It seems slightly silly to me that the content providers have pay for their network access in order to offer their services, which they usually do for free. A contentless net is a useless net, so it would seem reasonable that a content provider get their connection at very cheap prices, at least. Of course this will never happen, but let's say, for argument's sake, that Google started to aggressively renegotiate their peering agreements. It would seem that anyone not willing to peer with them at dictated terms would be left with an unsellable Google-less Internet.

The smaller content providers obviously cannot do anything so straightforward without at least uniting their power first, but if they ever did, I think the ISPs would be the ones to fold first, after all they have to sell _something_ to the home customer.

Naturally, that would mean every web page instantly becoming uselessly heavy with ads and no concern for bandwith usage, so let's hope they never get around to it.

(Full disclosure: I work at a company that hosts several relatively large web services.)

I once had a pair of command line tools that both printed lists of words (usernames, actually, one per row), and I wanted to find out how many unique ones there were. Obviously, the right hand side part of the pipeline was going to be something along the lines of " | sort -u | wc -l", but then I got utterly stuck by the left hand side. How can I combine the STDOUTs of two processes? Do I really need to resort to using temporary files? Is there really no tool to do the logical opposite of the "tee" command?

You are probably thinking: "Oh, you silly person, that's so trivial, you must be very incompetent", but in case you aren't, you might want to spend a minute trying to figure it out before reading on. I even asked a colleague for help before realizing that the reason I could not find a tool for the task was quite an obvious one: such a tool does not exist. Or actually it kinda does, but only in an implied sense: what I was hoping to achieve could be done by the humble semicolon and a pair of parens. I only had to put the two commands in parens to run them in a subshell, put a semicolon in between, so one will run after the other is finished, and I was done. I guess it was just that the logical leap from "This task is so simple, there must be a tool for this" to "just run the commands one after another" was too big for my feeble mind to accomplish.

So I guess the moral of the story is, even if you want to use just one simple tool, you may be overthinking it :-)

Of course not. This is because it is considerably more difficult to compromise a distro's packet distribution system than it is to compromise or spoof a website. Tricking my browser should be even easier.

Things might have been different had I spotted any kind of digital signature (or even a checksum) anywhere near the download page, or if the download had even originated on a SSL verified server. This is very likely to be because of incompetence of the guys running the site, but on my list of reasons for adding things to the kernel, incompetence is not exactly on the top.

You are very likely correct in thinking that adding yet another anonymous recommendation on the internet will make more people run the code. However, this is Slashdot, where the users are slightly more security aware than on an average internet site.

You see, If I were to attack all those nifty linux boxen out there, what would be a better attack vector than advertising your exploit on slashdot, which is known to accept almost anything on the front page, and yet is very likely to contain the biggest active linux user community on the nets? By looking at the code it seems obvious that the tool contains enough binary code to contain an exploit or three. If it is never used in a malicious way, it is somewhat difficult to say. So, outside a security lab setting, it is hard to tell if the provided code is not the exploit itself. Definitely "You are probably getting hacked right now! Check for viruses for free!" has been one of the more common attack vector against Windows users.

Whatever the case, I would not recommend running code that looks like this:

static char dis4blens4sel1nuxhayettgdr64545[] and
static int wtfyourunhere_heee(char *out_release, char* out_version)

So you are saying that it was just a BREAK?

You young whippersnappers with your light afternoon site nukings! When I was younger, why, I once accidentally demolished the wrong planet while building a hyperspatial express route!

I'm no expert in your language on that side of the big wet thing, but in Finglish the phrase would be "3 foot square", modulo hyphens. Which just further proves your point about the construction being annoying, I guess :-)

A venal government of a single country hijacked multiple domains with ease? Surely this should not be possible.

I'm currently in court over the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority's claim that they can charge me for having a digital TV at my recidence unless I allow them to do a warrantless search. They seem to claim that the law allows them to do that, I pointed them to the Finnish constitution, and the lowest level court said "Your privacy would not have been violated if you had allowed the warrantless search". Korkein hallinto-oikeus, here we come.

Yeah, I counted the "USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND" process too, and I bet you know the purpose of at least two of the actual commands in your count too :-)

Here's my translation of the Finnish air force article (http://www.ilmavoimat.fi/index.php?id=1149) the parent mentioned. Only the first bit talks about the engine damage, the rest is about how the air force is going to measure the ash levels and handle its routine operations.

Ash particles pose a real threat to aviation safety in the Finnish air space.

Over Thursday and Friday, the Air Force has examined the F-18 Hornet fighters of the Lapland Wing that flew practice flights over northern Finland on Thursday morning. The air space was still open to the public then.

The planes were examined after they landed, and volcanic ash dust, resembling potato flour, was detected in the engine intakes. An engine of one of the Hornets was further examined with a fiber optic camera. It was concluded from the images, that significant engine damage is caused by even a short flight through ash.

The pictures show that the accumulated ash has melted inside the combustion chamber, where the temperature is around 1000 degrees centigrade (1800 F). The molten ash blocks the cooling ducts, which causes overheating of engine parts, and the materials are weakened. This causes a risk for fractures in the rotating parts of the engine, and in the worst case the parts will break apart and the engine will be completely destroyed.

The exposed Hornets will be thoroughly inspected. It will be necessary to dismantle at least some of the engines, after which they will be sent to Patria engine repairs for further examination. Any engines with noticeable ash exposure will be taken apart to determine the full extent of the damage. The cooling air ducts will also be checked for ash blockages at that time.

I wish you a most pleasant life :-)

No, it's not at all the same. If the number of people that can multitask is only one in 40, I wonder what's the proportion of people who can focus on a _single_ task for long enough to read through an entire Slashdot summary. So far that summary has defeated at least someone who gets paid to read them, and someone who was prompted to do so by my earlier comment.

Timothy already posted this, it's still on the front page. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/31/2154207/Supertaskers-Can-Safely-Use-Mobile-Phones-While-Driving

The product site lists the size as 52mm x 52mm x 52mm.