| Friday, September
13, 2002
Bob Thompson says:
To test the WinXP exploit,
do the following on a WinXP system that has not had SP1 applied.
1. If it is not already present, create the folder
c:\junk and copy one or more trash files into it. (If c:\junk does exist,
move any files you wish to keep to another directory).
2. Fire up your browser and visit http://www.ttgnet.com/test_of_winxp_exploit.htm
3. Click on the link.
4. Check the contents of your c:\junk directory.
Bob
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
That's definitive. It's also the case that some
updates are breaking long established programs.
Mr. Lipscomb explains his views; I
have put that up with the letter it replies to.
And Eric has another, and perhaps important, note
on the subject. I have put it up there too.
And all this goes on and on. I am particularly
unhappy with the patches breaking programs that were running fine. The
remedy may be to return to Windows 2000.
AND here is something else to
worry about:
Jerry, As a user of Word, You might like to read
this http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27114.html
Regards, Edward Chambers
If you use WORD you should go read this. There is
a work around: put stuff you care about in directories you have created
with names that only you know. But since most people just stuff things
into My Documents....
And on a timely note:
Re: Computer security.
Dr. Pournelle, Your latest security alert brought
the subject to mind. I was wondering if you had ever provided a summary
overview of computer security issues and good practices and tools to have?
It seems like an appropriate topic for one of your Chaos Manor reports.
There's the one you emphasize often, of
course--never open unexpected email attachments.
In addition to operating practices like that, my own
security setup has four hardware/software elements:
First, there's having a good anti-virus program. I
use Norton 2000 at home and we have Norton 2002 at work. Second, there's
having a good firewall. Again, I use Norton at home. At work we have a
firewall appliance. Third, I use the GRR! program (Grayware Registry
Rearguard) which monitors registry activity for "suspicious"
behavior. From time-to-time it's caught attempts by something to attempt
to put "run on startup" type commands into the registry. Fourth,
I use the program Ad Aware frequently to check for spyware on my computer.
David L. Burkhead "May I be just half the
person Advanced Surface Microscopy, Inc. My dog thinks I am."
And see
the Xupiter warning. And the beat goes on...
To change the subject:
Hello Dr. Pournelle: I have to wonder: is there
something wrong with Democratic voters (other than the obvious), or is this
some kind of emotional disorder which infects Democratic candidates? Perhaps
this will just become Standard operating procedure. Certainly, after
witnessing the failure of similar tactics by Al Gore, two years ago, Janet
Reno could have attempted something better. It has already been determined
that we voters are too stupid to punch holes in cards; should it also be
inferred that we are not thought trustworthy, even to point at a name on a
touchscreen? Reno, who had been leading attorney McBride in the polls by a
clear 25 points before slipping behind recently, was still mulling her
options -- perhaps a lawsuit to overturn the results or a recount request --
and claiming that thousands of voters were turned away from the polls on
Tuesday. Reno's campaign complained about polls opening late or ignoring
Bush's order to stay open an extra two hours, election workers struggling
with new touchscreen voting machines, and voter confusion about polling
places because of new precinct boundaries. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,62988,00.html
Neal Pritchett
Well, some counties have a lot of people about my
age...
You had commented on some odd anti-Conservative
rantings on a technology web site a week or so ago. On the gripping hand,
here's a guy who "gets it" vis Islam and the West on
LowEndMac.com!
Dueling Civilizations: Islam and the West: http://www.lowendmac.com/9-11/moore.html
Since September 11th, 2001, there has been much
pontificating and theorizing about the "why" behind the
murderous suicide attacks on New York and Washington. I have been
underwhelmed by most of the analysis. . A literal interpretation of those
verses and others enables Muslims to affirm their religion as "a
religion of peace" while assenting to slaughter and oppression of
infidels with no sense of self-contradiction.
Jim Riticher
Islam is a religion of peace within the area of
submission. With infidels there can only be truce, not peace. It's pretty
clear on a reading of the Koran. In the West there was The Enlightenment
which made religious questions a bit less deadly. That has happened among
some Moslems, but not among Moslems generally.
And on another note:
Charles Cooper of ZDNet wrote: > The first
company that figures out how to free us from our > collective computing
straitjacket will strike financial gold.
That's an easy thing to say, and I've spent so much
time thinking about the topic that I'm sure it's true, but it overlooks
the tremendous cost of establishing a new computing platform. Only by
throwing away essentially all the work we've done so far on Unix, Windows,
and other popular computing platforms can we get around all the terrible
problems built into those platforms, and who's willing to do that?
I mean, I _know_ how to create a completely new
platform that eliminates every problem I've observed in computer
programming and operation over the years, except of course for basic human
weaknesses (limits to our intelligence and memory, poor hand-eye
coordination, etc.). Even these weaknesses can be programmed around to a
large extent. Computers are just what the doctor ordered for augmenting
the limited human brain. After the famous comment by Clausewitz, I would
say that "engineering is the continuation of evolution by other
means."
And while I'm on it, I'll invoke Fermat as well:
"I have discovered a truly remarkable computing paradigm which this
email is too small to contain."
Such a new platform, over a lifespan of a hundred
years, could be worth ten to a hundred times the total value of all
computing devices created to date... some tens of trillions of dollars.
But it would cost billions just to do the basic research to prove the
range of its potential value to the world. As a thought experiment, my
model of how computers should work has made tremendous progress over the
last ten years, and it hasn't cost me a penny, but the minute it leaves my
brain and other people start working on it, it becomes too expensive for
me to retain control of it.
To know it would work, hundreds of people would have
to spend years building useful amounts of hardware and software. Though
the potential payoff is much bigger than this investment, it's still a
prohibitively large investment.
We can't fix today's computing platforms using an
incremental strategy, and we can't afford to do anything more dramatic. So
how the heck does anything get fixed? Alex Pournelle suggested creating
the computing equivalent of an X Prize Foundation, and that might work for
less ambitious goals, but it would never get people working on ways to
replace Unix and Windows. The effort's out of proportion to any award a
private foundation could offer.
I'd like to think I can figure out a way to get
around these problems, but as I said, I've been thinking about this matter
for a long, long time, and I've made no real progress so far. Well, it
took the world 363 years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem...
. png
--
Peter N. Glaskowsky Principal Analyst, MicroDesign
Resources Editor in Chief, Microprocessor Report
Marvelous. Thanks!
From: Chris Morton To: Jerry Pournelle Subject: Spam
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
If somebody else has already addressed this please
disregard. Rather than filter email on your wife's PC, have you considered
instead setting up a Linux mailserver running Fetchmail and Sendmail. You
could download mail for any and all accounts there, doing the filtering on
the mailserver. You could get your mail from it using POP3.
Just a suggestion.
Chris Morton Rocky River, OH
We've thought of it. I haven't done it. Sloth. I
have actually been hoping to get high speed access and then set up a mail
server. It appears I can't, so I guess I need to put a mail server machine
in line here. I need to think on the details of that, including the
complications of travel etc. And my head is in the post-Atlantean
era...
Dr. Pournelle,
I found the patcher that Steve Gibson has written to
be a simple painless download to fix the hole in WinXP if you do not have
or cannot install WinXP SP-1 yet. (My experiences installing WinXP SP-1 is
detailed below.) The patch can be found at:
https://grc.com/xpdite/xpdite.htm
It is informational as well and will leave things
well enough alone if it finds the problem fixed or WinXP SP-1 installed. I
have already recommended it to several other people who do not yet have
WinXP SP-1. It works.
And now for the fun part: Installing WinXP SP-1 (I
am reminded of your slogan we do these silly things so that you don't have
to...)
It began innocently enough: I logged onto the WinXp
automatic updates page and looked at the WinXP SP-1 patch as if it was
just another MS patch. The message tells us it will most likely only
require a 30MB download.
Well, figuring that I have 350MB free on the C: hard
drive (10GB) and that I have already installed all other MS patches
(whether critical or not) I thought this should not take long at all.
Wrong. First the installer spent 20 minutes
examining my machine, then 2 seconds checking the product reg code with
MS, then went into determining if I had enough disk space for the
installation. This step took another 20 minutes and then stopped with a
message that I needed another 575MB to install or another 850MB if I
wanted to install with full backup. Wow!! Since I had un-checked the full
backup button earlier I was surprised to see this as well as the need for
575MB of space. Not believing this I stopped the install (you really have
no choice since the installer program ends it here), deleted about 300MB
of files and restarted. 40 minutes later the same thing happened, I still
needed 275MB more space for the install and more if I wanted backup! I
deleted the required space and ran again. This time the first part again
took 20 minutes, the MS registration check 2 seconds, but the installation
space check only took 3 seconds (go figure).
Now it started the actual download of files. First
surprise: I needed 55MB of files! Oh, well.
Second surprise: I got 8.5Kbits on my cable modem of
download speed (cable modem might as well have been a 33.6 dial up,
right...). Since all other MS update downloads have been in the 50Kbits to
100Kbits range you can imagine my surprise. (This slow rate happened each
time I downloaded the WinXP Sp-1 patch - on 3 separate occasions.)
After 25MB had downloaded (it shows a download
remaining counter) I got Surprise 3: the server dropped and the install
program asked if I wanted to "retry" or "quit".
Of course after 2 hours I furiously hit
"retry" and was immediately hit by Surprise 4: it now was going
to download 73MB of files for another 200 minutes of download time!
Actually, the last is a glitch in the downloader since after it had
downloaded about 30MB it went straight into installing the files. Once it
had started the actual install it took 20 minutes including a re-boot to
finish.
Whew. Of course I tried the same thing again on the
second WinXP machine with the same results. I had to prove I could take
the punishment (proves you are a man, right?).
OK, so now I wised up. On the third machine I
cleared off 1GB of space on the C: drive to prepare. While doing that I
downloaded the 133MB Network Install of WinXP SP-1. See the MS downloads
page for WinXP SP-1 to find this at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/
downloads/servicepacks/sp1/default.asp
This I downloaded onto another machine (at 9.5KBits
this also took several hours). Then I transferred the 133MB installer exe
to the D: drive on the target machine via ethernet and clicked it to start
it. The install from this point took about 25 minutes.
I did this silly stuff (took two evenings, 6-8 hours
each, Wednesday and Thursday after the Monday release) so you might not
have to. I can only hope the download speed was limited by the number of
people trying to get the WinXP SP-1 patch and not by MS server
limitations. Others will experience the same frustrations unless they also
clear off 1GB of space and don't download the network installer.
The nearly 1 GB of space requirement really throws a
monkey wrench into the SP-1 update process. I can only hope MS improves
this because corporations will not be able to predict whether they have
1GB of free space on each and every PC. What an enormous cost of resources
if MS cannot improve this process.
Oliver Richter Oliver_Richter@hotmail.com
_
See Below for Eric's comment.
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