Not at all surprising. If they didn't have the smarts to lock their systems down in the first place, they probably didn't have security audit software installed and running either. Too late to do all this after discovering the hack. That's closing the gate after the horse has bolted.
There's a difference between breaking into a network, nosing around, changing a couple of passwords and copying a couple of files.vs. causing 2000 systems to go offline resulting in a $700,000 bill to fix it.
Both will get him a jail term, but the former could net him a handful of years, where as the latter could cost him the rest of his life (in the US).
I'm just questioning whether he really did as much damage as is claimed, or whether it was mostly self inflicted by panicking non-tech PHB decision makers, who ran around with their hair on fire until they ran out of dumb (damaging) things to do.
Seen it happen too often in business.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 4, Informative
Take Apple's new MobileMe web site for example. Try browsing it from Firefox 3 on Linux and it redirects you to an "unsupported browser" page, where you're politely informed that you need to use a supported browser: Safari 3 or "Firefox 2 or greater (Mac / PC)".
Well sometimes I use Firefox 3 on a bloody PC, what's unsupported about that. Ok it's Linux (various flavours) and not Windows, but does Firefox on Windows implement JavaScript differently to Firefox on Linux? I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
I think his best chance of defense rests on whether or not this claim is true...
It says his hacking caused some $700,000 dollars damage to government systems.
What's more, they allege that Mr McKinnon altered and deleted files at a US Naval Air Station not long after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and that the attack rendered critical systems inoperable.
The US government also says Mr McKinnon once took down an entire network of 2,000 US Army computers. His goal, they claim, was to access classified information.
Only he knows if this is fact or fiction. If true (and they can prove it) then he's sunk and deserves everything he gets. But if it's not true then the chances are the US Govt are trying to blame him for the (supposed) $700,000 cost of securing systems that should have been tighter than a duck's back-side in the first place.
How much of this is truth, and how much is it a "cover your ass" exercise by the US Military to distract from their own incompetance?
There's probably a Linux equivalent of processor sets, CPU shares and the Fair Shares Scheduler, but again I've never found one
Use taskset(1) to launch a program and tie them to cpu sets. or adjust them on the fly afterwards. As for your Fair Shares Scheduler, I've no idea what that does on Solaris (smells like a marketing term to me) but the Linux kernel has a FAIR_GROUP_SCHED option which likely does the same thing.
just karma whoring here, but it's important to mention that pretty much everything ZFS has to offer was already available on tru64's advFS: http://advfs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
As much as I love tru64, I think it really is time to put this myth to bed. AdvFS is a good solid filesystem and cluster aware too, but it's no ZFS. AdvFS doesn't do any form of RAID other than concatenating disks into disk pools (domains) which can then be populated by filesets (AdvFS speak for filesystems) that share the same domain space. Every enterprise implementation of AdvFS always always has AdvFS sitting on top of some form of hardware or software RAID. AdvFS itself doesn't provide any RAID like data protection or redundancy.
AdvFS doesn't come close to the flexibility and power of ZFS. That's just the plain truth.
Now if you're really interested in Linux's answer to ZFS, you should keep an eye on the development of Btrfs. I wouldn't expect it to be production ready for a couple of years yet, but when it is it should kick ZFS ass!
By Chapter 7, Bash Cookbook extends out of Bash commands and begins exploring combining the power of bash scripting with useful command such as grep, awk, and sed.
Well I've not read the book, so I'm not sure what context he's using awk and sed in, but he should not be advocating the use these two unless it's absolutely necessary and only for occasional use. Under no circumstances should you ever make heavy use of them, especially when if you find yourself invoking them thousands of times inside a loop. The context switching it creates is a performance killer.
There really is no need for it, as bash has a very powerful set of features for text manipulation that can be bent to almost any task. It may require writing a little more code to get the job done, but sticking with shell built-ins as much as possible to avoid context switching will result in much much faster execution times. The same goes for other shells too, like ksh, zsh, etc.
I've re-written scripts for customers in the past to eliminate external programs as much as possible and reduced run times (for example) from several hours, to just 20 minutes.
Yeah. Most vendors I think got stuck with ksh 86 for many many years because of this, while ksh 93 languished on the shelf unused and unloved and left out of most distributions. ksh 93 was really very extensible and very powerful in its day. It was a missed opportunity.
Re:Standard Unix Shell?
on
Bash Cookbook
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· Score: 1
Bash is really only the common default shell on Linux
Bash is also the default user shell on Mac OS X too. And you can get it on HP-UX as well it you're willing to install the Open Source package collection that comes with the main distro.
That fact does cause a lot of problems with poorly-written third-party scripts
You mean scripts written by clueless idiots who have no business writing installation scripts if they don't know that 'sh' != bash and != POSIX. "sh" is as old as the hills and has a very limited feature set: it always has. Personally I've not run into this yet, but I'd stick a rocket up the arse of anyone who sent me a product that wouldn't install because of a basic, newbie mistake like that.
I hope you have a better plan if you ever need to do a full restore in anger. It's all right spending days backing up in small chunks, but if your data ever goes south, it's going to take at least as long to restore it all again. In the mean time, your web site/application/business is flat on its back.
/usr/local I agree with but not/opt. In the commercial world/opt or more specifically/usr/opt is fair game for OS layered products to install themselves into, and windows environments like KDE fall into that category.
And how exactly is competative feature evolution between distros meant to help improve the situation for developers? Survival of the fittest feature, as you advocate, is anathema to providing the distro neutral development environment the LSB are aiming for and developers would love to have.
The real danger of Linux fragmentation has nothing to do with licensing and everything to do with NIH syndrome. Having everything GPL has done little to pull the Linux distros together. It's the urge to have a competative advantage, to one up the other fella that forces the distros apart. This is why the LSB is so important: it helps to counteract that!
Perhaps spell checking is a build time option, or a hidden configuration choice. FF doesn't have it on OS X, or OpenSUSE 11; but it does on Ubuntu 8.04 and it's enabled by default too. So it's definitely possible.
I really hope they include this. Have got very used to having it in Safari, but am using Firefox more and more these days. I plan to switch to Firefox completely when I can get a Weave account and sync up across the different (mixed OS) desktops I use.
I've got a few different systems I use, running Mac OS X, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and I use the screen corners a lot; all configured the same using either Expose on OS X, or Compiz on Gnome/Linux. If I plant my mouse in the top left corner, windows from the same application group are exposed. Using the top right corner all windows in the current Desktop view are exposed. Bottom right hides all windows revealing the Desktop, and bottom left shows all my virtual Desktops (Spaces in OS X).
I've been doing this for years on OS X (more recently on Gnome) and now it's as natural a breathing.
Can I do the same on KDE 4.1, or does the desktop plasmoid thingy in the top right hand corner stop me from doing that?
Otherwise I think they will be pretty well finished in the OS market. The OEMs are not going down with them if they can help it, you can be sure of that. And once Windows is no longer the defacto preloaded OS it's all over.
I read comments like this and wonder what it must be like to live in your alternate version of reality. For all the (deserved) gnashing and thrashing that goes on about Vista, in the real world it doesn't seem to affect Microsoft's inexorable growth. Quarter after quarter, year after year their obscene revenue and profits just get bigger and bigger.
Microsoft show as much sign of "going down" right now as the moon does of leaving orbit, unfortunately.
Interesting links, thanks. I was only referring to Ubuntu though as that's who byolinux was trying to throw mud at. Canonical AFAIK are just like any other regular business, and have seen an opportunity to take Ubuntu code, package it with extras and offer it to OEMs. I don't see why this is any reflection on Ubuntu as Canonical could have done exactly the same thing with CentOS.
Btw, glad to hear you're having a good experience with the madwifi driver. I'm not. It's supposed to work with the WG311T cards too, but is very broken on Ubuntu 8.04 with the latest supported madwifi 0.9.4 driver. wlanconfig always barfs with an ioctl error, and dmesg spits out:
wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware didn't respond as expected' (HAL status 3)
Ok, I'll let you steer this away from trying to defend the statement about Ubuntu getting paid by proprietary vendors to include their software; as it's obvious by now that it was just pure conjecture and you can't back that up.
So what's your problem here. You have Gobuntu, which is 100% free and exists to serve your specific needs. And I have Ubuntu, which is not 100% free, but exists to serve my needs. And both are produced by the same people.
The true freedom in this scenario is the freedom to choose.
That's a Canonical product, not a Ubuntu product. It's just being reported on Ubuntu's news page because it's making use of Open Source Ubuntu software. Nothing on that story either about proprietary codecs so you'll have to find a better source than that.
Still waiting for evidence to back up the claim that Ubuntu bundle proprietary software because they are paid to do it!
No, Ubuntu is concerned about giving you the choice of being 100% free, or almost free where you need restricted drivers to get something working that otherwise you could not.
Ubuntu do not force you to use restricted drivers, they give you the choice! In doing so they attempt to provide their users with a Desktop experience that works as well as Windows/Mac OSX out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all surprising. If they didn't have the smarts to lock their systems down in the first place, they probably didn't have security audit software installed and running either. Too late to do all this after discovering the hack. That's closing the gate after the horse has bolted.
There's a difference between breaking into a network, nosing around, changing a couple of passwords and copying a couple of files .vs. causing 2000 systems to go offline resulting in a $700,000 bill to fix it.
Both will get him a jail term, but the former could net him a handful of years, where as the latter could cost him the rest of his life (in the US).
I'm just questioning whether he really did as much damage as is claimed, or whether it was mostly self inflicted by panicking non-tech PHB decision makers, who ran around with their hair on fire until they ran out of dumb (damaging) things to do.
Seen it happen too often in business.
Take Apple's new MobileMe web site for example. Try browsing it from Firefox 3 on Linux and it redirects you to an "unsupported browser" page, where you're politely informed that you need to use a supported browser: Safari 3 or "Firefox 2 or greater (Mac / PC)".
Well sometimes I use Firefox 3 on a bloody PC, what's unsupported about that. Ok it's Linux (various flavours) and not Windows, but does Firefox on Windows implement JavaScript differently to Firefox on Linux? I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
This sux, and Apple should know better!
I think his best chance of defense rests on whether or not this claim is true...
Only he knows if this is fact or fiction. If true (and they can prove it) then he's sunk and deserves everything he gets. But if it's not true then the chances are the US Govt are trying to blame him for the (supposed) $700,000 cost of securing systems that should have been tighter than a duck's back-side in the first place.
How much of this is truth, and how much is it a "cover your ass" exercise by the US Military to distract from their own incompetance?
Ha, just turned up a Slashdot article about this from last year:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2335217&from=rss
Use taskset(1) to launch a program and tie them to cpu sets. or adjust them on the fly afterwards. As for your Fair Shares Scheduler, I've no idea what that does on Solaris (smells like a marketing term to me) but the Linux kernel has a FAIR_GROUP_SCHED option which likely does the same thing.
On Linux you get the same functionalty from OpenVZ or its commercial cousin Virtuozzo.
As much as I love tru64, I think it really is time to put this myth to bed. AdvFS is a good solid filesystem and cluster aware too, but it's no ZFS. AdvFS doesn't do any form of RAID other than concatenating disks into disk pools (domains) which can then be populated by filesets (AdvFS speak for filesystems) that share the same domain space. Every enterprise implementation of AdvFS always always has AdvFS sitting on top of some form of hardware or software RAID. AdvFS itself doesn't provide any RAID like data protection or redundancy.
AdvFS doesn't come close to the flexibility and power of ZFS. That's just the plain truth.
Now if you're really interested in Linux's answer to ZFS, you should keep an eye on the development of Btrfs. I wouldn't expect it to be production ready for a couple of years yet, but when it is it should kick ZFS ass!
In this case the inventor will be the company, not the individual.
Well I've not read the book, so I'm not sure what context he's using awk and sed in, but he should not be advocating the use these two unless it's absolutely necessary and only for occasional use. Under no circumstances should you ever make heavy use of them, especially when if you find yourself invoking them thousands of times inside a loop. The context switching it creates is a performance killer.
There really is no need for it, as bash has a very powerful set of features for text manipulation that can be bent to almost any task. It may require writing a little more code to get the job done, but sticking with shell built-ins as much as possible to avoid context switching will result in much much faster execution times. The same goes for other shells too, like ksh, zsh, etc.
I've re-written scripts for customers in the past to eliminate external programs as much as possible and reduced run times (for example) from several hours, to just 20 minutes.
Yeah. Most vendors I think got stuck with ksh 86 for many many years because of this, while ksh 93 languished on the shelf unused and unloved and left out of most distributions. ksh 93 was really very extensible and very powerful in its day. It was a missed opportunity.
Bash is also the default user shell on Mac OS X too. And you can get it on HP-UX as well it you're willing to install the Open Source package collection that comes with the main distro.
You mean scripts written by clueless idiots who have no business writing installation scripts if they don't know that 'sh' != bash and != POSIX. "sh" is as old as the hills and has a very limited feature set: it always has. Personally I've not run into this yet, but I'd stick a rocket up the arse of anyone who sent me a product that wouldn't install because of a basic, newbie mistake like that.
I hope you have a better plan if you ever need to do a full restore in anger. It's all right spending days backing up in small chunks, but if your data ever goes south, it's going to take at least as long to restore it all again. In the mean time, your web site/application/business is flat on its back.
/usr/local I agree with but not /opt. In the commercial world /opt or more specifically /usr/opt is fair game for OS layered products to install themselves into, and windows environments like KDE fall into that category.
And how exactly is competative feature evolution between distros meant to help improve the situation for developers? Survival of the fittest feature, as you advocate, is anathema to providing the distro neutral development environment the LSB are aiming for and developers would love to have.
The real danger of Linux fragmentation has nothing to do with licensing and everything to do with NIH syndrome. Having everything GPL has done little to pull the Linux distros together. It's the urge to have a competative advantage, to one up the other fella that forces the distros apart. This is why the LSB is so important: it helps to counteract that!
Perhaps spell checking is a build time option, or a hidden configuration choice. FF doesn't have it on OS X, or OpenSUSE 11; but it does on Ubuntu 8.04 and it's enabled by default too. So it's definitely possible.
I really hope they include this. Have got very used to having it in Safari, but am using Firefox more and more these days. I plan to switch to Firefox completely when I can get a Weave account and sync up across the different (mixed OS) desktops I use.
I've got a few different systems I use, running Mac OS X, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and I use the screen corners a lot; all configured the same using either Expose on OS X, or Compiz on Gnome/Linux. If I plant my mouse in the top left corner, windows from the same application group are exposed. Using the top right corner all windows in the current Desktop view are exposed. Bottom right hides all windows revealing the Desktop, and bottom left shows all my virtual Desktops (Spaces in OS X).
I've been doing this for years on OS X (more recently on Gnome) and now it's as natural a breathing.
Can I do the same on KDE 4.1, or does the desktop plasmoid thingy in the top right hand corner stop me from doing that?
I read comments like this and wonder what it must be like to live in your alternate version of reality. For all the (deserved) gnashing and thrashing that goes on about Vista, in the real world it doesn't seem to affect Microsoft's inexorable growth. Quarter after quarter, year after year their obscene revenue and profits just get bigger and bigger.
Microsoft show as much sign of "going down" right now as the moon does of leaving orbit, unfortunately.
Interesting links, thanks. I was only referring to Ubuntu though as that's who byolinux was trying to throw mud at. Canonical AFAIK are just like any other regular business, and have seen an opportunity to take Ubuntu code, package it with extras and offer it to OEMs. I don't see why this is any reflection on Ubuntu as Canonical could have done exactly the same thing with CentOS.
Btw, glad to hear you're having a good experience with the madwifi driver. I'm not. It's supposed to work with the WG311T cards too, but is very broken on Ubuntu 8.04 with the latest supported madwifi 0.9.4 driver. wlanconfig always barfs with an ioctl error, and dmesg spits out:
wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware didn't respond as expected' (HAL status 3)
Haven't cracked the problem yet.
Ok, I'll let you steer this away from trying to defend the statement about Ubuntu getting paid by proprietary vendors to include their software; as it's obvious by now that it was just pure conjecture and you can't back that up.
So what's your problem here. You have Gobuntu, which is 100% free and exists to serve your specific needs. And I have Ubuntu, which is not 100% free, but exists to serve my needs. And both are produced by the same people.
The true freedom in this scenario is the freedom to choose.
That's a Canonical product, not a Ubuntu product. It's just being reported on Ubuntu's news page because it's making use of Open Source Ubuntu software. Nothing on that story either about proprietary codecs so you'll have to find a better source than that.
Still waiting for evidence to back up the claim that Ubuntu bundle proprietary software because they are paid to do it!
I assume you can provide examples, and provide evidence that they were paid to do it?
No, Ubuntu is concerned about giving you the choice of being 100% free, or almost free where you need restricted drivers to get something working that otherwise you could not.
Ubuntu do not force you to use restricted drivers, they give you the choice! In doing so they attempt to provide their users with a Desktop experience that works as well as Windows/Mac OSX out of the box.
I value that choice and thank them for it.