I'm seeing predictable phaser rays. Stage two emitters activating now. Overhead capacitors to one-oh-five percent. Eeeeeh... its probably not a problem, probably, but I'm showing a small discrepancy... well... no... its well within acceptable bounds. Sustaining sequence.
I run a mail server for a medium size tech/sales company. The spam levels have peaked last year and are remaining the same, if not getting worse. 70% to 80% of all incoming mail is spam, before the spam filtering of course. The filtering probably catches better than 9 out of 10 spam messages, but what remains is still a large number of junk messages that need to be dealth with by hand. This seems to the the norm according to my fellow mail admins from other orgs.
It's not unfathomable. IE *is* the Internet. Most home users are unable to make a distinction between the Internet content and the application they are using to view that content.
Anecdote: I once set someone's IE home page to about:blank, purely out of habit. I always set mine to a blank page. And sure enough, they called me 30 minutes later: "The Internet is down!"
I've also had many users complain that the Internet was down when MSN was having problems. Yes you've guessed right: msn.com was their home page. They didn't understand that they could simply ignore the broken home page and browse somewhere else.
A guy I know from a flight sim Web board was visited by the FBI in late 2001 because he bought a HOTAS joystick and throttle for his flight sim. Rumor was circulating back then that the 9/11 hijackers used a flight sim to practice the attacks. This guy bought the joystick online and it was delivered by a well known parcel carrier. The package was just the original manufacturer's box with the pictures of the joystick. He suspected that the delivery guy called the Feds but he couldn't prove it.
A single agent dropped by his house in the evening, looked around, noted the flight-sim on his computer, and the joystick, and CDs and books and manuals on the subject, asked him some questions, and left.
Bill Gates never said that. And no one at Intel ever said that. It is a myth. The 640 KB barrier was a limitation of the 20 bit addressing space of the old 8086/8088 processors and had nothing to do with DOS or MS. (Well, the limit was 1024 KB but the upper 384 KB were used for BASIC ROM, BIOS shadow, video memory and other things.)
Bloggers the Tech World's New Elite? Huh? They are just a bunch of geeks capitalizing on the ignorant mass media who have popularized blogging as of late. Blogging will become a niche again in a couple of years when the media and the public lose interest.
I've worked in corporate IT for 6 years now. Majority of the users, and even those who consider themselves "power users", have simply memorized the steps necessary to log in, send e-mail, reply to e-mail, open and save an Office document, print, etc... They are not technical and they can't be trained to be technical. Let alone to think like hackers.
Hell, I've just gotten a support call from someone who couldn't find the backslash key on his keyboard!!! He was not able to log onto a site that required "domain\user" logon credentials. I used the Google images search to find a high res image of his laptop's keyboard (it took like 5 minutes of coaxing for him to finally give me the correct laptop's model number!) so I could tell him exactly where the key was. Using Google to find a pic of his keyboard is an example of hacker thinking that an average person is NEVER going to master.
email has become our storage system for important documents
No yuo! E-mail should be used only for collaboration. Documents belong on a file server or some kind of a Web based document management system.
How big is your mail store? How long does it take to backup? How long would it take to restore in case of a failure? Half a day? I'm guessing that 95% of your mail store are file attachments that shouldn't even be there...
How do you share those documents with others? Forward them via e-mail of course. Thus compounding your document versioning problem, and increasing the mail store size. (Single instance storage can only do so much.)
"Perhaps Microsoft should include an option, like 'Prepare this computer for resale,' which utterly destroys all data."
They are probably afraid of getting customer support calls from people who used that option to "see what it did", or from people who changed their mind and wanted their data recovered, or folks who thought that MS didn't really mean it when they said (with a huge red bold and blinking disclaimer no less) that all data would be erased. Ahd then they'd sue MS, OEM, and CompUSA for the emotional distress caused by the loss of their data.
Event Type: Information Event Source: EventLog Event Category: None Event ID: 6013 Date: 2/4/2005 Time: 12:00:00 PM User: N/A Computer: NOYUO! Description: The system uptime is 14221937 seconds.
That's about 164 days. Last time I got a virus or spyware or malware or anything else even remotely malicious, was in 1991. I was a college kid and ignorant of the matters of computer security. I infected all my 5.25" floppies with the Michelangelo virus.
As for the never ending flaws... Every OS has flaws! How often is Apple patching OS X? (I have a 12" PowerBook BTW.) About every month? The MS's patching cycle is also a month! Linux, and various Linux components are being patched constantly. This has nothing to do with the number or severity of the flaws, because they are everywhere.
Windows flaws are being exploited a lot more because it is (drumroll) the most prolific desktop OS being used by computer-skill- challenged people all over the World! But you knew this already.
Writing secure code is hard. A function coded in, say, C++ may look perfectly sound when the source code is analyzed. But once compiled, and made a part of a much larger app, it may exhibit faulty behavior that can be exploited to inject arbitrary code into the application. This happens all the time, to MS, to open source programmers, to Apple, hell serious flaws have just been found in Oracle DB software.
Firefox has had a number of VERY serious flaws that could have been used to exploit computers, but haven't. Because no one would bother due to the fact that IE is a lot more popular. And the fact that people running alternative browsers are usually more savvy and would know what to do to keep their boxes secure. And it is my belief that another often overlooked reason exists. People who are doing the exploiting, hackers if you wish, are themselves fans of the open source software, namely Linux and OSS browsers and office apps. They don't WANT to exploit their precioussss.
Keep a Windows box patched, get a firewall, install an AV program, don't install "free" programs that you've downloaded off P2P networks or warez sites, and don't muck with your IE security settings unless you know exactly what you are doing. I routinely use IE to visit sites that are chock full of malware (cough pr0n, cough) and have never gotten IE exploited by anyone. Ever. Read that again, for best effect.
And for heaven's sake, log in as a User, not as an Administrator. Would you use a Linux box while logged in as root all the time? I didn't think so! Most home Windows users should not even have any sort of admin access to their machine. They wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. They should find someone who's computer savvy, in their family or circle of friends, and have them admin the computer.
It comes down to this. If you know what you are doing, you can keep your box safe regardless of the OS. Most Windows users are newbs who don't know what the F (shut yo' mouth!) they are doing so they get hacked. It isn't OSs fault. What can MS do? Deny people the ability to make their user accounts Administrators? Lock down security and break a bunch of stuff? Force OS updates on everyone with no way to turn them off? They can't do that. Imagine the headlines and the lawsuits!
An "E-mail system used to communicate with the public" sounds like an Internet facing SMTP gateway. I can't be sure, obviously, but that's the most likely type of a system that got "breached". The really juicy stuff, the e-mail servers that host the mailboxes, would be on the internal network, and much better protected against hacks.
If an SMTP gateway was supposedly "breached", what could that entail? Somebody was able to relay through the server? Wooo, big deal! There are like a bazillion open relays out there. Or someone installed a trojan that allowed them to intercept the SMTP traffic? Again, it is not a big deal. The e-mail messages were sent to the public, and SMTP traffic being sent to the outside mail servers isn't encrypted or secure in any way anyhow. It can be intercepted, and e-mail can be read, at any upstream router.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm seeing predictable phaser rays. Stage two emitters activating now. Overhead capacitors to one-oh-five percent. Eeeeeh... its probably not a problem, probably, but I'm showing a small discrepancy... well... no... its well within acceptable bounds. Sustaining sequence.
Bzzzzzzt! Boom!
Oh dear! Gordon, get away from the...
Shutting down, attempting shut down, it's not, it's not shutting down, it's not...
B O O M!
I came here to post "too little too late". But high school? Huh? You must be in your early 20s. High school is/was the best time of my life.
I wish this pill was available back in early 90s. I would not have had to live with PTSD for 15 years (war veteran).
I run a mail server for a medium size tech/sales company. The spam levels have peaked last year and are remaining the same, if not getting worse. 70% to 80% of all incoming mail is spam, before the spam filtering of course. The filtering probably catches better than 9 out of 10 spam messages, but what remains is still a large number of junk messages that need to be dealth with by hand. This seems to the the norm according to my fellow mail admins from other orgs.
I read the topic title, then immediately went to Edit > Find > 1.21 > Find Next, and there it was.
It's not unfathomable. IE *is* the Internet. Most home users are unable to make a distinction between the Internet content and the application they are using to view that content.
Anecdote: I once set someone's IE home page to about:blank, purely out of habit. I always set mine to a blank page. And sure enough, they called me 30 minutes later: "The Internet is down!"
I've also had many users complain that the Internet was down when MSN was having problems. Yes you've guessed right: msn.com was their home page. They didn't understand that they could simply ignore the broken home page and browse somewhere else.
A guy I know from a flight sim Web board was visited by the FBI in late 2001 because he bought a HOTAS joystick and throttle for his flight sim. Rumor was circulating back then that the 9/11 hijackers used a flight sim to practice the attacks. This guy bought the joystick online and it was delivered by a well known parcel carrier. The package was just the original manufacturer's box with the pictures of the joystick. He suspected that the delivery guy called the Feds but he couldn't prove it.
A single agent dropped by his house in the evening, looked around, noted the flight-sim on his computer, and the joystick, and CDs and books and manuals on the subject, asked him some questions, and left.
WTF?
That's what Bussard Hydrogen collectors are for.
Bill Gates never said that. And no one at Intel ever said that. It is a myth. The 640 KB barrier was a limitation of the 20 bit addressing space of the old 8086/8088 processors and had nothing to do with DOS or MS. (Well, the limit was 1024 KB but the upper 384 KB were used for BASIC ROM, BIOS shadow, video memory and other things.)
Get out of my head!
Bloggers the Tech World's New Elite? Huh? They are just a bunch of geeks capitalizing on the ignorant mass media who have popularized blogging as of late. Blogging will become a niche again in a couple of years when the media and the public lose interest.
Son of a...! I came here for the sole reason of posting that. All nerds think alike I guess...
I've worked in corporate IT for 6 years now. Majority of the users, and even those who consider themselves "power users", have simply memorized the steps necessary to log in, send e-mail, reply to e-mail, open and save an Office document, print, etc... They are not technical and they can't be trained to be technical. Let alone to think like hackers.
Hell, I've just gotten a support call from someone who couldn't find the backslash key on his keyboard!!! He was not able to log onto a site that required "domain\user" logon credentials. I used the Google images search to find a high res image of his laptop's keyboard (it took like 5 minutes of coaxing for him to finally give me the correct laptop's model number!) so I could tell him exactly where the key was. Using Google to find a pic of his keyboard is an example of hacker thinking that an average person is NEVER going to master.
RWR: beep-beep!
RWR: ring-ring-ring-ring!
Pilot: engaged defensive!
Bitchin' Betty: jammer!
Bitchin' Betty: chaff-flare! chaff-flare!
RWR: ring-ring-ring-ring!
RWR: (quiet)
No yuo! E-mail should be used only for collaboration. Documents belong on a file server or some kind of a Web based document management system.
How big is your mail store? How long does it take to backup? How long would it take to restore in case of a failure? Half a day? I'm guessing that 95% of your mail store are file attachments that shouldn't even be there...
How do you share those documents with others? Forward them via e-mail of course. Thus compounding your document versioning problem, and increasing the mail store size. (Single instance storage can only do so much.)
They are probably afraid of getting customer support calls from people who used that option to "see what it did", or from people who changed their mind and wanted their data recovered, or folks who thought that MS didn't really mean it when they said (with a huge red bold and blinking disclaimer no less) that all data would be erased. Ahd then they'd sue MS, OEM, and CompUSA for the emotional distress caused by the loss of their data.
Event Type: Information
Event Source: EventLog
Event Category: None
Event ID: 6013
Date: 2/4/2005
Time: 12:00:00 PM
User: N/A
Computer: NOYUO!
Description:
The system uptime is 14221937 seconds.
That's about 164 days. Last time I got a virus or spyware or malware or anything else even remotely malicious, was in 1991. I was a college kid and ignorant of the matters of computer security. I infected all my 5.25" floppies with the Michelangelo virus.
As for the never ending flaws... Every OS has flaws! How often is Apple patching OS X? (I have a 12" PowerBook BTW.) About every month? The MS's patching cycle is also a month! Linux, and various Linux components are being patched constantly. This has nothing to do with the number or severity of the flaws, because they are everywhere.
Windows flaws are being exploited a lot more because it is (drumroll) the most prolific desktop OS being used by computer-skill- challenged people all over the World! But you knew this already.
Writing secure code is hard. A function coded in, say, C++ may look perfectly sound when the source code is analyzed. But once compiled, and made a part of a much larger app, it may exhibit faulty behavior that can be exploited to inject arbitrary code into the application. This happens all the time, to MS, to open source programmers, to Apple, hell serious flaws have just been found in Oracle DB software.
Firefox has had a number of VERY serious flaws that could have been used to exploit computers, but haven't. Because no one would bother due to the fact that IE is a lot more popular. And the fact that people running alternative browsers are usually more savvy and would know what to do to keep their boxes secure. And it is my belief that another often overlooked reason exists. People who are doing the exploiting, hackers if you wish, are themselves fans of the open source software, namely Linux and OSS browsers and office apps. They don't WANT to exploit their precioussss.
Keep a Windows box patched, get a firewall, install an AV program, don't install "free" programs that you've downloaded off P2P networks or warez sites, and don't muck with your IE security settings unless you know exactly what you are doing. I routinely use IE to visit sites that are chock full of malware (cough pr0n, cough) and have never gotten IE exploited by anyone. Ever. Read that again, for best effect.
And for heaven's sake, log in as a User, not as an Administrator. Would you use a Linux box while logged in as root all the time? I didn't think so! Most home Windows users should not even have any sort of admin access to their machine. They wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. They should find someone who's computer savvy, in their family or circle of friends, and have them admin the computer.
It comes down to this. If you know what you are doing, you can keep your box safe regardless of the OS. Most Windows users are newbs who don't know what the F (shut yo' mouth!) they are doing so they get hacked. It isn't OSs fault. What can MS do? Deny people the ability to make their user accounts Administrators? Lock down security and break a bunch of stuff? Force OS updates on everyone with no way to turn them off? They can't do that. Imagine the headlines and the lawsuits!
An "E-mail system used to communicate with the public" sounds like an Internet facing SMTP gateway. I can't be sure, obviously, but that's the most likely type of a system that got "breached". The really juicy stuff, the e-mail servers that host the mailboxes, would be on the internal network, and much better protected against hacks.
If an SMTP gateway was supposedly "breached", what could that entail? Somebody was able to relay through the server? Wooo, big deal! There are like a bazillion open relays out there. Or someone installed a trojan that allowed them to intercept the SMTP traffic? Again, it is not a big deal. The e-mail messages were sent to the public, and SMTP traffic being sent to the outside mail servers isn't encrypted or secure in any way anyhow. It can be intercepted, and e-mail can be read, at any upstream router.
This has been blown out of proportions, IMO.
The sail might pickup Tachyon particles and propel the solar ship to warp speed. Hell, it would probably warp all the way to Cardassia.