Such a "study" is merely a measurement of broadband penetration. There is no relevancy in grouping trojaned PCs per country, continent, or whatever, and not doing the same with the secured and uncompromised systems.
Maybe their next study is going to point out that the majority of torjaned systems run Windows XP?
How long is this still going to work? Everywhere around us we see the old-fashioned analog communication services being shut down and replaced by new digital systems with access control. Even in situations where there is no real need, encryption is used because it is easy in a digital system.
You are right. The way it should have been done is as an extension of the address space in such a way that a transparant gateway between the two spaces could be setup at any possible point. I.e. some router that can translate an IP packet like a NAT router does now, without keeping state of course.
A new client should be able to communicate with all existing IPv4 servers, a new server should communicate with all existing IPv4 clients, and new servers and new clients could use the extended address space.
As it is done now, with the only compatability being tunnels of IPv6 connections through IPv4 space, there is zero chance that it will ever be adopted on a credible scale. This is a serious design error, that probably was not seen by those who wanted to improve the world.
To them (the BSA) it doesn't matter if people in these countries can't afford to eat, as long as they and there bankrupt governments don't pirate their software!
Then they should start selling it to them for prices that are proportional to the local income.
When Office costs 10% of a month's income for an American, then so should it for someone in a developing country. Maybe they make less per copy, but the piracy would go down.
Yes, it would probably correct to claim that SCSI uses mature technology while ATA uses more modern but less proven technology.
Same here, I always use RAID and that is why I found that the RAID-1 in Linux does not perform optimally when the disks start to become flaky. After a single sector read error you need to resync the disks, risking that another sector is not readable on the remaining disk, while it would have been valid on the disk that is now the target of the copy.
But since then, the angular momentum of drives has decreased, and cache size has increased. Of course write speed has increased as well, but typical cache size of 8MB and write speed of 50MB/s would mean 160ms of continuous writing when the head already is positioned correctly. Assuming the cache can contain blocks scattered over the entire disk, it does not seem realistic to write everything back on power failure.
a report I had from a SCSI-using friend running BSD who reports that a 'remapping' message turned up in his syslog without needing any special action to invoke.
SCSI drives can be set up to return "warning" codes like "I had trouble reading this sector but eventually I could read a good copy". When the driver is careful it will enable this, and when it occurs it will write back the sector to make sure a fresh copy is on the disk and/or it is remapped. Apparently BSD does this.
By default, corrected sectors are just returned as OK. It is also possible to enable "auto remap on read" and the drive would be triggered to do the rewrite or remap by itself. Of course this means you have less control and less logging. (but you can read the remap tables)
There are many details that can improve error handling but not all of them are fully worked out. For example, in Linux RAID-1, when a read error occurs the action is to take the drive offline, read the sector from the other disk and continue with 1 disk. Of course the proper handling would be to try writing the correct copy from the good disk back on the failed disk, and see if that fixes it. Only after several failures the disk should be taken offline, assuming that it has crashed.
This has been like this for years, and is relatively easy to fix. I would be prepared to try fixing it but it seems one has to jump over many hurdles to get a fix in the kernel while not being the maintainer of the subsystem, and a mail to said person was not answered.
You must be talking about some locally specific powercord and generalize it to all PC power cords?
A reasonably designed power connection standard always makes sure that earth is connected first and disconnected last. I am sure our local standard does.
Often you can block zombie spam by setting up a mailserver that strictly verifies the SMTP protocol. Delay the welcome message a few seconds, then first send a 220- line and wait some more. Any input before the final 220(space) line: goodbye.
The organisation where I work was victim to a looping mail that is not even a virus. Someone at another organisation sent a mail to all members of some group, and included all the mail addresses in the To: headers. About 8 of the recepients, all running Exchange server, mysteriously started relaying the mails to all addresses again, of course causing a severe mail meltdown. We got thousands of copies of this mail, and it is still continuing at about 2 per minute. We are not the sender and do not run Exchange, so we could relatively easily block the mails. But the sender and the relayers are in real trouble, their ADSL lines are completely saturated. Of course they have no competent on-site system administration, so recovery will be slow.
M$ stuff can and will get you in trouble even without any virus.
Probably the next step will be to eliminate the testing of technical knowledge, claiming that it is no longer required because everyone uses commercial equipment, and brings it to the shop when broken. This has replaced the earlier home-brewing culture in amateur radio longer than more efficient methods have replaced morse code, so why wait?
Of course, lowering the bar to encourage more people to become a ham has some merit, but it also has serious disadvantages.
Compare to the microcomputer world. In the early eighties, to use a computer you would need some basic knowledge about how computers work. What is a processor, RAM memory, disk, etc. How do they work together to run a program, and how does data move through those. When networking appeared, you needed similar knowledge of that to operate it. Now, this is no longer required. You just unpack the box, plug it in, turn it on an start using something you don't understand at all. The result is that many people have inexplicable problems, lose their work, get infected with viruses and malware, etc.
It is quite similar to operating and modifying a transmitter without having any idea about its basic operation, the setup and tuning of an antenna, HF fields and their effect on the surroundings, etc.
But this is true for SD display on a double-scan TV as well. The "digital feature box" in the TV is supposed to combine the two fields into one single frame. This is usually referred to as "motion compensation" or some other nifty marketing term. This is what separates the cheap from the expensive TVs.
The tax is not for software writers, but for rightholders for music and video. So, nothing is supposed to go to Microsoft, at least until they buy some music distributor (like Sony did).
There has been some proposal to have a similar tax for software rights holders, but it should be remarked that the tax is a compensation for the fact that it is entirely legal (here) to copy a music CD for personal purposes. As it is not legal to copy software for personal purposes, there is nothing to compensate for.
I don't think you need to immigrate. The money is supposed to be distributed amongst authors (via publishers) depending on some vague distribution scheme. Similar to the system used with music: those who sell most are supposed to be copied most and get all the money.
The tax in fact is specificially for this situation.
You have to pay rights for every medium on which you listen. Just like you pay seperate rights to you cable company for the programmes that they transport to you so that you do not have to install your own aerial. You first pay the rights for the TV programmes directly (via income tax these days), then you pay again to the cable company which forwards this money to the rightholders because you watch via cable and not directly.
It is a silly situation but it has been confirmed correct by the Raad van State.
The tax does not even give you the right to copy any music to the player for which you had not paid rights before (like downloading from a P2P network). It is only for the transfer of legally downloaded or purchased music to the new medium.
Re:Some more info on this (I'm Dutch)
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Even worse: the mechanism of "compensation" for copying by means of a levy has become completely accepted in government circles.
First there was such a levy on compact cassettes and video tapes. In those days it could probably be claimed that most carriers were used to hold material for which rights had not been paid (although it remains a point of discussion whether you are allowed to record something from radio or tv transmissions for which you have presumably paid rights to listen or view).
But then it extended to carriers that are not only for music, like CD-R and DVD-R. Entire user groups use these for completely different purposes than are the goal of the levy, still they have to pay.
In the meantime you now also have to pay a levy on photocopiers. Every company in the Netherlands that owns a photocopier has to pay because some nitwit believes that photocopiers are used to copy books. We have many photocopiers where I work but I never see someone with a book. But piles and piles of internal documents are fed through the sheetfeeders and copied 20 times. The company pays a levy on each copy that would probably go to some novel author who never did anything to earn this money.
Don't forget that most Windows users are using the administrator account for daily work. So even without permission-related bugs their system is constantly at risk.
This will not matter as they do not plan to release IE7 for anything but XP, so any users not using XP yet are left in the cold. There will be no "adoption by existing users" as they have no opportunity to do so. XP users probabl y will get it fed by Windows Update.
Yes, it really is a pity that 1.8 is not being released. The 1.8 beta already has bugs fixed that still are present in 1.7.7 and Firefox 1.0.3
I always found it a bad idea to fork off projects like Firefox and Thunderbird. The suite should have remained as a suite and the improvements implemented as part of that. The Mozilla community does not have the resources to develop so many different versions, and it shows.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a "study" is merely a measurement of broadband penetration. There is no relevancy in grouping trojaned PCs per country, continent, or whatever, and not doing the same with the secured and uncompromised systems.
Maybe their next study is going to point out that the majority of torjaned systems run Windows XP?
How long is this still going to work?
Everywhere around us we see the old-fashioned analog communication services being shut down and replaced by new digital systems with access control. Even in situations where there is no real need, encryption is used because it is easy in a digital system.
You are right. The way it should have been done is as an extension of the address space in such a way that a transparant gateway between the two spaces could be setup at any possible point. I.e. some router that can translate an IP packet like a NAT router does now, without keeping state of course.
A new client should be able to communicate with all existing IPv4 servers, a new server should communicate with all existing IPv4 clients, and new servers and new clients could use the extended address space.
As it is done now, with the only compatability being tunnels of IPv6 connections through IPv4 space, there is zero chance that it will ever be adopted on a credible scale.
This is a serious design error, that probably was not seen by those who wanted to improve the world.
If I were McDonald I would sue those who dared to call their computer a 'Mac', let alone a 'Big Mac'.
To them (the BSA) it doesn't matter if people in these countries can't afford to eat, as long as they and there bankrupt governments don't pirate their software!
Then they should start selling it to them for prices that are proportional to the local income.
When Office costs 10% of a month's income for an American, then so should it for someone in a developing country.
Maybe they make less per copy, but the piracy would go down.
Yes, it would probably correct to claim that SCSI uses mature technology while ATA uses more modern but less proven technology.
Same here, I always use RAID and that is why I found that the RAID-1 in Linux does not perform optimally when the disks start to become flaky. After a single sector read error you need to resync the disks, risking that another sector is not readable on the remaining disk, while it would have been valid on the disk that is now the target of the copy.
But since then, the angular momentum of drives has decreased, and cache size has increased.
Of course write speed has increased as well, but typical cache size of 8MB and write speed of 50MB/s would mean 160ms of continuous writing when the head already is positioned correctly.
Assuming the cache can contain blocks scattered over the entire disk, it does not seem realistic to write everything back on power failure.
a report I had from a SCSI-using friend running BSD who reports that a 'remapping' message turned up in his syslog without needing any special action to invoke.
SCSI drives can be set up to return "warning" codes like "I had trouble reading this sector but eventually I could read a good copy". When the driver is careful it will enable this, and when it occurs it will write back the sector to make sure a fresh copy is on the disk and/or it is remapped.
Apparently BSD does this.
By default, corrected sectors are just returned as OK. It is also possible to enable "auto remap on read" and the drive would be triggered to do the rewrite or remap by itself. Of course this means you have less control and less logging.
(but you can read the remap tables)
There are many details that can improve error handling but not all of them are fully worked out. For example, in Linux RAID-1, when a read error occurs the action is to take the drive offline, read the sector from the other disk and continue with 1 disk. Of course the proper handling would be to try writing the correct copy from the good disk back on the failed disk, and see if that fixes it. Only after several failures the disk should be taken offline, assuming that it has crashed.
This has been like this for years, and is relatively easy to fix. I would be prepared to try fixing it but it seems one has to jump over many hurdles to get a fix in the kernel while not being the maintainer of the subsystem, and a mail to said person was not answered.
SCSI drives usually make use of the latest technology. ATA uses whatever older technology has been cost-engineered to a suitable price-point
SCSI drives usually are a couple of years behind in drive capacity relative to ATA drives. This seems to contradict the above.
You must be talking about some locally specific powercord and generalize it to all PC power cords?
A reasonably designed power connection standard always makes sure that earth is connected first and disconnected last. I am sure our local standard does.
Often you can block zombie spam by setting up a mailserver that strictly verifies the SMTP protocol.
Delay the welcome message a few seconds, then first send a 220- line and wait some more.
Any input before the final 220(space) line: goodbye.
The organisation where I work was victim to a looping mail that is not even a virus.
Someone at another organisation sent a mail to all members of some group, and included all the mail addresses in the To: headers. About 8 of the recepients, all running Exchange server, mysteriously started relaying the mails to all addresses again, of course causing a severe mail meltdown. We got thousands of copies of this mail, and it is still continuing at about 2 per minute.
We are not the sender and do not run Exchange, so we could relatively easily block the mails. But the sender and the relayers are in real trouble, their ADSL lines are completely saturated. Of course they have no competent on-site system administration, so recovery will be slow.
M$ stuff can and will get you in trouble even without any virus.
Probably the next step will be to eliminate the testing of technical knowledge, claiming that it is no longer required because everyone uses commercial equipment, and brings it to the shop when broken.
This has replaced the earlier home-brewing culture in amateur radio longer than more efficient methods have replaced morse code, so why wait?
Of course, lowering the bar to encourage more people to become a ham has some merit, but it also has serious disadvantages.
Compare to the microcomputer world. In the early eighties, to use a computer you would need some basic knowledge about how computers work. What is a processor, RAM memory, disk, etc. How do they work together to run a program, and how does data move through those.
When networking appeared, you needed similar knowledge of that to operate it.
Now, this is no longer required. You just unpack the box, plug it in, turn it on an start using something you don't understand at all. The result is that many people have inexplicable problems, lose their work, get infected with viruses and malware, etc.
It is quite similar to operating and modifying a transmitter without having any idea about its basic operation, the setup and tuning of an antenna, HF fields and their effect on the surroundings, etc.
But this is true for SD display on a double-scan TV as well.
The "digital feature box" in the TV is supposed to combine the two fields into one single frame. This is usually referred to as "motion compensation" or some other nifty marketing term.
This is what separates the cheap from the expensive TVs.
The tax is not for software writers, but for rightholders for music and video.
So, nothing is supposed to go to Microsoft, at least until they buy some music distributor (like Sony did).
There has been some proposal to have a similar tax for software rights holders, but it should be remarked that the tax is a compensation for the fact that it is entirely legal (here) to copy a music CD for personal purposes. As it is not legal to copy software for personal purposes, there is nothing to compensate for.
You can find all info on http://www.reprorecht.nl/
I don't think you need to immigrate. The money is supposed to be distributed amongst authors (via publishers) depending on some vague distribution scheme. Similar to the system used with music: those who sell most are supposed to be copied most and get all the money.
Germany yes, but Belgium probably not.
The situation in Belgium is largely the same.
The tax in fact is specificially for this situation.
You have to pay rights for every medium on which you listen. Just like you pay seperate rights to you cable company for the programmes that they transport to you so that you do not have to install your own aerial.
You first pay the rights for the TV programmes directly (via income tax these days), then you pay again to the cable company which forwards this money to the rightholders because you watch via cable and not directly.
It is a silly situation but it has been confirmed correct by the Raad van State.
The tax does not even give you the right to copy any music to the player for which you had not paid rights before (like downloading from a P2P network). It is only for the transfer of legally downloaded or purchased music to the new medium.
Even worse: the mechanism of "compensation" for copying by means of a levy has become completely accepted in government circles.
First there was such a levy on compact cassettes and video tapes. In those days it could probably be claimed that most carriers were used to hold material for which rights had not been paid (although it remains a point of discussion whether you are allowed to record something from radio or tv transmissions for which you have presumably paid rights to listen or view).
But then it extended to carriers that are not only for music, like CD-R and DVD-R. Entire user groups use these for completely different purposes than are the goal of the levy, still they have to pay.
In the meantime you now also have to pay a levy on photocopiers. Every company in the Netherlands that owns a photocopier has to pay because some nitwit believes that photocopiers are used to copy books.
We have many photocopiers where I work but I never see someone with a book. But piles and piles of internal documents are fed through the sheetfeeders and copied 20 times. The company pays a levy on each copy that would probably go to some novel author who never did anything to earn this money.
A levy on MP3 players is only the next step.
IE6 is often not the real troublemaker as it has doctype switching and you can use .htc files to fix some of the bugs. IE5 is the problem.
Don't forget that most Windows users are using the administrator account for daily work.
So even without permission-related bugs their system is constantly at risk.
This will not matter as they do not plan to release IE7 for anything but XP, so any users not using XP yet are left in the cold.
There will be no "adoption by existing users" as they have no opportunity to do so. XP users probabl y will get it fed by Windows Update.
You would not believe it, some people really claim they have found such an algorithm :-)
(they claim that they have a compression algorithm that can compress any data, and result in a much smaller file, but fail to deliver)
Yes, it really is a pity that 1.8 is not being released. The 1.8 beta already has bugs fixed that still are present in 1.7.7 and Firefox 1.0.3
I always found it a bad idea to fork off projects like Firefox and Thunderbird.
The suite should have remained as a suite and the improvements implemented as part of that.
The Mozilla community does not have the resources to develop so many different versions, and it shows.
Your preferences and bookmarks are not stored in the install directory.