Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Police in London have adopted this weird tactic of holding the crowds still
in clumps and refusing to let them move.  They say it's intended to calm
things down.  I can't imagine being calmed down by being forced to stand in
a dense crowd without moving for hours.

wg
  

    
btw, apparently the Usenet archive is now back at

< http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search>

wg
  

    
I went back and read a bunch of my posts from 1994 and 1995 the other day.
It was freaky and weird.  I miss the old net!
  

    
We *are* the Old Net.

wg
  

    
Everybody I know gives me the evil eye when I start talking about the pre-
Netscape net.  I need to go to a WOP, maybe.
  

    

Heh. I used to have a Delphi shell account -- this is 10 years ago now.
Still love that ASCII text, though. Time to cart me off to the home. ...
  

    
Yeah, I read the WELL in green letters on a black background using Pico.

wg
  

    

Any thoughts on the way shell accounts are disappearing, Wendy? My ISP is
Panix in New York City, and I discovered that the best thing about having a
shell account is just how educational it can be. I picked up the basics of
programming through the Perl and Python interpreters, and I would never have
gotten to know UNIX without it. Apparently, though, it's getting harder and
harder to get an account with a command-line interface, especially away from
urban areas.
  

    
 They're a security risk, and there's not much demand for them.
  

    

  Well, those are the rationalizations put forward by the business types,
anyway.
  

    
#74:
> Watch how you phrase that.  Time-Warner bought CNN some time ago.

Sorry, I've got used to referring to Time-Warner as AOL/Time-Warner.

Incidentally, there's some interesting stuff about the relevance of CNN's
acquisition in the long profile of Ted Turner in this week's New Yorker.
  

    
Re. the educational value of shell accounts: how much of that that
education can you get by loading Linux?
  

    
 It's actually pretty cheap to get a shell account these days, anyway,
they're just not provided by the guys who sell dialup service.  You can
easily get a shell account for 5 or 10 bucks a month from any number of 
Web hosting companies.

 I think that the expertise required to run servers that provide public
shell access has mostly migrated out of the dialup access arena.  I don't
think it would be economical for Earthlink, ATT, or an RBOC to provide
that service.  However, the Web hosting firms are perfect for this, and 
do, in fact, provide it.
  

    
To what extent are those accounts restricted?
  

    
None of the big ISPs ever offered shell accounts in the UK, I think.  At any
rate, I don't think I've ever had one, though I still have a number of
online things I can run manually using text only.  CIX has a nifty, largely
forgotten, macro facility which you can use to make it jump through hoops.
I've never really explored half the WELL's capabilities.

But can't you do a lot of things you used to be able to do with a shell
account directly from a DOS box on your own computer?  Or  linux machine?

wg
  

    
 My account at pair.com is not restricted in any discernable way, other
than that I have only normal user privileges, and I can't read lots of
system files that I probably ought not be reading anyway.
  

    

Before Linux was released there wasn't any easy way to learn Unix on a
widely-available PC or Mac (dual-boot was even more poorly supported than it
is today), and DOS, while it resembles Unix, is a very very poor second.

Yes, it's also possible to learn the basics of Unix on the Well, and in fact
I believe the user's manual has a section about how to do so. (I know the
manual for Echo does.)
  

    
Getting back to _From Anarchy to Power_... Wendy, in chapter 5, "A
Thousand Points of Failure," you talk about network security issues,
viruses, etc. You mention a lack of diversity that contributes to virus
attacks... mentioning a "moncultural, cloned-sheep type of weakness," and
talk about some of the security holes in the widely-proliferated Microsoft
products.  I've always thought an acceptance of standards (vs
diversity) was a good thing in that it supports interoperability, and that
the Microsoft security flaws were related more to an inattention to
security issues by Microsoft developers than to a lack of diversity, would
you agree? And do you think we have better security now, after
highly-publicized viruses like Melissa? (And also, with cable and DSL
providers of high-bandwidth service - have they done a better job of
shielding their users from intrustion?)

(I directed this question to Wendy, but anybody and everybody please chime
in...)
  

    
I think several issues there are, er, conflated.  The fact
that there are bugs and holes in Microsoft's products are problems relating
to Microsoft development.  Arguably, they'd matter less if fewer people
depended on those products.  But viruses like Melissa, the email things that
make the rounds, etc., all depend on a uniformity of directory structure and
software functions.  eg, Melissa can't work on my system because I use
Ameol, not Outlook Express, so it has no standard address book format it can
use to send copies of itself to the first 50 people.  Similarly, a hacker
installing a trojan on my system is not going to be able to do much with my
Quicken data files if he's relying on their being stored in the standard
directory that Quicken puts them in (because my structure is different).
And so on.

There are a lot of things Microsoft still doesn't provide in terms of
operating system security.  I was interviewing t a guy the other week who
told me that they found in the course of building their network monitoring
products that later versions of Windows have a hidden file that stores a
list of *every URL you ever visit and never deletes any of it*.  Probably
more a privacy issue than a security one, but still pretty astonishing.

One of the big problems is that it isn't enough for MS to release a patch;
everyone has to *install* the patch -- and most people don't know to look
for it and/or don't know what a patch is.  In the UK, ADSL and cable modem
providers do supply some security now, yes.  It's only if you ask for it to
be turned off so you can do stuff like Internet phone, Netmeeting...that
you're expected to supply your own firewall.

wg
  

    

I'm looking forward to reading Chapter 5 tonight -- the book's in stores
here in New York now, so readers should go get a copy.

Wendy: Un*x's defenders like to say that their operating system is more
bullet-proof to break-ins and viruses, both because of and despite the fact
that it was designed as a multiuser OS. However, tucked away on boards like
/., there seem to be more reports of viruses and security problems specific
to Un*x, particularly the DNS servers. Do you know anything about this?
  

    
Not a whole lot, no -- I'd have to read /.

wg
  

    
I found a comment about Unix-specific viruses at
http://lists.gnac.net/firewalls/mhonarc/firewalls.199901/msg00392.html

It was posted in 1999, and suggests that there are few Unix viruses...the
larger problem being latent viruses resident on Unix systems. 
  

    
AIUI one reason there are relatively few is that the potential
audience/damage isn't enough to be interesting.  Same reason there are
relatively few Mac viruses.

wg
  

    
Could also be that PCs are so much more accessible...
  

    
There are plenty of reports about Unix breakins, security holes, and
fixes.  More reports could mean that security is actually worse, or it
could just mean that Unix folks are more interested in security and
more open about problems.