basics of shell scripting to reconfigure the way your system boots is a far cry less complex than having to learn Python.
As an embedded Linux developer, this project gets an emphatic thumbs down (as do most interpreted programming languages, though). They have their place in larger systems, but "Linux" is no such system, it is just a kernel. If he wants to write an init replacement, he should target a given set of distros, not the kernel itself.
Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying "This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way"?
No, just convince people that you deal with on a professional level to only give credit to emails with a PGP signature on it.
PGP and GPG are pretty simple to set up... it drives me nuts how many of my customers won't even look into it when I suggest they should use to for trusted / sensitive email content. To me it just makes good business sense.
Err... make that a pirate copy of Windows not *Linux*. Must have been that Linux pirate mentality :)
RIGHT... because nobody ever hacks, cracks, or pirates stuff on Windows. Never mind the fact that the most widely pirated piece of software in existance is Windows itself.
Provided you are modifying the unit for your own purposes and not redistributing the Liksys binary code, how exactly does this qualify as pirating?
Personally, I run my business on Linux and have implemented it in several companies where the Linux system itself was replacing a pirated copy of Linux.
I can only assume you are trolling here...
A lot of people get hung up on the human power plant issue with the Matrix. However, they did try to cover the fact that humans would make a poor power source...
When Morpheus is explaining to Neo that he is a Duracell, he makes that comment that "...combined with a form of Fusion, the machines found all the power they would ever need".
The assumption that humans are some form of required ingredient for fusion is a little silly, but less so than the idea that I could plug an extension cord into my ass to power the laptop I am using.
Oh sheesh... that is about that last damn thing I need a talking paper clip to ask me if I need help doing!
You've got to be kidding me.
Unless you spend all day chatting on IRC or playing UT2k3/NWN on your box and that is the best you can put it to use, having your system compromised can be very serious.
Personally, I use my computers for my online banking, my business billing/invoicing system, not to mention the fact that I have quite a bit of sensitive personal and business information stored in spread sheets and oo.org documents.
This type of thinking (getting hacked is no big deal, so I will be lazy about security) is a very good portion why we have so damn many Internet Worms floating around and why the Internet is a playground for script kiddies in the first place.
If you don't care about what happens to your box, do me a favor and disconnect it from the same world wide network that my boxes are connected to, please. I really don't what you contributing to the next time my company gets hit with a DoS or something similiar.