This is a Yahoo article about the Supreme
Court ruling in Norway in 1999, which resulted
in it being legal to virtually try to break into
anyone's system, it becomes illegal first when
you manage to break into someone's system!
Thursday December 24 12:40 PM ET
European court clears way for hackers
By Christopher Jones
SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - In a decision that sets a precedent in the realm of hacking, the Norwegian supreme court ruled last week that probing computer networks linked to
the Internet is not illegal.
The University of Oslo charged a private security-software company, Norman Data Defense Systems, with attempted break-ins and disruptions on machines linked to its
computer network. Norman Data conducted the network probes in 1995 on behalf of a Norwegian public news network, which was filming a program about the Internet and
wanted to demonstrate the inner workings of open systems and the pitfalls therein.
"The essence of the ruling is that if you want to join the Internet, you have to assure that you're protected," said Gunnel Wullstein, president and CEO of Norman Data Security. "If
you don't want to be visited, close your ports."
The case also illustrates the fine line between hackers and crackers. The former describes those who merely want to explore computer systems, while the latter refers to intruders
with malicious intent. They exploit networks using specialized tools and tricks of the trade, including unauthorized access operations.
During the experiment, the company's engineers used finger commands to find out which users were logged on to the university's machines and information related to their
session. They used telnet - a remote login command - to verify email addresses on the university's mail port. They also ran scans to see if any ports were open.
The University of Oslo could not be contacted in time for this story.
One of the engineers involved in the experiment, who asked not to be identified, stressed that all of these operations are based on open protocols and were not designed to break
into systems. Rather, the test was done to show what information is freely available from machines hooked to the Internet. During the experiment, he said, no user IDs or other
such information was retrieved.
"We wanted to help the news service tell the world that when you surf you leave your IP address all over the place, especially if you use the same machine," said the engineer.
"This information can be used to find out quite a bit about you."
Hackers and crackers will often use commercial port-scanning tools, or war dialers, as a way to identify easy entries into computer networks. Norman Data said it only limited
port scans and found no open ports during the experiment.
"I would say that it's not hacking to show if you go on the Internet, you expose yourself," said Wullstein. "It is up to you to decide which part you want to be exposed and which you
do not."
When an Oslo court first ruled in the case, it found the company guilty of an attempted break-in on a computer network and misuse of other people's machine resources, causing
inconvenience. Both charges carried a steep fine, and the company was also ordered to pay for repairs to the university's network. After Norman appealed the decision, a district
court overturned the more serious break-in charge, but upheld the misuse charge.
In Tuesday's supreme court decision, however, the engineer and the company were cleared on both charges.
"This is very principal, the first time the supreme court has taken a standpoint in a case like this," said Frode Pedersen, news editor at Aftenposten, a daily newspaper in Oslo. "The
high court said that if you have a service on the Internet not directly protected, you have to stand for people searching for security holes."
Another good movie that parodies a lot of those cool science fiction movies is Space Balls. It's directed by Mel Brooks and it was quite funny when I first saw it. "...you might as well skip the Xmas celebration completely, and instead sit in front of your linux computer playing with the all-new-and-improved linux kernel version."
I've tried running Linux on the XCopilot, and it said the Palm's clock speed was 49MHz. But I guess XCopilot can't be much relied on. Personally I own a Palm Pilot III, which clock speed does this run on?
Why do always you Slashdot people write "Use Babelfish" if an article is in german? There are in fact many of us Slashdot readers who know german. So why don't start saying "Use Babelfish if you don't know german." ?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm running OS X 10.4.4 and I know for sure that in the past there has been a utility similar to "pmap" that was called vmmap.
/usr/bin/vmmap
The path was
But it's somehow disappeared from OS X. Anybody know why?
ErikYYY also has a Space Invaders for GRUB you might want to check out :-)
For those interested, http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/, is the specification to SVG 1.0.
Nautilus, the GNOME filemanager and graphical shell uses SVG
(actually librsvg) for drawing vector icons and rendering anti-aliased fonts.
This is a Yahoo article about the Supreme Court ruling in Norway in 1999, which resulted in it being legal to virtually try to break into anyone's system, it becomes illegal first when you manage to break into someone's system!
Thursday December 24 12:40 PM ET
European court clears way for hackers
By Christopher Jones
SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - In a decision that sets a precedent in the realm of hacking, the Norwegian supreme court ruled last week that probing computer networks linked to the Internet is not illegal.
The University of Oslo charged a private security-software company, Norman Data Defense Systems, with attempted break-ins and disruptions on machines linked to its computer network. Norman Data conducted the network probes in 1995 on behalf of a Norwegian public news network, which was filming a program about the Internet and wanted to demonstrate the inner workings of open systems and the pitfalls therein.
"The essence of the ruling is that if you want to join the Internet, you have to assure that you're protected," said Gunnel Wullstein, president and CEO of Norman Data Security. "If you don't want to be visited, close your ports."
The case also illustrates the fine line between hackers and crackers. The former describes those who merely want to explore computer systems, while the latter refers to intruders with malicious intent. They exploit networks using specialized tools and tricks of the trade, including unauthorized access operations.
During the experiment, the company's engineers used finger commands to find out which users were logged on to the university's machines and information related to their session. They used telnet - a remote login command - to verify email addresses on the university's mail port. They also ran scans to see if any ports were open.
The University of Oslo could not be contacted in time for this story.
One of the engineers involved in the experiment, who asked not to be identified, stressed that all of these operations are based on open protocols and were not designed to break into systems. Rather, the test was done to show what information is freely available from machines hooked to the Internet. During the experiment, he said, no user IDs or other such information was retrieved.
"We wanted to help the news service tell the world that when you surf you leave your IP address all over the place, especially if you use the same machine," said the engineer. "This information can be used to find out quite a bit about you."
Hackers and crackers will often use commercial port-scanning tools, or war dialers, as a way to identify easy entries into computer networks. Norman Data said it only limited port scans and found no open ports during the experiment.
"I would say that it's not hacking to show if you go on the Internet, you expose yourself," said Wullstein. "It is up to you to decide which part you want to be exposed and which you do not."
When an Oslo court first ruled in the case, it found the company guilty of an attempted break-in on a computer network and misuse of other people's machine resources, causing inconvenience. Both charges carried a steep fine, and the company was also ordered to pay for repairs to the university's network. After Norman appealed the decision, a district court overturned the more serious break-in charge, but upheld the misuse charge.
In Tuesday's supreme court decision, however, the engineer and the company were cleared on both charges.
"This is very principal, the first time the supreme court has taken a standpoint in a case like this," said Frode Pedersen, news editor at Aftenposten, a daily newspaper in Oslo. "The high court said that if you have a service on the Internet not directly protected, you have to stand for people searching for security holes."
Hemos: Better change your password!
I know Xdaliclock for X11 doesn't work too well because of the y2k bug, but the Palm version seem to be working all right!
Thanks JWZ!
Another good movie that parodies a lot of those cool science fiction movies is Space Balls. It's directed by Mel Brooks and it was quite funny when I first saw it.
"...you might as well skip the Xmas celebration completely, and instead sit in front of your linux computer playing with the all-new-and-improved linux kernel version."
I've tried running Linux on the XCopilot, and it said the Palm's clock speed was 49MHz. But I guess XCopilot can't be much relied on. Personally I own a Palm Pilot III, which clock speed does this run on?
Why do always you Slashdot people write "Use Babelfish" if an article is in german? There are
in fact many of us Slashdot readers who know german. So why don't start saying "Use Babelfish if you don't know german." ?
This was especially for you, Rob.