Well, I've been looking for an excuse to stop using slashdot.... it's the same bullshit over and over, and the few gems that do crop up have gotten so rare that trawling through the shit spewed by consumer-capitalist apologists is just too much.

I do not use javascript, and will not spend any effort on making this site work without it. I discovered with D2 that if you have D2 on in you prefs, set the threshold to -1, and use /. without JS enabled in the browser, you get a better experience than D1 in one way - all the comments load on 1 page. But without JS you couldn't mod, nor look at mod histories, without opening the comment in another tab and allowing JS temporarily.

What I got on the /. homepage just was a huge white position:fixed box thing floating over the content, blocking most of it. Presumably that box is hidden when JS is on, but I am not going to fight with another site that is trying to be a "web application" just for.... fuck knows why. Bandwagon jumping, I'd say. Perhaps /. think they can get 500mill out of Goldman too, if only they appeared "trendier"?

I've got 1 mod point, I'm gonna go mod taco a troll or something, and that's it.

It was worse than that.... it looks like up until very recently they could well have had their site on a Windows 2000 machine. 2000 was the best version of Windows that MS ever made, but it still had some chronic shortcomings that make it totally unsuitable for most internet-facing tasks.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.lush.co.uk

Of course it is all too easy to just flame Windows, but even (especially) the MS fans will agree that using IIS5 in at least 2007 is not a clever thing to have been doing.

But lets be honest, the way that site is slinging about the word "hacker" it is clear they do not have any kind of top-notch IT... or even any clue about computers - they probably accepted what the industry told them as 100% truths, and then think that somehow some person is doing fucking magic or something to get into their server. Considering how keen they seem to be to shirk responsibility for the break ins (their list of suspect beliefs, for example), they truly do not recognise their own ignorance. The BBC miss the point too, and just go along with the hacker rhetoric as well.

Right up until it is used as a proxy to download child porn, and all of a sudden you are having to explain why your IP has accessed CP to law enforcement, family, friends, the media.....

Yeah, I know CP is one of those bogey men used to persuade people to see danger from unlikely events, but an accusation of CP can be enough to ruin lives. If you can avoid it, it's probably for the best.

Also, if your TV is in a botnet then it might be inside your firewall, if you use a straight forward NAT router. The TV could be used to attack other computers on your LAN which may contain more important data.

0 comments on this piece of PR bullshit? What a surprise, the PR is leading to censorship!

All I can say is fuck off Intel, I will not be buying your products again. I do not pay for anything if it contains any form of anti-feature, no matter how appealing the features might be. When your hardware contains features that hand control of my property to a third party, that feature suddenly becomes an anti-feature. That third party will use their control ability to interfere with what I might want to do with my property, and just because some IP laws say that I am not allowed to copy some data, I will still do so if I want.

The internet exists, and computers exist. So when the market offers copies of data at n currency units (eg a DVD movie for 15UKP), but a person can make their own copy of the data at n x 10^-5 or -6, it is obvious what will happen. Industry reacts by name calling (pirates) and law-buying, and when that fails they send their slush-funds to other corrupt corporations to make their products shittier.

I'm kinda glad I moved away from Windows after XP (I have used fista once, and only a release candidate of 7), so as I use Linux moving away from intel compatibles will be easier than changing CPU architecture and OS - I know how to use the OS, so moving to ARM, Sparc, PPC, etc. is a possibility. Though in the mean time AMD will sell me a chip without anti-features.

Shit, even your boyfriend Microsoft is looking at ARM processors. I guess with the Wintel duopoly drifting towards the rocks you are looking for other sources of money without offering what the customer might actually want. So you've got into bed with Hollywood. I hope you catch something!

I had the misfortune of being at the end of a BT line for the past 10 days, and noticed throttling of torrents, at least, at some times of the day.

I had been torrenting on a Zen line and had been maxing out the line all day with the stuff I was downloading. When I tried to finish a torrent off on the BT (business grade) connection it would only go to a maximum of about 25k/sec. Fired up some other torrents, and whilst trying to figure out what was going on, the maximum overall for multiple torrents seemed to move to 35k/sec.

I SSH'd into a box on the Zen line, and had a look at a torrent there. It was maxing out the line, so I started the same torrent on my laptop from this BT line..... 35k/second. The line was capable of downloads otherwise of 90k/sec. So from my data point of 1, they were definitely throttling. As time went on, the torrent throttling appeared to go away, and by the late evening the torrents were maxing out the BT line too. Remember, business grade. Isn't the contention ratio 20:1 on that, but 50:1 on consumer services (like the Zen line I mentioned)? So it utterly reeked of them interfering, rather than just the intentionally shit set up getting in the way. Things are intentionally shit to try and protect the profits from guaranteed service services - proper leased lines.

The BT Business hub thing is a piece of shit too. The wireless range is a joke (totally unsuitable for all but the smallest of offices), the shitty BT/2wire router controls 3 networks (BTFusionnnn, BTBusinessnnn, BTOpenworld) - meaning the WLAN you want to use is noisy. There doesn't appear to be a way to upgrade the aerial either, which can be enough to cheaply solve some WLAN issues. BT are clearly providing limited kit knowing that people will have problems and will have to upgrade. I bet BT want a piece of that upgrade market - and considering the people who have BT as their ISP tend to do so because they know no better, BT know that when the clueless do have to upgrade they will come back to BT. The clueless do not recognise their cluelessness, so think they have made good decisions about who to do business with, so do not think twice (once would be a fucking novelty!) about dealing with BT again. In fact, if they went elsewhere, perhaps they had made a poor decision first time 'round? Many or most people don't want to face buyers' remorse, and some will actively try and avoid it by not thinking, so will dogmatically stick with their past decisions.

Packet loss over the shitty wireless or sub-par BT internet service through this POS business hub meant I had problems getting downloads to work from the BBC iplayer too. I use get_iplayer and the banned version of rtmpdump rather than whatever proprietary nonsense the BBC are telling you you need, and the packet loss was upsetting rtmpdump.

Anyway, after that fucking rant, fuck BT. Even though they have been broken up they clearly still are practising the same bullshit they always have. No doubt the shareholders of all the various bits of BT overlap quite considerably, so it is no surprise they still seem to act as one business.

I was going to reply to PopeRatzo with a link to the WP article about that book's very topic, right-wing authoritarianism, but you kinda beat me to it. I don't have any mod points, but I can do better anyway by quoting you at +2

/me dons my internet-psychologist's trousers:
Some of the replies in this discussion are clearly from people who are RWAs.

Why do Sun readers have black penises?

Because the print comes off on their hands.

- Jasper Carrott

I've said this before, but I'm going to repeat it:

If you are on an ISP that censors, because they inject fake 404s you cannot be sure what is a real 404 and what isn't. So if you see any 404s, call them up and get them to confirm if it is their system or if it is the actual server. And if enough people did this, the censorship would go away...... until they come up with another method, that doesn't open them up to costs. But if they do that, I'm sure we can figure something else out.

You forgot to mention that customer services will be a call you have to pay for. They will have worked it out such that implementing the censorship and turning it off for some will turn a profit - you will be giving them that profit when you jump through the hoops they want you to.

Recently t-mobile spammed my phone with some new fucking feature that I don't want - they will send you a text if someone phones you and you don't answer. Well, fuck that! The phone already says if there is a missed call, I don't need to be told twice. I also know how shit their network is, and I don't need to be kept up to date as to how shit it is.

To turn off this unasked for feature I was meant to call up (and pay) or text them (and pay). Yeah, it's a few pence, but it is the principle that I object to. So I found their corporate fax number, and rang some numbers similar to it. I ended up getting straight through to someone who was able to turn off the feature I didn't want. The thing is, I didn't get through to just some call centre peon, I wasted the time of someone better paid within t-mobile, and explained to someone who might actually be willing to understand why I was trying to waste their time and money - because I don't like having my time and money wasted with features that are only there to try and encourage the user to use their phone more.

I though the difference was that fax sound like an unpleasant screeching noise, and fox sounds worse?

And whilst you say that, there will still be the odd fax machine about. Perhaps in some director's office who doesn't want to have to use the new system - and can pull rank to be able to not have to use it. Perhaps a legal department sometimes faxes confidential communication, and the simplest way to keep it secured is to have a simple fax machine, that doesn't have any ability to keep copies etc., in a locked room. Smaller regional offices are more likely to be stuck with older kit - I have worked for a couple of corps where the sites that executives frequently used had all the best facilities and newest (and shiniest) kit, and the rest would only get new stuff when the old stuff broke and caused a big problem. Those more minor regional offices are much more likely to have DOS-able faxes.

Anonymous - dig out those war diallers and find the hidden faxes in the corporate telephone number blocks. The publicised fax numbers will have to be handling fax-spam, and that might be useful for the corporation to be able to ignore these attacks. The targeting of non-public faxes is much more likely to lead to a cubicle full of used thermal paper, leading to direct costs for the corporations.

Solving one problem whilst making another is the basis of capitalism!

Industry knows the situation you have illustrated, and hence why this US government policy has come up: it has been lobbied for by the very companies that stand to benefit from the modern mainframe.

d'oh! Shit, missed that :)

But you can still commit data into /var/spool/exim4 in the form of an exim config file, and exim will run commands in that config file as root if exim is launched by root or debian-exim. Which is the case here.... isn't it?

If you can run any command on a remote system as root, then surely instead of simply elevating the privilege of an existing session, you do something else to 0wn the box? The root commands put in that config file could make a new user, give that new user root privileges, and allow them to ssh in. Probably much more easily noticed, but is still remote root.

As far as I can tell, and know, that above does allow a program to be run that is otherwise on a noexec partition. bsDaemon suggested that putting the mail spool on a noexec partition would stop this attack, but I don't think it will. I do know that I know enough to get by on Linux, but I also know I do not understand all the ins and outs of the system, so am perfectly willing to accept I am wrong about noexec partitions. I just don't think I am....

Part of TFA:

So the file setuid is set to be executable as root via exim's feature of being able to run commands from its config file. At least, I think that is what is going on. As exim will need to open port 25 I guess the program sits on disk with the suid bit set, and once port 25 is opened it drops privileges to debian-exim. But it appears exim will also execute commands from a user specified config file, and it must be doing so before it drops its privs.

I happen to have a debian virtual machine here:
lintorrent:~# ls -l `which exim4`
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 695968 2008-09-30 19:27 /usr/sbin/exim4

Exim is on disk with a suid of root.

From the exim manpage:

Ahhh, because the initial exploit gives the attacker a shell as debian-exim, exim won't give up root as quick as if exim -CDodgyConfigFile is run as any other local user (apart from root). The person publicising the attack is keeping some details with himself and the exim devs, so I don't know exactly how that initial shell that is mentioned is presented. Does the attacker telnet into the server, start talking in SMTP, then just gets a shell responding after sending right secret phrase?

The final piece of the attack, going to root, summed up by "and gets suid bit on /var/spool/exim4/setuid \
everything else is trivial" could have the extra sh dropped in just in front of /var/spool/exim4/setuid. I do know that most Linux distros will ignore an suid of root on a shell script, but what is written to the mail spool isn't a shell script. It looks like C (I'm no programmer), and I didn't know you could execute uncompiled code like that... and trying it here I can't get it to work. Though I think the really important bit is that Exim will execute as root commands in a config file if exim is run as root or as the exim user (debian-exim in this case).

noexec ain't bulletproof:

root@bender:/mnt# mount -o noexec,size=10M,nr_inodes=100 -t tmpfs tmpfs ./tmp/
root@bender:/mnt# cd tmp
root@bender:/mnt/tmp# echo echo blah > test.sh
root@bender:/mnt/tmp# chmod +x test.sh
root@bender:/mnt/tmp# l
total 12K
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 80 2010-12-10 17:33 ./
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4.0K 2009-01-23 04:07 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10 2010-12-10 17:33 test.sh*
root@bender:/mnt/tmp# ./test.sh
-su: ./test.sh: Permission denied
root@bender:/mnt/tmp# sh ./test.sh
blah

And if I have understood this exploit, that extra sh could still be added.