I'm pretty certain I've got enough under my belt to be a good SysAdmin, or HelpDesk Tech.. but no go here, either.. (This is Baltimore, MD area in the US).
Here's a hint for a fellow Slashdotter: if you know Solaris well (or are just a good general Unix admin), contact Jeffery Tunison, at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at JHU (tunison@pha.jhu.edu). He's looking for an full time assistant admin (and has been for some months). I'm working there right now, though I've only logged a few hours in the last 3 weeks, I've been so busy with final papers and whatnot. I'm not sure about the pay but it should be at least 8.75/hour, as that's what I'm getting.
Personally, as a college student (at JHU), I get jobs thrown at me (just here on campus, I've never had to go off). I've had 3 or 4 sysadmin offers in the last 2 months.
It's nice to see companies (like Be) using free software as part of their commercial product. Why? Because something that is implemented by free software is, by definition, not implementing a proprietary API. If Microsoft chose to use glibc 2.1 for the next Windows release (which is possible as glibc is LGPL), wouldn't that be good for everyone? MS would finally have a decent CRT (slam), and programmers would have an OPEN, PORTABLE API for programming on Windows. Everyone wins. Same thing for Be.
While I don't particularly like either Windows or BeOS, I do prefer Be as a company. They provide POSIX interfaces, and complete documentation for all their systems (and the source for components that are GPL/LGPL, unless they make a mistake as in this story). And one of their API functions is is_computer_on_fire(). Gotta love that.:)
I think people who switch back are not looking for Unix. When I installed Linux, that's exactly what I was looking for. The Unix philosophy is obviously not for everyone. I live and work Unix (I administer ~15 Linux and ~40 Solaris boxen), and I would never want anything else (well, at least if new OSes keep in the vein of other recent ones, like Windows, MacOS, and BeOS, none of which I like much).
Personally, for apps, I have what I want. LaTeX (replaces Office and PageMaker), Gimp (replaces every graphics program every created for Windows), XMMS (replaces WinAmp), GCC and/or KAI C++ (replaces Borland C++ & Visual C++). I have a Win98 partion that I keep around for the occasional time when I want to play games [mostly Freespace2], and that's about it.
I've got a CD-RW on the Linux box but have yet to successfully burn a CD on it.
CD burners under Linux seem to get really mixed reviews. I've seen lots of people say they've had problems with them and/or CD burning under Linux is "impossibly hard" or something like that, but OTOH I've never had a problem with it on either of my CD-R drives, and I know plenty of people who use them all the time and have never mentioned having problems.
Might just be the drives themselves (buggy drivers or something). I got a CD-R drive for Xmax (having never used one before), read the CD-Writing HOWTO, and was off burning CDs in no time.
Re:Stocks *have been* and will continue to be cove
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
·
· Score: 1
Almost every one of those dealt with a specific tech company (Cisco, MS, 3Com, USR, etc). The last 2 are Ask Slashdots, and IMO hardly count as being on slashdot proper. This is just "the market" in general, and hardly counts as being/. news in any way shape or form.
The problem is that if your setup is insecure, or you're untrustworthy, you're customers are screwed [and how do they know that either of these is not the case?]. I think almost any company is going to spend the money to get a Verisign cert. And of course there are the realities of finance - how are you going to pay for all the hardware and checking of credentials (very neccessary when issuing certs).
For personal use, PGP [or S/MIME, though I think it's pretty icky] seems far preferable to SSL based encryption. I honestly don't see where the demand is coming from.
So to the extent that corporations are a threat to our liberty, the answer is *still* to reduce the government to its constitutional limits. Once we do that, the power of Big Business will go away with it.
You're absolutely right. However, there are other concerns besides just corps using government power (examples of this being DMCA, the entire patent system, etc), but also the absolutley enourmous influence that the big media companies (Disney and Time-Warner/AOL coming to mind) wield. They can basically put whatever they want on the evening news, and most people will accept it at face value without thinking about the conflict of interest that is there. Also threatening litigation, etc: even if it's totally non-legit, they can really fuck with people who can't afford a team of top-flight lawyers.
ZDnet obviously isn't keeping up with the times much. Yeah, maybe people who don't play computer games at all read ZDnet, but if you haven't at least heard of Quake, you're probably not much interested in overclocking. And a good video card (+ good drivers) are what you really need for good gaming performance, anyway, not a somewhat faster CPU (assuming you don't have something ancient, ie Pentium 100 or something).
"Libertarians are used to fighting the government," he [Tim Berners-Lee] says, "and not corporations..."
That's because for a long time governments had the majority of power. Now that big corps can buy any law they want, they are the ones with the power. I don't see any big contradition in the change in focus. Personally, I'm not against govt or business, but I don't like that a small group of people (who are running the show) being able to threaten and bully others to get what they want.
From the article, this patent seems far nuttier than the 1-click patent:
technology allowing in-store customers to listen to parts of songs at a kiosk, or to hear the music through a computer, before deciding whether to buy.
That's crazy. Most decent record stores (ie, the cool independant ones) have let you do this forever. Here in Baltimore, you can go to the Record Garden and listen to full CDs, as many and as long as you want [not quite any CD though, only used ones or new ones that are popular enough to open up a copy for people to listen to, and no singles or sets. However, that's still many thousands of CDs].
In fact, this could be seen to cover MP3s. I'll often download some MP3s of a band before deciding if they're good enough to buy a CD of (now if only sTs would put out a CD!!!). Guess I should stop before I'm sued for patent infringment.
Can anyone tell me why RH (and most other distros) still ship with only sendmail? I can understand that it's useful on big sites, but it would be nice if something a little smaller and more secure (like qmail) was available in the distro.
install the re-freed Tripwire (or a clone)
Are there any free (aka GPL or BSD licensed) Tripwire (or clone) versions out there [I hadn't heard that Tripwire was in any way free...]? I was thinking about doing a BSD licensed version for fun sometime this summer, but if they already exist I'm not sure if I should bother.
encrypt all but your boot partition using Serpent
Or if you've got the cash, buy a card that encrypts the stuff in hardware.:) Hmmm... A UW2 SCSI card that encrypted everything going in and out of any particular device(s) (configurable so you could read unencrypted CD-ROMs, etc) with 3DES or Serpent would rock (the onboard BIOS prompts you for a passphrase at boot time, hashes it and uses it as a key). Wonder if you can get something like that... [fires up Google]
These bars - which have mocha chocolate flavoring with almond butter, almond pieces, currants and vegetable oil - contain a total of 600 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of about six cups of coffee.
Were can I get some of these?!?!:P
Seriously, this sound pretty cool. I think you'd still feel hungry (as the body isn't adapted to taking food through the skin and the stomach just knows that it's empty), but it's a damn good idea. I wonder how it will get along in the general civilian market. Well, I guess I'll still be around in 2025 (though I will be an old fart [note that I consider anyone over 40 an old fart, nothing personal anyone:P]), too see the new fashion craze kick in - don't eat any food, subsist entirely on food patches.:)
Pardon my ignorance, but can you do that in NT, even portwise - or do you have to use a firewall.
Well, I'm not exactly the kind of person you want to ask for NT security, but I'm pretty sure it's possible. Though maybe not in Workstation (never really looked)? Most of the serious NT users I know run Server - maybe it comes with some firewalling capability? I should hope so, anyway...
And of course you can always unplug the network. Hey - then you have a C2 system.:P
Sounds fun. Hopefully it'll be as good (or better?) than the Wallace & Gromit films (we need to get more cheese!). I wonder if it'll be available in some format I can read, ie not Quicktime or AVI or... well what the hell else is left?!?!?! Guess I'll be putting that 98 partition to use when these come out...
The first doesn't affect Linux directly, but is still embarrasing. If you run Linux as a file server for Win32 machines, and a (usually macro) virus gets a decent foothold in the network, you rely on the Win32 virus checkers to fix it. But they can't (easily) clean it from the file server. The Linux boxes can quite happily continue serving infected files to clean Win32 boxes.
I'd agree with you that it's embarrasing, but it should be embarrasing to a large company that shall remain nameless that decided putting a full programming language into their document format was a good idea, not to any Linux user or vendor. But your idea seems reasonable - maybe some sort of plugin for Samba (I'm not sure if the architecture exists for something like that in Samba tho). I certainly wouldn't build it into the filesystem or the kernel, that's just nuts. Especially as something like that is bound to be a proprietary product.
The other problem is with binary-only kernel modules that allow connections from userland.
Good thing binary-only drivers are generally not used.
If even a tiny proportion of the trolls/mp3 warez lusers on this board learn some programming, we could all be in for a difficult time.
I'm really not that concerned. I won't bother with the usual arguments about users and permissions, the fact that a virus must exploit a root-shell getting vulnerability in order to do it's thing right, etc, as I'm sure you heard them before. And there is a fairly fast upgrade cycle among most OSS using people (ie, upgrade to the newest RH every 6 months, whatever). So there is a fairly limited window in order to get infected and spread it to others. Also most software comes from a few places (Distro FTP sites, rufus, metalab, tsx-11, etc), rather than (like the doze world) warez getting passed around on CD-Rs and suchlike.
Just because by default windows is setup unsecure, it doesnt mean it is an unsecure os.
First off, I'll assume you mean NT/2000 by Windows (vs 3.x/95/98/Millenium/CE/whatever), as otherwise you're just totally insane. But it seems to me that it's a lot harder to lock down an NT box than a similiar Linux box (I haven't used *BSD/Solaris/Other enough to comment on them). Yes, NT can be made secure (easy, drop all packets coming from all hosts (or only allow from certain hosts)) - and in fact I know people with machines set up like that. But setting up a sane security policy seems damned hard in NT. Admittadly I don't use it that often and haven't had much experience with it, but I found *nix permissions, tcpd, etc much more 'logical' than NT's setup, even back when I was just starting *nix administration. Part of the problem may be lack of good documentation - I think you can get docs for MS online but c'mon, where are the HOWTOs (or NT equivalent therof)?
OTOH, a Linux distro like say Redhat is fairly easy to secure. Install any updates. Remove r* and telnet, install SSH. Set up Tripwire and a log analyzer and run them from cron. At this point you're probably OK.
If you're not extreeeeemly careful with sudo (maybe only allowing root access to a few programs like mount, etc), you're handing someone who knows what they're doing root.
First off, many programs provide shell escapes:
[lloyd@shirley lloyd]$ dc !/bin/sh bash$
and there are more where that came from. Give someone a root shell and all is lost (an easy "cp/bin/sh/bin/rootshell; chmod 4755/bin/rootshell" and they have root). Also, this means they can't install their own software - else they could replace the NFS server and related stuff with trojaned copies. That means more maintenance in most cases.
Also, if the people are techie types they will tend to get pissed off if you take away root on their personal machines. And unless you take care to lock down every machine very tight, they'll do things like booting into single user mode, use boot disks, etc.
Personally I don't see the need for this at all, unless it's common for people to go from one office to the other editing files on their home machines. Just a big PITA (Pain In The Ass). If you happen to be on someone else's machine, ssh to your own.
Don't be ridiculous. Not only is the Enigma keyspace very small by modern standards (I don't see how it could possibly exceed 2**32 or even 2**24 keys...), but the algorithm is also very weak (by modern standards). The Enigma was broken in the 40s using lots of ciphertext and "guessed" plaintext (ie cribs). Any algorithm used today would be considered broken if the same were possible on them. Some can withstand attacks using 2**128 known plaintext/ciphertext pairs... Enigma is interesting historically, and even technologically (to see what the Allies had to do to break it, etc), but it's not something that useful today.
If a company patented such a technique there seems to be no reason they couldn't make money on it.
Of course. But if such company had a technique which was actually insecure (or at best no more secure than any other commonly available scheme), then claimed it had, in fact, was so secure that it was impossible to break, would that be very responsible? That's just what TriStrata did.
When will people figure out you can't make money from crypto anymore (at least not the kind TriStrata tried to sell)? Sure, RSADSI did, but that's because they had a monopoly on public key crypto. Yeah, people will make money selling PGP, B-SAFE, and what-have-you, but it won't be because you have technology the other guy doesn't. Because all of it is in the public domain. Nobody uses IDEA (except for PGP, and I think most people would agree that was a mistake on PRZ's part). Why? Because it's patented and good alternatives exist. And that is the case for basically everything cryptographically related now (with the exception of some protocols like digital cash, and RSA, which is public domain in September).
And anyway, even the digicash stuff, RSA, IDEA, whatever, is peer reviewed. TriStrata refused to release any real details about their scheme. And in crypto, that's about equivalent to admitting "it's insecure".
the land to the south of narnia (cant remember the name) was said to be barbaric and evil, in book 5 (?) "the horse and his boy" we see that this southern land has very Turkish or Arabic customs/clothing.
IIRC it was Calorem or Calanorem or something like that (I should reread those sometime). You also see quite a bit of their culture/language/etc in the last book, which I can't recall the name of at the moment. The one where they invade Narnia...
I wish PBS would show those old Narnia movies again. I remember seeing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair (presumably they also did Prince Caspian but I never saw it). I really liked them, they were very well done.
I've actually been looking at this today, for a DSL line to share between myself and some other people I'm sharing a house with.
According the the people I've asked, and web sites I've looked at, no Linux drivers exist for these cards. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The older cards are 1 mbit/sec, which is pretty pitiful. The new version (I think it's called HomePNA 2) theoretically runs at 10 mbit/sec, but I don't know about real-world performance. You might want to check homepna.org and/or homepna.com for more info. Good luck!
maybe wiring CAT5 into every room of every house, same as electricty and phone?).
Why not? Does this sound so laughable to you?
No, it sounds like a damn good idea. But a lot of people just aren't getting it yet. I (along with 3 other people) are going to be leasing a house starting May 1. It was just rebuilt from scratch. Is there CAT5 installed? No. Is there conduit so we can easily put it in? No. It's very very frustrating. We're looking at HomePNA stuff but I'm not sure if any of it works with Linux. I may end up having to get a seperate DSL line from the other 3. It's just a big pain in the ass. Arrrghh!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty certain I've got enough under my belt to be a good SysAdmin, or HelpDesk Tech.. but no go here, either.. (This is Baltimore, MD area in the US).
Here's a hint for a fellow Slashdotter: if you know Solaris well (or are just a good general Unix admin), contact Jeffery Tunison, at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at JHU (tunison@pha.jhu.edu). He's looking for an full time assistant admin (and has been for some months). I'm working there right now, though I've only logged a few hours in the last 3 weeks, I've been so busy with final papers and whatnot. I'm not sure about the pay but it should be at least 8.75/hour, as that's what I'm getting.
Personally, as a college student (at JHU), I get jobs thrown at me (just here on campus, I've never had to go off). I've had 3 or 4 sysadmin offers in the last 2 months.
It's nice to see companies (like Be) using free software as part of their commercial product. Why? Because something that is implemented by free software is, by definition, not implementing a proprietary API. If Microsoft chose to use glibc 2.1 for the next Windows release (which is possible as glibc is LGPL), wouldn't that be good for everyone? MS would finally have a decent CRT (slam), and programmers would have an OPEN, PORTABLE API for programming on Windows. Everyone wins. Same thing for Be.
:)
While I don't particularly like either Windows or BeOS, I do prefer Be as a company. They provide POSIX interfaces, and complete documentation for all their systems (and the source for components that are GPL/LGPL, unless they make a mistake as in this story). And one of their API functions is is_computer_on_fire(). Gotta love that.
How do you feel about the recent commercial interest in free software? Do you care? Is it good/bad? Why?
I think people who switch back are not looking for Unix. When I installed Linux, that's exactly what I was looking for. The Unix philosophy is obviously not for everyone. I live and work Unix (I administer ~15 Linux and ~40 Solaris boxen), and I would never want anything else (well, at least if new OSes keep in the vein of other recent ones, like Windows, MacOS, and BeOS, none of which I like much).
Personally, for apps, I have what I want. LaTeX (replaces Office and PageMaker), Gimp (replaces every graphics program every created for Windows), XMMS (replaces WinAmp), GCC and/or KAI C++ (replaces Borland C++ & Visual C++). I have a Win98 partion that I keep around for the occasional time when I want to play games [mostly Freespace2], and that's about it.
I've got a CD-RW on the Linux box but have yet to successfully burn a CD on it.
CD burners under Linux seem to get really mixed reviews. I've seen lots of people say they've had problems with them and/or CD burning under Linux is "impossibly hard" or something like that, but OTOH I've never had a problem with it on either of my CD-R drives, and I know plenty of people who use them all the time and have never mentioned having problems.
Might just be the drives themselves (buggy drivers or something). I got a CD-R drive for Xmax (having never used one before), read the CD-Writing HOWTO, and was off burning CDs in no time.
Almost every one of those dealt with a specific tech company (Cisco, MS, 3Com, USR, etc). The last 2 are Ask Slashdots, and IMO hardly count as being on slashdot proper. This is just "the market" in general, and hardly counts as being /. news in any way shape or form.
The problem is that if your setup is insecure, or you're untrustworthy, you're customers are screwed [and how do they know that either of these is not the case?]. I think almost any company is going to spend the money to get a Verisign cert. And of course there are the realities of finance - how are you going to pay for all the hardware and checking of credentials (very neccessary when issuing certs).
For personal use, PGP [or S/MIME, though I think it's pretty icky] seems far preferable to SSL based encryption. I honestly don't see where the demand is coming from.
So to the extent that corporations are a threat to our liberty, the answer is *still* to reduce the government to its constitutional limits. Once we do that, the power of Big Business will go away with it.
:P
You're absolutely right. However, there are other concerns besides just corps using government power (examples of this being DMCA, the entire patent system, etc), but also the absolutley enourmous influence that the big media companies (Disney and Time-Warner/AOL coming to mind) wield. They can basically put whatever they want on the evening news, and most people will accept it at face value without thinking about the conflict of interest that is there. Also threatening litigation, etc: even if it's totally non-legit, they can really fuck with people who can't afford a team of top-flight lawyers.
Hmmm... I note that you are a fellow bit.
Games like "Doom" also are popular.
ZDnet obviously isn't keeping up with the times much. Yeah, maybe people who don't play computer games at all read ZDnet, but if you haven't at least heard of Quake, you're probably not much interested in overclocking. And a good video card (+ good drivers) are what you really need for good gaming performance, anyway, not a somewhat faster CPU (assuming you don't have something ancient, ie Pentium 100 or something).
"Libertarians are used to fighting the government," he [Tim Berners-Lee] says, "and not corporations ..."
That's because for a long time governments had the majority of power. Now that big corps can buy any law they want, they are the ones with the power. I don't see any big contradition in the change in focus. Personally, I'm not against govt or business, but I don't like that a small group of people (who are running the show) being able to threaten and bully others to get what they want.
From the article, this patent seems far nuttier than the 1-click patent:
technology allowing in-store customers to listen to parts of songs at a kiosk, or to hear the music through a computer, before deciding whether to buy.
That's crazy. Most decent record stores (ie, the cool independant ones) have let you do this forever. Here in Baltimore, you can go to the Record Garden and listen to full CDs, as many and as long as you want [not quite any CD though, only used ones or new ones that are popular enough to open up a copy for people to listen to, and no singles or sets. However, that's still many thousands of CDs].
In fact, this could be seen to cover MP3s. I'll often download some MP3s of a band before deciding if they're good enough to buy a CD of (now if only sTs would put out a CD!!!). Guess I should stop before I'm sued for patent infringment.
Postfix as a drop-in Sendmail
:) Hmmm... A UW2 SCSI card that encrypted everything going in and out of any particular device(s) (configurable so you could read unencrypted CD-ROMs, etc) with 3DES or Serpent would rock (the onboard BIOS prompts you for a passphrase at boot time, hashes it and uses it as a key). Wonder if you can get something like that... [fires up Google]
Can anyone tell me why RH (and most other distros) still ship with only sendmail? I can understand that it's useful on big sites, but it would be nice if something a little smaller and more secure (like qmail) was available in the distro.
install the re-freed Tripwire (or a clone)
Are there any free (aka GPL or BSD licensed) Tripwire (or clone) versions out there [I hadn't heard that Tripwire was in any way free...]? I was thinking about doing a BSD licensed version for fun sometime this summer, but if they already exist I'm not sure if I should bother.
encrypt all but your boot partition using Serpent
Or if you've got the cash, buy a card that encrypts the stuff in hardware.
These bars - which have mocha chocolate flavoring with almond butter, almond pieces, currants and vegetable oil - contain a total of 600 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of about six cups of coffee.
:P
:P]), too see the new fashion craze kick in - don't eat any food, subsist entirely on food patches. :)
Were can I get some of these?!?!
Seriously, this sound pretty cool. I think you'd still feel hungry (as the body isn't adapted to taking food through the skin and the stomach just knows that it's empty), but it's a damn good idea. I wonder how it will get along in the general civilian market. Well, I guess I'll still be around in 2025 (though I will be an old fart [note that I consider anyone over 40 an old fart, nothing personal anyone
Pardon my ignorance, but can you do that in NT, even portwise - or do you have to use a firewall.
:P
Well, I'm not exactly the kind of person you want to ask for NT security, but I'm pretty sure it's possible. Though maybe not in Workstation (never really looked)? Most of the serious NT users I know run Server - maybe it comes with some firewalling capability? I should hope so, anyway...
And of course you can always unplug the network. Hey - then you have a C2 system.
Sounds fun. Hopefully it'll be as good (or better?) than the Wallace & Gromit films (we need to get more cheese!). I wonder if it'll be available in some format I can read, ie not Quicktime or AVI or... well what the hell else is left?!?!?! Guess I'll be putting that 98 partition to use when these come out...
The first doesn't affect Linux directly, but is still embarrasing. If you run Linux as a file server for Win32 machines, and a (usually macro) virus gets a decent foothold in the network, you rely on the Win32 virus checkers to fix it. But they can't (easily) clean it from the file server. The Linux boxes can quite happily continue serving infected files to clean Win32 boxes.
I'd agree with you that it's embarrasing, but it should be embarrasing to a large company that shall remain nameless that decided putting a full programming language into their document format was a good idea, not to any Linux user or vendor. But your idea seems reasonable - maybe some sort of plugin for Samba (I'm not sure if the architecture exists for something like that in Samba tho). I certainly wouldn't build it into the filesystem or the kernel, that's just nuts. Especially as something like that is bound to be a proprietary product.
The other problem is with binary-only kernel modules that allow connections from userland.
Good thing binary-only drivers are generally not used.
If even a tiny proportion of the trolls/mp3 warez lusers on this board learn some programming, we could all be in for a difficult time.
I'm really not that concerned. I won't bother with the usual arguments about users and permissions, the fact that a virus must exploit a root-shell getting vulnerability in order to do it's thing right, etc, as I'm sure you heard them before. And there is a fairly fast upgrade cycle among most OSS using people (ie, upgrade to the newest RH every 6 months, whatever). So there is a fairly limited window in order to get infected and spread it to others. Also most software comes from a few places (Distro FTP sites, rufus, metalab, tsx-11, etc), rather than (like the doze world) warez getting passed around on CD-Rs and suchlike.
Just because by default windows is setup unsecure, it doesnt mean it is an unsecure os.
First off, I'll assume you mean NT/2000 by Windows (vs 3.x/95/98/Millenium/CE/whatever), as otherwise you're just totally insane. But it seems to me that it's a lot harder to lock down an NT box than a similiar Linux box (I haven't used *BSD/Solaris/Other enough to comment on them). Yes, NT can be made secure (easy, drop all packets coming from all hosts (or only allow from certain hosts)) - and in fact I know people with machines set up like that. But setting up a sane security policy seems damned hard in NT. Admittadly I don't use it that often and haven't had much experience with it, but I found *nix permissions, tcpd, etc much more 'logical' than NT's setup, even back when I was just starting *nix administration. Part of the problem may be lack of good documentation - I think you can get docs for MS online but c'mon, where are the HOWTOs (or NT equivalent therof)?
OTOH, a Linux distro like say Redhat is fairly easy to secure. Install any updates. Remove r* and telnet, install SSH. Set up Tripwire and a log analyzer and run them from cron. At this point you're probably OK.
And just to prove the point of how careful you have to be, 'mount' isn't safe. You could create and mount a filesystem with a suid shell on it...
:)
Ahhh... very nice. I didn't think of that.
If you're not extreeeeemly careful with sudo (maybe only allowing root access to a few programs like mount, etc), you're handing someone who knows what they're doing root.
/bin/sh /bin/rootshell; chmod 4755 /bin/rootshell" and they have root). Also, this means they can't install their own software - else they could replace the NFS server and related stuff with trojaned copies. That means more maintenance in most cases.
First off, many programs provide shell escapes:
[lloyd@shirley lloyd]$ dc
!/bin/sh
bash$
and there are more where that came from. Give someone a root shell and all is lost (an easy "cp
Also, if the people are techie types they will tend to get pissed off if you take away root on their personal machines. And unless you take care to lock down every machine very tight, they'll do things like booting into single user mode, use boot disks, etc.
Personally I don't see the need for this at all, unless it's common for people to go from one office to the other editing files on their home machines. Just a big PITA (Pain In The Ass). If you happen to be on someone else's machine, ssh to your own.
Don't be ridiculous. Not only is the Enigma keyspace very small by modern standards (I don't see how it could possibly exceed 2**32 or even 2**24 keys...), but the algorithm is also very weak (by modern standards). The Enigma was broken in the 40s using lots of ciphertext and "guessed" plaintext (ie cribs). Any algorithm used today would be considered broken if the same were possible on them. Some can withstand attacks using 2**128 known plaintext/ciphertext pairs... Enigma is interesting historically, and even technologically (to see what the Allies had to do to break it, etc), but it's not something that useful today.
If a company patented such a technique there seems to be no reason they couldn't make money on it.
Of course. But if such company had a technique which was actually insecure (or at best no more secure than any other commonly available scheme), then claimed it had, in fact, was so secure that it was impossible to break, would that be very responsible? That's just what TriStrata did.
When will people figure out you can't make money from crypto anymore (at least not the kind TriStrata tried to sell)? Sure, RSADSI did, but that's because they had a monopoly on public key crypto. Yeah, people will make money selling PGP, B-SAFE, and what-have-you, but it won't be because you have technology the other guy doesn't. Because all of it is in the public domain. Nobody uses IDEA (except for PGP, and I think most people would agree that was a mistake on PRZ's part). Why? Because it's patented and good alternatives exist. And that is the case for basically everything cryptographically related now (with the exception of some protocols like digital cash, and RSA, which is public domain in September).
And anyway, even the digicash stuff, RSA, IDEA, whatever, is peer reviewed. TriStrata refused to release any real details about their scheme. And in crypto, that's about equivalent to admitting "it's insecure".
the land to the south of narnia (cant remember the name) was said to be barbaric and evil, in book 5 (?) "the horse and his boy" we see that this southern land has very Turkish or Arabic customs/clothing.
IIRC it was Calorem or Calanorem or something like that (I should reread those sometime). You also see quite a bit of their culture/language/etc in the last book, which I can't recall the name of at the moment. The one where they invade Narnia...
I wish PBS would show those old Narnia movies again. I remember seeing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair (presumably they also did Prince Caspian but I never saw it). I really liked them, they were very well done.
I've actually been looking at this today, for a DSL line to share between myself and some other people I'm sharing a house with.
According the the people I've asked, and web sites I've looked at, no Linux drivers exist for these cards. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The older cards are 1 mbit/sec, which is pretty pitiful. The new version (I think it's called HomePNA 2) theoretically runs at 10 mbit/sec, but I don't know about real-world performance. You might want to check homepna.org and/or homepna.com for more info. Good luck!
maybe wiring CAT5 into every room of every house, same as electricty and phone?).
Why not? Does this sound so laughable to you?
No, it sounds like a damn good idea. But a lot of people just aren't getting it yet. I (along with 3 other people) are going to be leasing a house starting May 1. It was just rebuilt from scratch. Is there CAT5 installed? No. Is there conduit so we can easily put it in? No. It's very very frustrating. We're looking at HomePNA stuff but I'm not sure if any of it works with Linux. I may end up having to get a seperate DSL line from the other 3. It's just a big pain in the ass. Arrrghh!!!