SCO Finally Gives McBride The Boot

After many years of raping and pillaging so many companies, under their laughably false claims that Linux contained code stolen from SCO UNIX and given by IBM, SCO has finally seen the light and fired their shit-spewing leader, Darl McBride, before the county water department starting billing them extra for the high volume of McBride's total bullshit that kept clogging the county sewers.

Darl McBride, as seen here in this 2004 edition of Fortune, has cursed the Linux kernel and community for years, claiming up and down that Linux contains stolen code from his company's UNIX operating system, to the point he was forcing corporations to buy IP indemnity licenses - basically an agreement that SCO won't assrape them which wasn't even worth the paper it was printed on - or he would sue - which is what he did to IBM and DaimlerChrysler.

Well, SCO bit off more than they could chew, and McBride drove the company into the depths of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, the other employees could only take so much of his utter bullshit, so they hired this guy to have him terminated:

I hope that criminal charges come up against Darl McBride, and that he ends up being put in prison, where he'll do good as Bubba's "McBride".

Microsoft Fucks Over XP Users

Well, no surprise this time, but Microsoft has managed to fuck over a significant portion of the userbase for their Windows operating system. Three vulnerabilities in Windows Vista and Windows 2008 were fixed in a patch released by Microsoft on September 8th, but no such fix was provided for users of Windows XP or 2000.

While only two of the three holes affect XP and 2000 (and go to show just how much swiss cheese Vista really is), Microsoft has stated that they can't be fucked to plug the holes.

In a webcast release September 9th, which is probably edited to include 10% more lies, Microsoft insecurity program manager Adrian Stone, and his fellow ass pirate and program manager Jerry Bryant, stated that the code that they blatantly ripped off from BSD is around 15 years old, and that they were too lazy to bother fixing the code, thus users of Windows XP and 2000 were shit out of luck. (Webcast transcript here)

Microsoft's pitifully lame excuse as to why they weren't patching Windows XP was this: "By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability," the bastards said. "Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems include a stateful host firewall that provides protection for computers against incoming traffic from the Internet or from neighboring network devices on a private network."

To make matters worse, Microsoft even tried to downplay the impact of their swiss cheese security. Their claim is that the attack would just cause a machine to stop responding because the network stack would suck RAM like there's no tomorrow, and that the attack would require that someone send specially crafted TCP packets (probably with a payload of Viagra spam) in a sustained mass flood, much akin to the the flood of shit that spews from Steve Ballmer's mouth every time it opens, and that the machine would return to normal once the attack stopped.

Ironically, Microsoft tried to pull the same shit back on 2003 in regards to Windows NT 4.0. They argued that they fucked up the code for Windows 2000 and later too badly for any fix to be backported to Windows NT 4.0.

Death To Cloud Computing, And Why Gmail's IMAP Access Sucks

NOTE: I did not finish this post, I decided to post it as-is two months later.

First of all, let me start this off with a very clear message: FUCK CLOUD COMPUTING.

While, yes, I'll admit I really have no idea what this so-called "cloud computing" is, it sounds like a load of useless shit to me.

A good friend of mine pointed me at a cloud computing project called Eucalyptus (http://eucalyptus.com/), which is an open-source cloud computing implementation, which supports the Amazon S3 and EC2 APIs. They also have a public-access cloud setup for people to demo the software in action (presumably for users like me that lack the infrastructure to host my own cloud). So I go and setup a new account, download Amazon's EC2 API tools, and the X.509 certificates I need for the cloud.

OK, let do this thing... not so fast!

They give you an automagical shell script to setup your environment variables (aside from EC2_HOME; this is for the EC2 tools themselves, pointing the directory they are installed in, and this is an aesthetic choice, left for the user to decide when she installs). However, (and this is my fault for using Micro$hit WinDOS) the script is only of use to UNIX users, so you have to manually set your environment variables (although having the script on hand will prove useful). Now, I setup all the environment variables, following the UNIX shell script as a guide.

The shell script looks something like this:

EUCA_KEY_DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f ${BASH_SOURCE}))

export S3_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Walrus

export EC2_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Eucalyptus

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=${EUCA_KEY_DIR}/euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-pk.pem

export EC2_CERT=${EUCA_KEY_DIR}/euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-cert.pem

export EUCALYPTUS_CERT=${EUCA_KEY_DIR}/cloud-cert.pem

export EC2_ACCESS_KEY='2UC-AbUnChOfRaNdOmNeSs-A'

export EC2_SECRET_KEY='SoMeMoRe_RaNdOmChArAcTeRs_FoRaCrYpToChAlLeNgE'

alias ec2-bundle-image="ec2-bundle-image --cert ${EC2_CERT} --privatekey ${EC2_P

RIVATE_KEY} --user 000XXXXXXXXX --ec2cert ${EUCALYPTUS_CERT}"

alias ec2-upload-bundle="ec2-upload-bundle -a ${EC2_ACCESS_KEY} -s ${EC2_SECRET_

KEY} --url ${S3_URL} --ec2cert ${EUCALYPTUS_CERT}"

Roughly translated into NT cmd.exe syntax, you get this (computing the top line by hand)

set EUCA_KEY_DIR=C:\Documents and Settings\Segin\.ec2

set S3_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Walrus

set EC2_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Eucalyptus

set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=%EUCA_KEY_DIR%\euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-pk.pem

set EC2_CERT=%EUCA_KEY_DIR%\euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-cert.pm

set EUCALYPTUS_CERT=%EUCA_KEY_DIR%\cloud-cert.pem

set EC2_ACCESS_KEY=2UC-AbUnChOfRaNdOmNeSs-A

set EC2_SECRET_KEY=SoMeMoRe_RaNdOmChArAcTeRs_FoRaCrYpToChAlLeNgE

All right! So you should be set. Notice that in the above blocks, all cryptographic keys and IDs were removed, so if you try to copy and paste from the code abone, it will not work as-is. Fill in your own (real) details.

Now, let it be known that, yes, I did RTFM. I made sure I had both the Amazon and Eucalyptus documentation open in Chrome throughout the experience.

So, I finally get the the magical bit, where they tell me to me