In that comment you are fixated on gaining root. The point is, you don't need root to do damage to everything you care about. For example, malicious code running as the user can turn the machine into a spam box. Want to steal online banking? No problem, replace whatever shortcut launches the browser with a wrapper that looks for banking transactions. Got any sensitive files? Those are up for grabs. Root is not needed.
The link is for a presentation about Windows.
Where did you draw that conclusion from? Everything in the talk applies equally well to Linux. Regarding not wanting to watch a video, I will say that the first 10 minutes illustrates the huge security flaws that both Windows and Linux suffer from. The rest of the video focuses on a better security model.
I'm not unsympathetic, I prefer a nice HTML writeup too. There's a page on CapDesk that has the basic ideas.
You seem to be down on Linux, up on Windows.
Nope, I never said Windows had better security. I'm a Linux user, but I know that the "Linux is secure" mantra is a myth. If every Windows user switched to Ubuntu, we'd still have the same security situation all over again. Root is hardly any security at all when you trust every application you run with all your data and privileges.
I'd advise you to do some serious thinking. The guy who's been replying to you is totally right. There is absolutely zero security when everything that matters is runnable by you. If you're running something like Firefox as your everyday user and it has a vulnerability, game is over, just like IE. What's sad is this myth that most Linux users have regarding security.
You have never tried getting my printer to work in Linux. Works fine on Windows -- has a CD and downloadable software if I lose the CD. It's claimed to have some quasi-support in Linux, but it just don't work. The kicker is that it used to on my previous Debian install.
Typical Linux pain in the ass. Some stuff has gotten better, but I could never in good conscience recommend Linux to the average computer user.
You should've paid for the warranty. They weren't lying. Mine died in 6 days, my roommates in 2 weeks.
Which both would have been covered under the 90-day warranty. Most items, if they are going to break, do so fairly soon. That's why the stores are happy to sell you extended warranties. They are a complete ripoff. By the way, I've had my 360 for almost a year now, still works fine.
Don't lay a guilt trip on Slashdot. People speculate about all kinds of stuff they don't have all the facts on (tell me, did you ever discuss the OJ case?). It's a tragedy, but it's geek news and a topic for discussion. Just because your personally affected by it means nothing for everybody else.
Sometimes smart people do stupid things. You can look at the case of Richard Illes, who was a heart surgeon. He was arrested and convicted of killing his wife, the motive being that they were in the middle of a messy divorce. When police searched his house, he had on his bedstand "They Wrote Their Own Sentences. The FBI Handwriting Analysis Book." (Handwritten anonymous letters were later received by the police trying to implicate a coworker as the perpetrator.) He also used a rare gun in the murder that he had inherited from a relative. And finally, when they eventually arrested him, he had a manuscript for a book about the murder on his computer. The book was written from the killer's point of view.
Typical slashdot ranting/mindless joke gets +5 insightful. The fact is it's a free market society, and money buys you better lawyers. Should there be a law against free-market lawyers?
A language such as JavaScript (and Python to name another) communicates the same amount of information with greater clarity in far less space than "high-level" languages such as C++ and Java.
As these language wars do, it often comes down to dynamic vs static typing. A dynamic language like Python gains some of its succinctness by omitting types, which has the effect of reducing communication. Looking at the types of parameters and return values is an extremely valuable tool, and becomes more important as projects get larger in size.
Then there's languages like Perl, which gains much of it's brevity via hidden magic and cryptic constructs. It's great if you live and breath the language, but not so great otherwise.
If they can't tell the difference, why should they approve the team spending twice as long on the cleanup as on the prototype?
They should approve it after you explain that when they want new features or a bug fixed, it will be faster to add with fewer problems. You explain that if all projects were left in prototype stage as soon as something was working, eventually you'll end up with a big ball of mud.
Remember, I didn't say it was likely that Microsoft was covertly spying on you, just that if they were it wouldn't necessarily be easy to detect. Though after the AT&T scandal, the widescale bank monitoring, Carnivore, Crypto Ag, etc., it wouldn't suprise me in the least if the US government didn't have some backdoors deep down. Once hardware enforced DRM is the reality, you'll never be able to know.
On top of that there's always the threat of jailtime for revealing these programs, so the few that know about them may not want to blow the whistle. If you have reason to be paranoid then you should be, is all I'm saying.
It's not hypocritical. Google spends millions to maintain it's infrastructure. The average site is not spending millions. There are also plenty of content providers that want their site made as visible as possible, so they can make money somehow or just to get the information out.
And finally, just because somebody makes their content available for free does not mean somebody who adds value to it has to do the same. That's the difference between the BSD vs GPL philosophy.
The thing is, sniffing the wire is no guarantee. IE could collect the data and then send it when you check for a Windows Update. I'm not saying it's likely that Microsoft is covertly spying on you, but it's definitely possible, and very hard to detect. If you want to be extremely paranoid you should browse anonymously via public computers, using a disguise (because of face recognition technology).
What's that? You're afraid of Microsoft getting all your data, tinfoil hatter? What about your ISP? We've seen that the government is willing to install a massive spy network in our infrastructure (see AT&T). McNealy is right, privacy is dead for the average person.
People have the right (or ought to anyway) to keep domains that they purchase, develop, and maintain in good faith
I agree, though in this case the guy is just a cybersquatter. If you look at this site's history, you'll see that as late as Jan. 2006, the guy had it parked. Legally I still think he's entitled to it, but I don't feel any sympathy at all for this guy. He sat on that domain for years hoping somebody would buy it out. After he was sued over it, it suddenly became a shopping site for computer games.
Look back in history, and you'll see freedom of speech has always been less than perfect. However, with the advent of the internet there has never been a time of greater free speech. The United States has no national firewall. You can criticize the government (Michael Moore isn't behind bars). Bush will leave office in 2008. I wish people would keep perspective instead of dramatizing so much.
It doesn't make any sense that the Iranian government would want the United States to attack them. Even if the situation became a quagmire, the Iranian government would face huge upheaval. After seeing what happened to Saddam, do you really think the Iranian heads of state want the US knocking on their door?
An elitist thinks he's too good to do what the common man does. Volunteering for Vietnam shows some courage and willingness to share the load, unlike "fortunate son" Bush. It used to be that military service was a positive, and Kerry was trying to beef up his credentials as "Commander in Chief", because of the whole "Democrats are soft on war" issue. I don't know if he ever claimed the title of "War Hero", but he did serve his country with honor.
But whatever, that election has come and gone. It's not like I was a big fan of Kerry anyways, but he couldn't have done worse than Bush.
Or how about "John F Kerry, served his country while Bush avoided combat via his rich and connected daddy." Not too many "Ivy League Elitists" volunteered for Vietnam (Bush was Ivy League too, but he adopted a Texas-hick attitude after early political failure).
When you look at it that way, it's quite a lot like a chess game.
You can stretch anything to look like anything else. As I said, your comparison is superficial. However, this argument has definitely gotten into the repeating stage, so I'll exit here.
Slashdot Mirror
In that comment you are fixated on gaining root. The point is, you don't need root to do damage to everything you care about. For example, malicious code running as the user can turn the machine into a spam box. Want to steal online banking? No problem, replace whatever shortcut launches the browser with a wrapper that looks for banking transactions. Got any sensitive files? Those are up for grabs. Root is not needed.
Where did you draw that conclusion from? Everything in the talk applies equally well to Linux. Regarding not wanting to watch a video, I will say that the first 10 minutes illustrates the huge security flaws that both Windows and Linux suffer from. The rest of the video focuses on a better security model.
I'm not unsympathetic, I prefer a nice HTML writeup too. There's a page on CapDesk that has the basic ideas.
Nope, I never said Windows had better security. I'm a Linux user, but I know that the "Linux is secure" mantra is a myth. If every Windows user switched to Ubuntu, we'd still have the same security situation all over again. Root is hardly any security at all when you trust every application you run with all your data and privileges.
Wow. You live in Florida without air conditioning?
The 360 is nice except it's too damn noisy. That and all the games for it assume you have a 50" HDTV (text is always too hard to read).
I'd advise you to do some serious thinking. The guy who's been replying to you is totally right. There is absolutely zero security when everything that matters is runnable by you. If you're running something like Firefox as your everyday user and it has a vulnerability, game is over, just like IE. What's sad is this myth that most Linux users have regarding security.
Do some reading yourself (or watch the video): The SkyNet Virus Why it is Unstoppable; How to Stop it
You have never tried getting my printer to work in Linux. Works fine on Windows -- has a CD and downloadable software if I lose the CD. It's claimed to have some quasi-support in Linux, but it just don't work. The kicker is that it used to on my previous Debian install.
Typical Linux pain in the ass. Some stuff has gotten better, but I could never in good conscience recommend Linux to the average computer user.
Which both would have been covered under the 90-day warranty. Most items, if they are going to break, do so fairly soon. That's why the stores are happy to sell you extended warranties. They are a complete ripoff. By the way, I've had my 360 for almost a year now, still works fine.
Good grief, you can't manage without a game system on the off-chance that it goes down?
Don't lay a guilt trip on Slashdot. People speculate about all kinds of stuff they don't have all the facts on (tell me, did you ever discuss the OJ case?). It's a tragedy, but it's geek news and a topic for discussion. Just because your personally affected by it means nothing for everybody else.
Sometimes smart people do stupid things. You can look at the case of Richard Illes, who was a heart surgeon. He was arrested and convicted of killing his wife, the motive being that they were in the middle of a messy divorce. When police searched his house, he had on his bedstand "They Wrote Their Own Sentences. The FBI Handwriting Analysis Book." (Handwritten anonymous letters were later received by the police trying to implicate a coworker as the perpetrator.) He also used a rare gun in the murder that he had inherited from a relative. And finally, when they eventually arrested him, he had a manuscript for a book about the murder on his computer. The book was written from the killer's point of view.
Typical slashdot ranting/mindless joke gets +5 insightful. The fact is it's a free market society, and money buys you better lawyers. Should there be a law against free-market lawyers?
I agree, GP was unreasonable. I think we can also agree security is a bitch :)
As these language wars do, it often comes down to dynamic vs static typing. A dynamic language like Python gains some of its succinctness by omitting types, which has the effect of reducing communication. Looking at the types of parameters and return values is an extremely valuable tool, and becomes more important as projects get larger in size.
Then there's languages like Perl, which gains much of it's brevity via hidden magic and cryptic constructs. It's great if you live and breath the language, but not so great otherwise.
The people responding know it's a joke.
They should approve it after you explain that when they want new features or a bug fixed, it will be faster to add with fewer problems. You explain that if all projects were left in prototype stage as soon as something was working, eventually you'll end up with a big ball of mud.
Remember, I didn't say it was likely that Microsoft was covertly spying on you, just that if they were it wouldn't necessarily be easy to detect. Though after the AT&T scandal, the widescale bank monitoring, Carnivore, Crypto Ag, etc., it wouldn't suprise me in the least if the US government didn't have some backdoors deep down. Once hardware enforced DRM is the reality, you'll never be able to know.
On top of that there's always the threat of jailtime for revealing these programs, so the few that know about them may not want to blow the whistle. If you have reason to be paranoid then you should be, is all I'm saying.
It's not hypocritical. Google spends millions to maintain it's infrastructure. The average site is not spending millions. There are also plenty of content providers that want their site made as visible as possible, so they can make money somehow or just to get the information out.
And finally, just because somebody makes their content available for free does not mean somebody who adds value to it has to do the same. That's the difference between the BSD vs GPL philosophy.
The thing is, sniffing the wire is no guarantee. IE could collect the data and then send it when you check for a Windows Update. I'm not saying it's likely that Microsoft is covertly spying on you, but it's definitely possible, and very hard to detect. If you want to be extremely paranoid you should browse anonymously via public computers, using a disguise (because of face recognition technology).
What's that? You're afraid of Microsoft getting all your data, tinfoil hatter? What about your ISP? We've seen that the government is willing to install a massive spy network in our infrastructure (see AT&T). McNealy is right, privacy is dead for the average person.
I agree, though in this case the guy is just a cybersquatter. If you look at this site's history, you'll see that as late as Jan. 2006, the guy had it parked. Legally I still think he's entitled to it, but I don't feel any sympathy at all for this guy. He sat on that domain for years hoping somebody would buy it out. After he was sued over it, it suddenly became a shopping site for computer games.
Look back in history, and you'll see freedom of speech has always been less than perfect. However, with the advent of the internet there has never been a time of greater free speech. The United States has no national firewall. You can criticize the government (Michael Moore isn't behind bars). Bush will leave office in 2008. I wish people would keep perspective instead of dramatizing so much.
"To view the site you shuold enable Javascript!"
It doesn't make any sense that the Iranian government would want the United States to attack them. Even if the situation became a quagmire, the Iranian government would face huge upheaval. After seeing what happened to Saddam, do you really think the Iranian heads of state want the US knocking on their door?
An elitist thinks he's too good to do what the common man does. Volunteering for Vietnam shows some courage and willingness to share the load, unlike "fortunate son" Bush. It used to be that military service was a positive, and Kerry was trying to beef up his credentials as "Commander in Chief", because of the whole "Democrats are soft on war" issue. I don't know if he ever claimed the title of "War Hero", but he did serve his country with honor.
But whatever, that election has come and gone. It's not like I was a big fan of Kerry anyways, but he couldn't have done worse than Bush.
Or how about "John F Kerry, served his country while Bush avoided combat via his rich and connected daddy." Not too many "Ivy League Elitists" volunteered for Vietnam (Bush was Ivy League too, but he adopted a Texas-hick attitude after early political failure).
You can stretch anything to look like anything else. As I said, your comparison is superficial. However, this argument has definitely gotten into the repeating stage, so I'll exit here.
Who knows, I doubt you were there. However, it is a fact Kerry was in the line of fire, unlike "fortunate son" Bush.