Posts by Vic 5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
> By what twisted logic can you lay that blame for Flash crashing your machine at the feet of MS?
By the simple, non-twisted logic that it's MS' fault.
Flash can crash - that's down to Adobe. It might even take down the browser - that's understandable, as the browser was relying on it.
But taking down the whole machine? That's an unstable OS.
> other anti-spam suggestions like SPF
SPF is *NOT* an anti-spam measure. It is an anti-forgery measure.
The correlation of forged emails to spam means that there is usually a coincidental reduction in spam when SPF filtering is intrioduced - but that is not the purpose of the technology, and making claims about how effective SPF is at stopping spam merely demonstrates a lack of understanding.
> If I register my one outbound mail server for mail from my domain, then what about mail I send via mailing lists
If you - as the domain owner - make a positive statement that any mail not sent from your server is a forgery, then any recipient receiving mail allegedly from your domain but not from your server can only go by the statement you have made - that it is a forgery.
There are many ways to permit sending mail through other servers, but you can hardly blame recipients for taking you at your word. If you don't mean it - don't say it.
I've seen this several times over the past week - the major AV suites all seem to miss the infection (although the Microsoft MSRT catches it). The giveaway symptom is that you cannot get to Windows Updates. Running Wireshark on the cable shows that neither IE nor Firefox even do a DNS lookup. I haven't tried other browsers, but I expect them to be the same.
The other thing that Wireshark shows is the retrieval of target URLs from a machine in Eastern Europe. The PC then goes on to do the biggind of its bot master. Mostly click fraud, but passwords are also being stolen, and all search traffic seems to be echoed to a snooping server.
One of my customers uses online banking. I told him he had this infection, and that he should change all his passwords as a matter of urgency. He phoned the bank, just as I said he should. They replied that he could change his credentials himself on another computer. Nice to see the banks taking security so seriously - I mean, what harm can compromised credentials do?
Vic.
> The terms of the original contract were pretty clear. Novell intended to
> sell, and SCO intended to buy, the copyrights.
Yes, that's true. Sadly, Santa Cruz (the SCO that existed at the time) couldn't afford to buy what they wanted, so the deal was changed. SCO got the business at a much reduced price, but they didn't get everything they'd initially wanted - Novel retained the copyrights and the right to the royalty stream. They paid 5% of that stream to SCO as a fee for running the sales side of the business.
Santa Cruz told Caldera all about this when they sold the business on.
> The contract simply makes no sense without transferring the copyrights.
No, that's completely wrong. The contract makes lots of sense, it just doesn't do what SCO want it to do.
> It's just that they were inexplicably omitted from the actual bill of sale portion
> of the contract detailing what was being transferred.
It's completely explicable: Santa Cruz couldn't afford what they wanted, so they couldn't buy it. They bought a small portion of it, because that's all they could afford.
> What SCO is trying to do is to get the courts to read a term into the contract,
> that transfers the copyrights.
Yes. But what several courts have told them is that that clause simply isn't in the contract, and never has been. Santa Cruz didn't buy the copyrights, so they couldn't sell them to Caldera. Caldera has no right to sue over copyrights they do not own.
> They clearly always believed that they did own the copyrights
This isn't true either - they only started asserting ownership once Novell had said they wren't interested in joining the SCOSource scam.
> Courts can infer terms in contracts if it's clear there was a drafting error
they can. And several courts have now determined that there was no drafting error. The contract really does mean what it says - copyrights were excluded from the sale.
Vic.
The background to this is very simple indeed.
The Santa Cruz Organisation (SCO) wanted to buy the whole Unix business from Novell, but couldn't afford it. So instead, they bought the distribution rights. They sold packaged Unix, and were supposed to pass all the proceeds to Novell. Novell would then return 5% of that as a fee for doing the boring selling stuff.
Caldera - a Linux distributor - bought that business from SCO and then - this is the confusing bit - renamed themselves "The SCO Group". These two companies have both gone by the name "SCO", and that confusion appears to be deliberate.
NewSCO (formerly Caldera) then decided that they owned all the Unix copyrights (the ones OldSCO couldn't afford and never bought). they also decided that, as Linux had grown up so quickly, it *must* have stolen Unix code in it. This is the basis on which they tred to sue world + dog.
The two prongs of defence used so far are :-
1) Neither incarnation of SCO has ever owned the copyrights that NewSCO have been suing people over.
2) There is no stolen code in Linux anyway.
The SCO v Novell case is mostly about the first of these. Judge Kimball ruled a long time ago that SCO didn't own the copyrights it claimed, but the Court of Appeals said that a jury should have decided that. A jury did decide that - and it decided that SCO has never owned said copyrights.
The SCO v IBM case is primarily about the second of these items - that there is no stolen Unix code in Linux. It is somewhat mooted, though, because even if there were any, SCO has no standing to sue anyone anyway, because it doesn't own the code it claims to be trying to "protect".
There are further defences. An important one is that SCO was a Linux distributor, and distributed the alleged infringing code even some years after starting its lawsuits. Indeed, Caldera was the company that put most of it into Linux in the first place. They released this under the GPL - and therefore everyone is granted a licence to use and redistribute all this code anyway.
This last is important because the FUDsters are already firing up the talk of what might happen should Someone Evil(tm) buy Novell. the answer is simple - nothing. Novell have deliberately distributed all of this code under GPL, and that cannot be revoked just because the bad guys buy up the source.
Vic.
> I *demand*...
>
> an obvious way to quit without making changes.
:q . Seems simple enough.
> that the arrow keys move a visible insertion point around the text
Yep. I like that about vi too.
> that it is obvious how to access other commands
There's a built-in help page...
> I've used things like sed, to which the very notion of cursor keys and insertion
> point are alien.
No you haven't. sed is a stream editor. You don't use it interactively.
> But still, I consider the above a fundamental right
Looks like you're a vi devotee too :-)
I've seen the emplyment agency thang from most sides - trying to get a job, trying not to get a job, and trying to find someone to do a job.
With very few exceptions, the agencies are the biggest part of the problem.
When I was an employer, I had two criteria. I wanted someone who knew C properly, and I wanted someone who was a shit-hot coder. That was all - I'd pay pretty much anything to anyone who could fulfill my needs.
What did I get fromn the agencies? "He knows Java". "You want a C-level programmer - what languages would that use?". "I've got a really good guy for you here. Java and .Net". I spent far more time on the phone talking to parasites than was warranted...
A bit later in my career, I was trying to find a job. Many companies require you to go through agencies, so that's what I had to do. So I'd ring up an agency that had my CV and ask them whether or not they'd put me forward for a certain position I had seen them advertising. "Oh we didn't think that was your sort of thing". "What, the job I've been doing for the last decade? No, I can see how you wouldn't have associated that with me..."
So now here I am settled into my current job. I still get the 15 or so mails per week trying to get me to work somewhere else; in *almost* all situations, the job is so different to what I do that I'd have to be *desperate* to even apply. And I'm not desperate :-) On a couple of occasions, something's caught my eye, so I ask a question about it. "Sure," comes the stock reply, "Send us an updated CV and we'll find out".
My conclusion is :-
- There is no skills shortage
- There is no job shortage.
- The reason each side of the divide believes the shortage exists is simply that the cretins who are supposed to be matching up engineers to jobs don't know their arse from their elbow.
Vic.
0845 don't cost as much as 0870 numbers, but there is "revenue sharing" on those lines as well. So someone makes money out of it - albeit a fairly small amount.
This is why one of my VoIP providers was happy to give me an 0845 number, but not a geographical number...
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