Take the article for what it's worth. He makes some very good points, although it's hard to take him seriously when he doesn't even know what the word 'hacker' means... but still, some very good points. Security is something that needs to be designed in from the start, not patched on top later.
I didn't say it's a bad idea, I said it wouldn't work.
It's not a political or idealistic belief, it's a fact that zombies are overwhelmingly windows boxes. All I'm saying is that those who choose to hook those systems up and don't bother to protect them impose a cost on all of us, and some way should be found to place that cost back on those who incur it with their choices, rather than making the rest of us share the burden of their actions.
It wouldn't mean a 'windows free internet' btw - not by a long shot. All you have to do is throw a cheap firewall up between your windows box and the net.
ISPs should scan their networks for windows machines and disconnect any they find, regularly.
Yes, I know that wouldn't work, because so many of the customers run windows. But other than that, it's actually a sensible idea.
ISPs should probably just run regular scans for vulnerabilities on clients, help those that have them, and give a discount to those that consistently don't.
Of course most ISPs today are run by the terminally clueless, so that's probably not going to happen either.
After reading TFA I think all that can safely be said is that neither the reporter nor the school personell that were interviewed have a clue. I'd be more inclined to say, on that basis, that the clueless personell are likely the problem, not too much or too little homogeneity or a particular OS or daemon or whatever.
Indeed, the root of the problem is that people keep confusing themselves by talking about 'linux' as if it were an OS.
People write books on, for instance, doing things with Redhat's OS, but the title will be something about 'linux.' Which is stupid and confusing.
There is a need for better documentation, and I think that will only happen once people realise they need to target their documentation to a specific OS, rather than to 'linux.'
There are people who would much rather use a more secure OS than Windows, and know about Linux, but really just cannot be bothered working around some of the more ass-backwards systems.
Funny, "ass-backwards systems" - that's exactly what I think every time I have to use Windows.
I can do things in Windows within minutes that take a good half hour on Linux.
Like what?
I can do things in minutes on any *nix box that would take days to do with Windows too, I should add.
Now, I agree with the practice improving speed but some things just do not work between distros, whereas Windows does.
Huh? Windows works between distros? What do you mean by that?
You're not being 'accurate' you're being incoherent.
The 'battle' was only in your imagination, as is the supposed resolution of it, unless of course if you are referring to your own personal battle to understand these issues, which does appear to have been lost long ago.
Just because most people can't be bothered with understanding the difference between, say, the transmission and the gearshift in a car doesn't make them the same thing. It may only be a minor annoyance when Joe Average doesn't understand the difference, but any mechanic that doesn't understand the difference is incompetent and is not going to be able to do his job. Similarly, anyone that's talking about making a linux-based OS who doesn't understand the difference between linux and an OS is talking out his rear end.
Your post wasn't insightful, it was simply ignorant.
I don' know what the heck a 'desktop' has to do with anything, but I've been using linux as my Personal Computer/Workstation OS since 1994. So yes, I think they're a bit behind the curve on this announcement.
I think you are (deliberately?) misunderstanding. Linux is the kernel, not the OS.
If you want to make 'BatOS' and make it however you think is most 'desktop friendly' that's just fine. If you need to change anything in linux itself, that is the KERNEL, then you should be ready to maintain and update your patches yourself, however. Just as, if you decide you need to change some application code in ways that the maintainers of that application don't agree with, you'll have to maintain your patches there too. This is just common sense. Unfortunately we've seen many people come along demanding that the Free Software community do this work for them, and do it the way they want it - that's not going to happen. Free software built by volunteers is going to reflect what the volunteers consider important, and vendors that build on their work for a profit have to accept that fact, and actually do the customisation work themselves, rather than demand the volunteers do it for them.
I know one thing that really irks myself and many other longtime linux users is when people build end-user software on linux whose idea of 'user-friendly' entails being actively unfriendly to users who like *nix. It's a real shame, for instance, that Mozilla, which is really not easily replaceable (there are many web browsers one can use on linux, but sooner or later you always seem to need to use a site that none of the others can handle) chooses to use the GTK library, which in the name of 'user-friendliness' has become actively unfriendly to anyone that is used to *nix, not windows, conventions. This generates some resentment, and understandably so.
What planet are you living on? GNOME developers seem to be congenitally incapable of grasping Unix-think, there's nothing there to lose, or to 'loose' either.
Now if they could be pursuaded to learn something about Unix and produce tools that actually reflect that learning, they might produce something useful for a change.
You don't need a license to use something you've bought.
You need a license to copy, modify, and distribute it outside of fair-use.
Bnetd's use of the programs was clearly use, they were NOT copying and distributing the copyrighted material (which isn't even available or released) they were simply running the binaries they bought, determining how to interoperate with them, and building THEIR OWN server software to interoperate with those binaries.
So they had no need of a license, and the terms of any license that might have been offered to them doesn't matter, they didn't need any license to do this.
The TOS you refer to are the Terms of Service for battlenet. Bnetd didn't use battlenet, so those terms don't matter either.
Bnetd violated what? A 'EULA' that fails so many tests for a valid contract it's absurd and terms of use for a service they were not using!
Blizzard and their bought-and-paid-for kangaroo court are the violaters here.
Not even making a Mac version on the same CD can make up for it. I don't give money to people that spend that money to rewrite the law and take away my rights. Period.
They didn't even 'bypass' Blizzard copy protection. That copy protection is on Blizzard servers, and there's nothing Bnetd did or even could have done to affect that in the least.
They asked Blizzard to work with them on implementing it on the bnetd servers as well, and Blizzard refused, so they had no way to implement it on their servers, but that was never the point, or even something they wanted, it only happened because they had no other choice.
More likely is the large cost of keeping a secret because bad things happen more often when we're kept in the dark. Particularly about what our government is doing.
All you need is a cassette recorder and a cable. Use the cable to pipe the output from your computer to the input on your cassette recorder, hit 'record' on the recorder and 'play' on your computer.
A $5 portable cassette player and some headphones and you're set to listen to the audiobooks wherever you go.
Yes, it's not the highest quality audio, but it should be more than sufficient for an audiobook - even if you turn around and rip it from the tape to an mp3 file it should still be fine.
Any bets on how long before cassette recorders are defined as illegal 'piracy devices?'
OK so maybe I'm being thick but let me see: Setup flash game on the web for people to use. Someone sends you lots of users. Get upset people are using said flash game you put up for people to use. Profit?!?
That's what I thought from the blurb too, but read the article and you'll see the difference.
They didn't just sent folks to his page. They setup a link to open the game, from his page, in a popup window, so that it would appear as if it were theirs. Check out the screenshots.
Did you perchance notice the big foot next to the article? Granted, it doesn't appear on the front page as it probably should, but it is still there.
Big foot? Huh, what, where?
I assume this must refer to some image that isn't included in the 'light-html' version that anyone with two brain cells working turns on first thing after making an account here?;)
Wasn't hard to see it was satire though, I had a pretty good hunch even before I RTFA. Moderately funny, not the best, but good for a chuckle at least.
Lewis Binford, many years back, investigated another site (in Israel) where h. sapiens and h. neanderthalis existed in close proximity for MUCH longer, around 90,000 years IIRC. The same results otherwise, despite an incredibly long time period very close to each other, no genetic drift towards each other to be seen. Pretty much has to mean that they were not sexually compatible with each other.
Everyone assumes that OUR ancestors had the 'superior abilities and traits' but, other than the fact that we're here instead of them, there's no reason to think that. They were definately stronger, more muscular and with a more efficient musculature as well - if they were still alive today they would take all the top spots in just about any sport you can think of. The 'hunchback' stereotype is incorrect - one of the early neanderthal skeletons had those features and that was taken as typical, but it turns out it was just that that particular individual had massive crippling arthritic problems - it wasn't genetic. And despite the stereotype that they were dumb, there's really no evidence of that either - their brains were even larger than ours, and their artifacts are not inferior.
One difference is that there is a bone in the throat, (hyoid bone iirc) critical to the production of human speech, which was shaped differently in the neanderthal. They would not have been capable of making many of the sounds we use in speech as a result. However, that doesn't mean they couldn't have spoken their own languages, with different sounds - only that they would not have been able to make many of the sounds we use.
Still a great mystery. Maybe one day we'll know what happened.
All that is true. But you left out possibly the worst effect of false papers - the effect they can have on the funding gatekeepers. A handful of just BAD research papers, all claiming to show what those that hold the pursestrings want to hear, and suddenly that false conclusion is a 'scientific fact' and anyone that wants their studies to be funded in the future had damn well better agree with that. Which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
So not only does it get ugly, but on some of the bad sites out there that have [images][text][images] columns you can end up with a lot more image than you want.
Opera has a nice button that disables images on the page you are viewing, just for sites like that.
I never figured out *why* anyone would want an MDI in any application - it's like a mini windowing environment inside a window, where's the advantage over just opening separate windows on your desktop?
Organisation.
It's not quite as necessary when I have a real window manager, although even then it's nice. But in Windows, or on my Mac, it's damn near a necessity for certain types of work.
I might need, for instance, to have three windows open, with three different documents, arranged so that the relevant parts of each are viewable at the same time. Now, sure, I can take three seperate firefox windows and arrange them the way I want them - but then I need to minimise them and deal with something else for a moment, and then come back to the previous setup.
The only way to do this well on a Windows or Mac box is with an MDI browser. There are a lot of hacks and workarounds, but they're time consuming and inefficient compared to simply having an MDI browser.
Now on my linux box, what I'd do is give that setup it's own virtual desktop, and that works with Firefox fairly well. It's still handier to have them inside a single container, but at least it's not so incredibly annoying as it is on other systems.
And yes, I know in theory you can get virtual desktops on Mac and Windows now too. I haven't used Windows in a long time, but on Mac all the solutions I've tried wound up not working very well, and being really more trouble than they're worth. But with or without virtual desktops, I still find MDI to be a very worthwhile feature in my browser.
For a long time you could load Opera on a 1.44MB floppy and use it sort of like a 'live CD' for whenever you had to work on a machine that didn't have it. So yeah, the current release is bloated. It's still less bloated than the other graphical browser alternatives, though.
I tried and tried to get firefox to work like this with extensions, and only managed to get it b0rked and have to wipe and start over, several times, without ever getting anywhere near what I want.
There's an extension that converts the 'tabs' into a real MDI, where you can lay different documents side by side, for instance? I never found it.
Opera uses a full MDI interface. This is so handy for a browser that people started complaining that the other browsers didn't have this. Eventually the Mozilla folks started imitating this with the 'tabs' - but they are nowhere near a full MDI interface, and so still lack many of the useful functions. Just try tiling, or cascading, your tabs for instance. With a full MDI, you can open two webpages side by side, inside the main browser window, to compare them line by line. Or you can give one most of the window space, but reserve a small strip at the bottom for a second - very handy when typing in a text entry field in the second page while quoting from the first page, for instance.
I was a huge Opera fan for a long time, and bought it years ago.
I wasn't happy that it bloated, but it's still less bloated than the alternatives. And you're right, on Windows at least, the interface was always the best. It's a true MDI, rather than the half-assed 'tabs' imitation, and it's far better IMOP.
Trouble is, the less I used windows, the less use I had for Opera. The Linux and Mac versions just weren't up to snuff, and eventually I switched to Mozilla because of that.
I hear they've improved a lot though, so I think I'll give it another try.
Slashdot Mirror
Take the article for what it's worth. He makes some very good points, although it's hard to take him seriously when he doesn't even know what the word 'hacker' means... but still, some very good points. Security is something that needs to be designed in from the start, not patched on top later.
I didn't say it's a bad idea, I said it wouldn't work.
It's not a political or idealistic belief, it's a fact that zombies are overwhelmingly windows boxes. All I'm saying is that those who choose to hook those systems up and don't bother to protect them impose a cost on all of us, and some way should be found to place that cost back on those who incur it with their choices, rather than making the rest of us share the burden of their actions.
It wouldn't mean a 'windows free internet' btw - not by a long shot. All you have to do is throw a cheap firewall up between your windows box and the net.
ISPs should scan their networks for windows machines and disconnect any they find, regularly.
Yes, I know that wouldn't work, because so many of the customers run windows. But other than that, it's actually a sensible idea.
ISPs should probably just run regular scans for vulnerabilities on clients, help those that have them, and give a discount to those that consistently don't.
Of course most ISPs today are run by the terminally clueless, so that's probably not going to happen either.
After reading TFA I think all that can safely be said is that neither the reporter nor the school personell that were interviewed have a clue. I'd be more inclined to say, on that basis, that the clueless personell are likely the problem, not too much or too little homogeneity or a particular OS or daemon or whatever.
Indeed, the root of the problem is that people keep confusing themselves by talking about 'linux' as if it were an OS.
People write books on, for instance, doing things with Redhat's OS, but the title will be something about 'linux.' Which is stupid and confusing.
There is a need for better documentation, and I think that will only happen once people realise they need to target their documentation to a specific OS, rather than to 'linux.'
Funny, "ass-backwards systems" - that's exactly what I think every time I have to use Windows.
Like what?
I can do things in minutes on any *nix box that would take days to do with Windows too, I should add.
Huh? Windows works between distros? What do you mean by that?
You're not being 'accurate' you're being incoherent.
The 'battle' was only in your imagination, as is the supposed resolution of it, unless of course if you are referring to your own personal battle to understand these issues, which does appear to have been lost long ago.
Just because most people can't be bothered with understanding the difference between, say, the transmission and the gearshift in a car doesn't make them the same thing. It may only be a minor annoyance when Joe Average doesn't understand the difference, but any mechanic that doesn't understand the difference is incompetent and is not going to be able to do his job. Similarly, anyone that's talking about making a linux-based OS who doesn't understand the difference between linux and an OS is talking out his rear end.
Your post wasn't insightful, it was simply ignorant.
I don' know what the heck a 'desktop' has to do with anything, but I've been using linux as my Personal Computer/Workstation OS since 1994. So yes, I think they're a bit behind the curve on this announcement.
I think you are (deliberately?) misunderstanding. Linux is the kernel, not the OS.
If you want to make 'BatOS' and make it however you think is most 'desktop friendly' that's just fine. If you need to change anything in linux itself, that is the KERNEL, then you should be ready to maintain and update your patches yourself, however. Just as, if you decide you need to change some application code in ways that the maintainers of that application don't agree with, you'll have to maintain your patches there too. This is just common sense. Unfortunately we've seen many people come along demanding that the Free Software community do this work for them, and do it the way they want it - that's not going to happen. Free software built by volunteers is going to reflect what the volunteers consider important, and vendors that build on their work for a profit have to accept that fact, and actually do the customisation work themselves, rather than demand the volunteers do it for them.
I know one thing that really irks myself and many other longtime linux users is when people build end-user software on linux whose idea of 'user-friendly' entails being actively unfriendly to users who like *nix. It's a real shame, for instance, that Mozilla, which is really not easily replaceable (there are many web browsers one can use on linux, but sooner or later you always seem to need to use a site that none of the others can handle) chooses to use the GTK library, which in the name of 'user-friendliness' has become actively unfriendly to anyone that is used to *nix, not windows, conventions. This generates some resentment, and understandably so.
What planet are you living on? GNOME developers seem to be congenitally incapable of grasping Unix-think, there's nothing there to lose, or to 'loose' either.
Now if they could be pursuaded to learn something about Unix and produce tools that actually reflect that learning, they might produce something useful for a change.
You don't need a license to use something you've bought.
You need a license to copy, modify, and distribute it outside of fair-use.
Bnetd's use of the programs was clearly use, they were NOT copying and distributing the copyrighted material (which isn't even available or released) they were simply running the binaries they bought, determining how to interoperate with them, and building THEIR OWN server software to interoperate with those binaries.
So they had no need of a license, and the terms of any license that might have been offered to them doesn't matter, they didn't need any license to do this.
The TOS you refer to are the Terms of Service for battlenet. Bnetd didn't use battlenet, so those terms don't matter either.
Bnetd violated what? A 'EULA' that fails so many tests for a valid contract it's absurd and terms of use for a service they were not using!
Blizzard and their bought-and-paid-for kangaroo court are the violaters here.
Not even making a Mac version on the same CD can make up for it. I don't give money to people that spend that money to rewrite the law and take away my rights. Period.
They didn't even 'bypass' Blizzard copy protection. That copy protection is on Blizzard servers, and there's nothing Bnetd did or even could have done to affect that in the least.
They asked Blizzard to work with them on implementing it on the bnetd servers as well, and Blizzard refused, so they had no way to implement it on their servers, but that was never the point, or even something they wanted, it only happened because they had no other choice.
More likely is the large cost of keeping a secret because bad things happen more often when we're kept in the dark. Particularly about what our government is doing.
All you need is a cassette recorder and a cable. Use the cable to pipe the output from your computer to the input on your cassette recorder, hit 'record' on the recorder and 'play' on your computer.
A $5 portable cassette player and some headphones and you're set to listen to the audiobooks wherever you go.
Yes, it's not the highest quality audio, but it should be more than sufficient for an audiobook - even if you turn around and rip it from the tape to an mp3 file it should still be fine.
Any bets on how long before cassette recorders are defined as illegal 'piracy devices?'
That's what I thought from the blurb too, but read the article and you'll see the difference.
They didn't just sent folks to his page. They setup a link to open the game, from his page, in a popup window, so that it would appear as if it were theirs. Check out the screenshots.
Big foot? Huh, what, where?
I assume this must refer to some image that isn't included in the 'light-html' version that anyone with two brain cells working turns on first thing after making an account here? ;)
Wasn't hard to see it was satire though, I had a pretty good hunch even before I RTFA. Moderately funny, not the best, but good for a chuckle at least.
Lewis Binford, many years back, investigated another site (in Israel) where h. sapiens and h. neanderthalis existed in close proximity for MUCH longer, around 90,000 years IIRC. The same results otherwise, despite an incredibly long time period very close to each other, no genetic drift towards each other to be seen. Pretty much has to mean that they were not sexually compatible with each other.
Everyone assumes that OUR ancestors had the 'superior abilities and traits' but, other than the fact that we're here instead of them, there's no reason to think that. They were definately stronger, more muscular and with a more efficient musculature as well - if they were still alive today they would take all the top spots in just about any sport you can think of. The 'hunchback' stereotype is incorrect - one of the early neanderthal skeletons had those features and that was taken as typical, but it turns out it was just that that particular individual had massive crippling arthritic problems - it wasn't genetic. And despite the stereotype that they were dumb, there's really no evidence of that either - their brains were even larger than ours, and their artifacts are not inferior.
One difference is that there is a bone in the throat, (hyoid bone iirc) critical to the production of human speech, which was shaped differently in the neanderthal. They would not have been capable of making many of the sounds we use in speech as a result. However, that doesn't mean they couldn't have spoken their own languages, with different sounds - only that they would not have been able to make many of the sounds we use.
Still a great mystery. Maybe one day we'll know what happened.
All that is true. But you left out possibly the worst effect of false papers - the effect they can have on the funding gatekeepers. A handful of just BAD research papers, all claiming to show what those that hold the pursestrings want to hear, and suddenly that false conclusion is a 'scientific fact' and anyone that wants their studies to be funded in the future had damn well better agree with that. Which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Opera has a nice button that disables images on the page you are viewing, just for sites like that.
Organisation.
It's not quite as necessary when I have a real window manager, although even then it's nice. But in Windows, or on my Mac, it's damn near a necessity for certain types of work.
I might need, for instance, to have three windows open, with three different documents, arranged so that the relevant parts of each are viewable at the same time. Now, sure, I can take three seperate firefox windows and arrange them the way I want them - but then I need to minimise them and deal with something else for a moment, and then come back to the previous setup.
The only way to do this well on a Windows or Mac box is with an MDI browser. There are a lot of hacks and workarounds, but they're time consuming and inefficient compared to simply having an MDI browser.
Now on my linux box, what I'd do is give that setup it's own virtual desktop, and that works with Firefox fairly well. It's still handier to have them inside a single container, but at least it's not so incredibly annoying as it is on other systems.
And yes, I know in theory you can get virtual desktops on Mac and Windows now too. I haven't used Windows in a long time, but on Mac all the solutions I've tried wound up not working very well, and being really more trouble than they're worth. But with or without virtual desktops, I still find MDI to be a very worthwhile feature in my browser.
For a long time you could load Opera on a 1.44MB floppy and use it sort of like a 'live CD' for whenever you had to work on a machine that didn't have it. So yeah, the current release is bloated. It's still less bloated than the other graphical browser alternatives, though.
I tried and tried to get firefox to work like this with extensions, and only managed to get it b0rked and have to wipe and start over, several times, without ever getting anywhere near what I want.
There's an extension that converts the 'tabs' into a real MDI, where you can lay different documents side by side, for instance? I never found it.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Opera uses a full MDI interface. This is so handy for a browser that people started complaining that the other browsers didn't have this. Eventually the Mozilla folks started imitating this with the 'tabs' - but they are nowhere near a full MDI interface, and so still lack many of the useful functions. Just try tiling, or cascading, your tabs for instance. With a full MDI, you can open two webpages side by side, inside the main browser window, to compare them line by line. Or you can give one most of the window space, but reserve a small strip at the bottom for a second - very handy when typing in a text entry field in the second page while quoting from the first page, for instance.
I was a huge Opera fan for a long time, and bought it years ago.
I wasn't happy that it bloated, but it's still less bloated than the alternatives. And you're right, on Windows at least, the interface was always the best. It's a true MDI, rather than the half-assed 'tabs' imitation, and it's far better IMOP.
Trouble is, the less I used windows, the less use I had for Opera. The Linux and Mac versions just weren't up to snuff, and eventually I switched to Mozilla because of that.
I hear they've improved a lot though, so I think I'll give it another try.