true but if use of noscript in that way becomes common things will just have to be changed to include the ad servers javascript serverside rather than clientside. That would make the security situation even worse.
Of course good old fassioned copper phone lines are really insecure, anyone can climb up a telephone pole, open up the junction box and add a tap cable.
over in the UK at least it's fairly easy to switch to another company for phone services. It depends on what you mean by switch, unless you go with virgin media and live in a cabled area your traffic will all be going through a BT openreach copper pair to your house. Also until recently almost all DSL was provided through BTs DSL backend network (this has now started to change with some of the bigger providers colocating thier own equipment in BT exchanges) which has a fee structure that made offering true unlimited service virtually impossible.
IE is buggy and and insecure. not that firefox is much better, iirc there are loads of reproducable crash bugs that aren't investigated because they don't affect enough users. I wonder how many of those would turn out to be worse than just crash bugs when investigated properly.
noscript may help a little but most users are just going to disable it for any site they want to visit that doesn't work properly without scripting.
either they are making money or they aren't. things get a little more complicated when you add loan interest to the expenses.
It is not at all unusual to find a buisness who can afford to pay thier operating costs but have ended up sufficiantly far in debt that the debt pulls thier overall balance below breakeven. If things don't improve then the company will end up in chapter 11. Of course the lenders know this and will charge a high rate of interest on any new loans.
Who do you trust more to make sound, rational economic decisions--a bunch of self-interested, economically motivated lenders, or, omfg, the United States Congress? They are optimising for different things, a private lender is trying to make thier expected rate of return (rougly demanded return*chance of actually getting paid) is high enough for them to make a profit. A government should be trying to improve the stablity of the system as a whole.
Unless you go looking at the list of environment variables (something that most people only do occasionally afaict, probablly far less often than you use su) you won't notice something new on the start of your path and I very much doubt you will notice a binary sitting in some deep subdir under your homedir or even somewhere under/tmp .
for menu based stuff it is even easier, are you really going to notice a couple of menu item customisations?
I define patent trolling as buying dubious patents (usually from bankrupcy auctions) with no intention of actually producing anything from them soley for the purpose of getting settlements out of those using them who want to avoid a long costly legal battle.
IBMs patent seems to be more about running a patent protection racket.
my understanding is that you get taken to a page that tries a bank of browser exploits (I don't know if they are all for IE or if there are some FF ones in there too) until one works. If they all fail then it tells the user to download and run an exe.
and the virus doesn't wait for them to legitimately type in their password and then sneak in on the 5-minute timer that sudo has It has always seemed to me that it would be pretty trivial for malware to hijack a users use of su/sudo/gksu/similar. The easiest way would be to modify the users bash profile and desktop menus so that instead of running the real elevation tool the users ran a program supplied by the malware. This program would then use the information it gathered to do both what the user wanted and what the malware wanted.
I don't know, I assume some of them do. I know most firewalls are configured to allow outbound by default, but I would assume some of them don't - or can be configured not to, so it would depend on the distro to set the default. Blocking outbound by default would make a distro practically unusuable for anyone who didn't understand firewall configuration.
Huh? According to Microsoft they security updates to pirated versions of Windows. they do kind of.
If you want to run pirate windows without getting nags and you don't have access to a good (as in allocated by MS and not shitlisted because of wide distribution) corp key you have to either crack windows genunine advantage notifications or keep it off your system. Cracking it has the downside that MS could release an update at any time.
There are two easy ways to keep windows genuine advantage notifications off your system.
1: set automatic update to prompt before installing updates and manually check the list for wga every time (you can reject it but it reappears every so often). This is probablly tolerable if it is your own machine but if you give it to someone else to use then it's not such a good idea. 2: disable automatic updates completely.
Anyone else think that the rather lax enforcement of Windows piracy is helping to create the possibility of massive botnets? IMO anti piracy measures are contributing to insecurity. The fact is that such measures WILL be cracked and those using cracked versions will be reluctant to install updates both from the point of view of MS possibly breaking thier system (I don't think WGA actually disables your system on XP but it does give annoying nag messages they could change it to be nastier at any time, sure you don't have to install WGA to get important updates but MS repeatedly put it back in the critical updates list every time they update it so it only takes one slip to end up with it installed) and from the point of view of possiblly giving away to MS that they are pirates to be hunted down (afaict MS hasn't actually done this yet but after the recent filesharing lawsuits I wouldn't blame people for being paraniod about it).
Anti piracy measures probablly do stop some piracy but they also mean a lot of people stick to older versions/non updated copies of pirate software to make sure they don't have problems (whether technical or legal).
First, yes, there may be special circumstances. I can see that this argument, in abstracto, might justify the manufacture of, say, a few hundred of the devices, around the globe, to deal with the situation of rogue gunsmiths as it arose. I think you would find more "rouge gunsmiths" than a few hundred guns could deal with.
But second, how does one use a gun to 'subdue' someone? normally the mere threat of pointing a number of loaded guns at someone is sufficiant to make them comply. If that fails shooting them in the legs or arms will probablly get them down.
Talking to people is a traditional alternative first recourse, and works much better if the people you are talking to don't think you are just trying to buy time before you shoot them. Why would a criminal talk to the cops if he belives he can overpower them and get away?
it sounds suspiciously as if you are agreeing with me: that more guns (and thus more use of force) generally means worse government. Is it really such a big step to the notion that such groups should, therefore, be prevented from having guns in the first place? IMO for the most part a stable government is better than frequent revoloutions or anarchy. The way you get a stable governement is by setting things up so to governement has more force at it's disposal than anyone else. Given that outlaws will manage to source guns (by smuggling if nessacery) the government must have guns that are as good or better.
I do think though that you americans have gone a bit far with guns, allowing normal citizens to have handguns and even to get a license to hide them is not the most sensible idea IMO.
It's unimaginable to me that we don't just imprison people who make or purchase firearms. Who wants to be shot? What else is a gun good for? How would you imprison the people who make and purchase firearms if you have no firearms of your own to subdue them and force them into prison.
If the organisation currently in control of a country (the government) gave up it's weapons they would just be overthrown by another organisation that kept theirs. Do you really belive that the new government would be as nice as your current one (yes the governments of western europen nations do have thier flaws but in general they manage to create a much nicer situation for thier citizenry than most recently formed dictatorships).
95/98/ME are all a different code base with different versioning. For the most part the versionings are paralell, versions from the two lines with similar version numberings have a similar user interface and were released at a similar time. When you query for version number there are seperate values returned for the version number and whether the system is NT line or not.
Your version numbers are also wrong.
the following is how I understand the mapping of names to versions
3.0->3.0 3.1->3.1 NT 3.1->NT 3.1 3.11->3.11 NT 3.51->NT 2.51 95->4.0 NT 4.0->NT 4.0 98->4.1 ME->4.2 (not sure on this one) 2K->NT 5.0 XP->NT 5.1 Vista-> NT 6
I wouldnt have said loosly but I agree that they are not the same.. Is that why OSX has only now gained the true UNIX certification rather than always conforming? Afiact OS-X got the unix certification because apple decided the easiest way out of the mess they had got in by calling it unix without it being certified as such was to make whatever minor changes were required for compliance and get it certified.
you can't have a shadowed volume on XP, you can access them (including previous versions) from it but you can't have them on it. The volumes must be hosted on server 2003 or above.
debian is a solid distro, thier longish release cycles are an issue for those needing to install on new hardware but are great for those who want to set up machines and not bother too much about them. Thier QA is generally very good upgrades from one release to the next generally go very well and the forums are populated by people with a clue. While they do have political problems development goes on forward and shows no sign of stopping.
debian had a bad cycle at just the wrong time, just as things regarding video hardware detection and other installation factors were improving in linux in general debian was stuck in it's longest release cycle ever (nearly 3 years).
At work, I run Windows most of the time, due to having to run a few Windows apps almost all the time -- yet I do still actually have a good reason for virtualizing it, as soon as I get around to it. btw MS has done something rather sneaky with vista and virtualisation, if you want to use KMS activation (which is an easier option for large deploments than MAK activation because individual machines don't have to contact MS and there is no need to request limit increases on your key) then you have to have at least 25 machines running vista direct on the hardware.
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true but if use of noscript in that way becomes common things will just have to be changed to include the ad servers javascript serverside rather than clientside. That would make the security situation even worse.
Of course good old fassioned copper phone lines are really insecure, anyone can climb up a telephone pole, open up the junction box and add a tap cable.
over in the UK at least it's fairly easy to switch to another company for phone services.
It depends on what you mean by switch, unless you go with virgin media and live in a cabled area your traffic will all be going through a BT openreach copper pair to your house. Also until recently almost all DSL was provided through BTs DSL backend network (this has now started to change with some of the bigger providers colocating thier own equipment in BT exchanges) which has a fee structure that made offering true unlimited service virtually impossible.
IE is buggy and and insecure.
not that firefox is much better, iirc there are loads of reproducable crash bugs that aren't investigated because they don't affect enough users. I wonder how many of those would turn out to be worse than just crash bugs when investigated properly.
noscript may help a little but most users are just going to disable it for any site they want to visit that doesn't work properly without scripting.
either they are making money or they aren't.
things get a little more complicated when you add loan interest to the expenses.
It is not at all unusual to find a buisness who can afford to pay thier operating costs but have ended up sufficiantly far in debt that the debt pulls thier overall balance below breakeven. If things don't improve then the company will end up in chapter 11. Of course the lenders know this and will charge a high rate of interest on any new loans.
Who do you trust more to make sound, rational economic decisions--a bunch of self-interested, economically motivated lenders, or, omfg, the United States Congress?
They are optimising for different things, a private lender is trying to make thier expected rate of return (rougly demanded return*chance of actually getting paid) is high enough for them to make a profit. A government should be trying to improve the stablity of the system as a whole.
Unless you go looking at the list of environment variables (something that most people only do occasionally afaict, probablly far less often than you use su) you won't notice something new on the start of your path and I very much doubt you will notice a binary sitting in some deep subdir under your homedir or even somewhere under /tmp .
for menu based stuff it is even easier, are you really going to notice a couple of menu item customisations?
I define patent trolling as buying dubious patents (usually from bankrupcy auctions) with no intention of actually producing anything from them soley for the purpose of getting settlements out of those using them who want to avoid a long costly legal battle.
IBMs patent seems to be more about running a patent protection racket.
my understanding is that you get taken to a page that tries a bank of browser exploits (I don't know if they are all for IE or if there are some FF ones in there too) until one works. If they all fail then it tells the user to download and run an exe.
and the virus doesn't wait for them to legitimately type in their password and then sneak in on the 5-minute timer that sudo has
It has always seemed to me that it would be pretty trivial for malware to hijack a users use of su/sudo/gksu/similar. The easiest way would be to modify the users bash profile and desktop menus so that instead of running the real elevation tool the users ran a program supplied by the malware. This program would then use the information it gathered to do both what the user wanted and what the malware wanted.
I don't know, I assume some of them do. I know most firewalls are configured to allow outbound by default, but I would assume some of them don't - or can be configured not to, so it would depend on the distro to set the default.
Blocking outbound by default would make a distro practically unusuable for anyone who didn't understand firewall configuration.
Huh? According to Microsoft they security updates to pirated versions of Windows.
they do kind of.
If you want to run pirate windows without getting nags and you don't have access to a good (as in allocated by MS and not shitlisted because of wide distribution) corp key you have to either crack windows genunine advantage notifications or keep it off your system. Cracking it has the downside that MS could release an update at any time.
There are two easy ways to keep windows genuine advantage notifications off your system.
1: set automatic update to prompt before installing updates and manually check the list for wga every time (you can reject it but it reappears every so often). This is probablly tolerable if it is your own machine but if you give it to someone else to use then it's not such a good idea.
2: disable automatic updates completely.
Anyone else think that the rather lax enforcement of Windows piracy is helping to create the possibility of massive botnets?
IMO anti piracy measures are contributing to insecurity. The fact is that such measures WILL be cracked and those using cracked versions will be reluctant to install updates both from the point of view of MS possibly breaking thier system (I don't think WGA actually disables your system on XP but it does give annoying nag messages they could change it to be nastier at any time, sure you don't have to install WGA to get important updates but MS repeatedly put it back in the critical updates list every time they update it so it only takes one slip to end up with it installed) and from the point of view of possiblly giving away to MS that they are pirates to be hunted down (afaict MS hasn't actually done this yet but after the recent filesharing lawsuits I wouldn't blame people for being paraniod about it).
Anti piracy measures probablly do stop some piracy but they also mean a lot of people stick to older versions/non updated copies of pirate software to make sure they don't have problems (whether technical or legal).
gizmo is just a client for the sipphone service which can be used with any sip supporting equipment afaict.
that is why a truely effective patent troll makes sure that patent trolling is thier only buisness.
First, yes, there may be special circumstances. I can see that this argument, in abstracto, might justify the manufacture of, say, a few hundred of the devices, around the globe, to deal with the situation of rogue gunsmiths as it arose.
I think you would find more "rouge gunsmiths" than a few hundred guns could deal with.
But second, how does one use a gun to 'subdue' someone?
normally the mere threat of pointing a number of loaded guns at someone is sufficiant to make them comply. If that fails shooting them in the legs or arms will probablly get them down.
Talking to people is a traditional alternative first recourse, and works much better if the people you are talking to don't think you are just trying to buy time before you shoot them.
Why would a criminal talk to the cops if he belives he can overpower them and get away?
it sounds suspiciously as if you are agreeing with me: that more guns (and thus more use of force) generally means worse government. Is it really such a big step to the notion that such groups should, therefore, be prevented from having guns in the first place?
IMO for the most part a stable government is better than frequent revoloutions or anarchy. The way you get a stable governement is by setting things up so to governement has more force at it's disposal than anyone else. Given that outlaws will manage to source guns (by smuggling if nessacery) the government must have guns that are as good or better.
I do think though that you americans have gone a bit far with guns, allowing normal citizens to have handguns and even to get a license to hide them is not the most sensible idea IMO.
I don't think they changed the version number for 98 second edition though i'm not positive.
It's unimaginable to me that we don't just imprison people who make or purchase firearms. Who wants to be shot? What else is a gun good for?
How would you imprison the people who make and purchase firearms if you have no firearms of your own to subdue them and force them into prison.
If the organisation currently in control of a country (the government) gave up it's weapons they would just be overthrown by another organisation that kept theirs. Do you really belive that the new government would be as nice as your current one (yes the governments of western europen nations do have thier flaws but in general they manage to create a much nicer situation for thier citizenry than most recently formed dictatorships).
95/98/ME are all a different code base with different versioning.
For the most part the versionings are paralell, versions from the two lines with similar version numberings have a similar user interface and were released at a similar time. When you query for version number there are seperate values returned for the version number and whether the system is NT line or not.
Your version numbers are also wrong.
the following is how I understand the mapping of names to versions
3.0->3.0
3.1->3.1
NT 3.1->NT 3.1
3.11->3.11
NT 3.51->NT 2.51
95->4.0
NT 4.0->NT 4.0
98->4.1
ME->4.2 (not sure on this one)
2K->NT 5.0
XP->NT 5.1
Vista-> NT 6
I wouldnt have said loosly but I agree that they are not the same.. Is that why OSX has only now gained the true UNIX certification rather than always conforming?
Afiact OS-X got the unix certification because apple decided the easiest way out of the mess they had got in by calling it unix without it being certified as such was to make whatever minor changes were required for compliance and get it certified.
at 128kbps I think you would fit most pop songs in a 5 megabyte attatchment. at 64kbps you would fit virtually all of them.
you can't have a shadowed volume on XP, you can access them (including previous versions) from it but you can't have them on it. The volumes must be hosted on server 2003 or above.
iirc you right click on a folder go to properties and there is a previous versions tab but it's a while since i've used it.
debian is a solid distro, thier longish release cycles are an issue for those needing to install on new hardware but are great for those who want to set up machines and not bother too much about them. Thier QA is generally very good upgrades from one release to the next generally go very well and the forums are populated by people with a clue. While they do have political problems development goes on forward and shows no sign of stopping.
debian had a bad cycle at just the wrong time, just as things regarding video hardware detection and other installation factors were improving in linux in general debian was stuck in it's longest release cycle ever (nearly 3 years).
At work, I run Windows most of the time, due to having to run a few Windows apps almost all the time -- yet I do still actually have a good reason for virtualizing it, as soon as I get around to it.
btw MS has done something rather sneaky with vista and virtualisation, if you want to use KMS activation (which is an easier option for large deploments than MAK activation because individual machines don't have to contact MS and there is no need to request limit increases on your key) then you have to have at least 25 machines running vista direct on the hardware.
That was a slight exageration, i'd heared the name and know they are somewhat rich and famous but I didn't know anything about their music style.