November 2004 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

ISP plans (was Along comes another Fedora Core release...)
by David Nicholls 09 Nov '04

09 Nov '04

interesting... i know someone else who wanted to go the orcon way and got sick of waiting so went back to telecom. prob is they cant get hold of orcom to cancel. they are now left wondering if somethings happened to them. anyone know? cheers... david -----Original Message----- From: Oliver Jones [mailto:oliver(a)deeper.co.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 9 November 2004 11:46 am Subject: Re: [wlug] Along comes another Fedora Core release... On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 11:29, Gavin Denby wrote: I am getting my jetstream upgrade tomorrow, so not yet sorry. But then I get the new 40 GB/mth limits What ISP/Plan is that? I switched to Orcon last week. Sick of Telecom. Waiting to get switched over though. Regards -- Oliver Jones > Director > <mailto:oliver.jones(a)deeperdesign.com> oliver(a)deeperdesign.com > +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited > +64 (7) 377 3328 > <http://www.deeperdesign.com> www.deeperdesign.com

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RE: [wlug] ISP plans (was Along comes another Fedora Core release...)
by Lindsay Druett 09 Nov '04

09 Nov '04

Ironically, I was talking to Richard from Satlan last night about upgrading my aDSL connection, and he pointed to Telecom Website, and yeah, this does take quite a bit of find (quite deliberate I'd say), but you can get to here, http://www.telecom.co.nz/chm/0,5123,203160-202570,00.html , and here are the plans that you can get from other ISPs. He tells me it works, so all I have to do is sign up for the new plan I want. They do the change on your billing day. Incidentally, both Clear Communications and Telstra (when they were separate) had little ATD boxes which did digit insertion, so when you dialled say 095209414, it inserted 050 in front so that you got 050095209414. I wish I kept some of those, does anyone know where they can be sourced from, I going to have a hunt, but they could save $ 10.00 a month now :) Maybe you know Gavin. Oh well, I'm about to go in for our monthly Telecom meeting, I'll ask them - I won't mention the ATD idea. -----Original Message----- From: David Nicholls Sent: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 09:56 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Subject: [wlug] ISP plans (was Along comes another Fedora Core release...) interesting... i know someone else who wanted to go the orcon way and got sick of waiting so went back to telecom. prob is they cant get hold of orcom to cancel. they are now left wondering if somethings happened to them. anyone know? cheers... david -----Original Message----- From: Oliver Jones [mailto:oliver(a)deeper.co.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 9 November 2004 11:46 am Subject: Re: [wlug] Along comes another Fedora Core release... On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 11:29, Gavin Denby wrote: I am getting my jetstream upgrade tomorrow, so not yet sorry. But then I get the new 40 GB/mth limits What ISP/Plan is that? I switched to Orcon last week. Sick of Telecom. Waiting to get switched over though. Regards -- Oliver Jones > Director > <mailto:oliver.jones(a)deeperdesign.com> oliver(a)deeperdesign.com > +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited > +64 (7) 377 3328 > <http://www.deeperdesign.com> www.deeperdesign.com

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RE: [wlug] The Microsoft Antivirus Reward Program
by Lindsay Druett 09 Nov '04

09 Nov '04

> Sure, but if there's an unknown potential flaw in a window of > your house, which > causes it to break if tapped three times or somesuch, and a > thief uses this to > break in and steal all your stuff. > Regardless of the fact that the window company may or may not > be fixing the > issue in future, would you make such snide comments if the > police etc still > hunted the thief and the window making company put up some > incentive to assist > this? I don't think so. > > Not trying to defend MS here or anything like that, just that > the whole "it's > cool to bash microsoft without thinking about it, because > we're linux people > and therefore we're so much smarter/better than them" > attitude grows tiresome > at times. But at the end of the day, using the scenario here, the job of the window company is to fix this flaw and stop producing windows with this flaw, not go around and knee-cap someone because they discovered and exploited this flaw. Believe it or not, Chubb international have a safe somewhere with a wod of cash in it, and if someone successfully breaks into that safe, providing they tell Chubb how they broke into that safe, the money is theirs. I'm not trying to defend criminals, but I don't think it's Microsoft's place to knee-cap people who exploit their vulnerabilities, it's their job to proactively find and fix vulnerabilities and not make any vulnerabilities public knowledge without a solution to fix the problem.

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RE: [wlug] The Microsoft Antivirus Reward Program
by Lindsay Druett 09 Nov '04

09 Nov '04

> You are right in that it is Microsoft's first responsibility should be > to correct the flaws in its products and commercial behaviour > that allow > these problems to propagate. It is however in their interest to also > try and find and prosecute these individuals. A few high profile > convictions may send a "message" to virus writers that what they do > isn't so smart. > Yes, but from any level of incident response, the DIY approach is not a good approach. Personally, I see this as Microsoft taking the law into their own hands. I can fully understand the Microsoft is rather pissed at the moment. The appropriate authorities such as the FBI in America, or closer to home, the NZ Police Electronic Crimes Lab are there to hunt down, catch, arrest, and convict cyber-criminals. Tell me, what is the difference between me beating up a thief with a baseball bat and Microsoft doing what they intend to do. > The only problem we have is that the "good guys" could get > painted with > the same brush as the "bad guys". The "good guys" being > those grey and > white hats who find bugs and write proof of concept exploits and post > them to forums such as bugtraq. These guys help make the software > safer. However as a side effect they also help the morons who write > 800k VB viruses cause havoc. Which is unfortunate. But it is > ultimately the moronic VB virus coders who are the problem not the > people who find the software flaws in the first place. > It's the case of slowly educating the public, people are slow learners. If they only realised that stealing cars these days also requires a similar level of skill.

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Along comes another Fedora Core release...
by Oliver Jones 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

Along comes another Fedora Core release, so here comes the obligatory beg for a copy on CD. :) Anyone out there with bandwidth to burn who wouldn't mind burning me a copy? Thanks PS, Got my copy of Halo 2 this morning.... champing at the bit to play but gotta work... damn it. ;) Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com

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The Microsoft Antivirus Reward Program
by Lindsay Druett 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

Hey All, Please excuse the hypertext, but this came from LAN1s website, http://www.lan1.co.nz/default.aspx?p=snippet&story=1 , Fasinating... The Microsoft Antivirus Reward Program In an effort to help law enforcement agencies identify and bring to justice those who illegally release damaging worms, viruses, and other types of malicious code on the Internet, Microsoft has created the Microsoft® Antivirus Reward Program, initially funded with US$5 million. Through this program, Microsoft will offer monetary rewards to persons who provide information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for launching malicious viruses and worms on the Internet. Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service, in coordination with Interpol, will investigate leads that are provided through this program in order to identify and prosecute those responsible for such crimes that harm the private industry and the public. $750,000 in Awards Currently Offered Microsoft is offering three rewards under the Antivirus Rewards Program. . The first reward, in the amount of US$250,000, is for information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for launching the MSBlast.A worm (also known as Blaster). The worm was designed to prevent consumers from installing the latest software updates by attacking Microsoft's Windows® Update website, which provides updates to help users protect their computers against malicious attacks. . The second reward, in the amount of $250,000, is for information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for launching the Sobig virus. This virus, the first variant of which was detected on January 10, 2003, attacked individual machines and sent itself to each e-mail address in the computer's contact list. The Sobig.B and Sobig.C variants of the virus made messages appear as if they had come from official Microsoft e-mail addresses. . The third reward, in the amount of $250,000, is for information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for launching the Mydoom.B worm. Mydoom.B is a variant of the MyDoom.A worm, also known as the Novarg worm, which spread quickly to infect computers worldwide. The release of Mydoom.B triggered the first alert from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's new National Cyber Alert System.

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New releases today
by Craig Box 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

Slashdot will no doubt have picked up on these, but Fedora Core 3 and the Novell Linux Desktop 9 have both been released. FC3 is available from http://fedora.redhat.com/ (use the torrent at http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/) - we'll have it by the end of the day and I'm sure that some people will grab it from those who have it and arrange distribution. The NLD is a "commercial product" with a "30 day evaluation version", which is the standard full version with a Novell ZENworks (Red Carpet, for those who remember Ximian) Update code valid that's only valid for 30 days - you can still use it forever. Based on Phil Kangro's demonstration and reviews, it sounds like this will be a very interesting release. Built on SUSE 9.2 and running GNOME 2.6, this is basically what Ximian do now. Check it out at http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/index.html?sourceidint=homepage_annou ncement1 and we'll probably have a copy of that by the end of today too. Craig

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FW: Y Windows
by David Nicholls 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

This one souns interesting guys -----Original Message----- From: Michael Lee [mailto:mike(a)loginlogic.net] Sent: Saturday, 6 November 2004 5:45 pm To: David Nicholls Subject: Fw: Y Windows > Heard of it?? > > http://www.y-windows.org/about.html

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Books... anyone want these?
by Oliver Jones 05 Nov '04

05 Nov '04

Hi. I have a few books I no longer need. They aren't Linux related but some geeks amongst you all might want them. They are: Access 97 Developers Handbook - good Access 97 programming manual, probably applies to later versions but I've never used Access past the '97 version so I wouldn't know. Programming Windows 95 (Charles Petzold) - The Petzold books a very good. Held up as the best Windows API books etc. Obviously this is a tad out of date as the Win32 API has moved on a bit but I'm sure a lot of it is still useful to some degree. This teachs the Win32 API. No frameworks. Just raw C API. Programming Windows 95 with MFC. If you want to be productive programming GUI apps in Windows you need to learn some sort of framework. MFC is Microsoft's framework of doom. No doubt this book is very aged. I imagine MFC would have moved on quite a lot since this was published. But it may still be somewhat relevant. However if I was to write a GUI app in Windows these days I'd write it in C# or some such thing. If anyone has any interest please email me. Otherwise I'll try and find homes for them on Trademe... Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com

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live cd
by David Nicholls 02 Nov '04

02 Nov '04

anyone up here at the uni happen to have a live cd of any sort handy i can get a copy of? cheers... David Nicholls Computer Support Consultant School of Science & Engineering/Dept of Chemistry The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

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