Subject: Root of the Homepage

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:42:50 +0300

Hi!

I finally got my act together and set up a root page for the 
www.hackers.org.il site:

http://www.hackers.org.il/

There's not too much of it there, just a direction to the wiki and various 
links.

Note that the web-meta-language source of the site currently resides in my 
private Subversion repository. If there's popular demand, I'll move it to a 
Subversion hosting somewhere online. (we can have hosting at BerliOS, 
opensvn.csie.org, etc.) Meanwhile, someone should better create a nicer 
design to the site. (I'm not much of a web-designer.) One thing we could do 
is borrow and tweak one of the "open-source designs" site's designs.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
-- 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [email-masked]
Homepage:        http://shlomif.il.eu.org/

Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.

---

From: Ori Idan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 10:48:02 +0300

I started writing a short story for the Free Software day 2004, The 
story is in hebrew.
I would be happy for any help on the story.

I tried putting the story on the Hackers-IL wiki
It works fine with hebrew however it is not easy to edit...
The best way to edit it is copy it to an editor that supports right to 
left editing
and after editing it copy back to the wiki, that's what I did.

Anyway the story is at: 
http://www.hackers.org.il/mediawiki/index.php/LookingBackOnTommorow

--
Ori Idan

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 10:50:49 +0300

> http://www.hackers.org.il/mediawiki/index.php/LookingBackOnTommorow

Nice. A couple of corrections:

ביתי (second line) should be בתי.

OSF was the "Open Software Foundation", an organization that had very little
to do with Open Source and very much to do with making DEC rich (see OSF/1,
X Windows, etc.), and perhaps some to do with open Standards. I assume you
meant the OSI, the Open Source Initiative (see www.opensource.org).

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Sunday, Aug 22 2004, 5 Elul 5764
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |We are Microsoft. You will be
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |assimilated. Resistance is futile.

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:08:57 +0300

> http://www.hackers.org.il/mediawiki/index.php/LookingBackOnTommorow

Hi Ori!

Nice story, but I don't think I agree with its theme much. The reason there 
are many security exploits in Microsoft's software and that there were many 
worms and virii is because security was once not a high priority for 
Microsoft (because their software run only on a non-interconnected computer 
or organization LANs), and when it tried to go on the Internet bandwagon, it 
did not have good coding practices required for secure networked programming.

What I'm saying is that:

1. Open-Source Software is not necessarily secure. (re: BIND, Sendmail, etc.)

2. Proprietary software can be made secure or even very-secure.

3. Open-source is not a panacea for security nor is it absolutely necessary.

But I agree that with a good software management, open-source can certainly 
help.

For the record, I started writing a story, which talks about open-source 
hackers:

http://www.advogato.org/person/shlomif/diary.html?start=213

Let me know if you want me to send you drafts of it. I hope it will be 
finished by the Free Software day, and if not, I'll release it as incomplete, 
and finish it later.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> Yahoo! Groups Links

--

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:20:43 +0300

> did not have good coding practices required for secure networked programming.

I think I agree more with Ori: Microsoft's software is indeed less secure
than, say, Redhat Linux, but this is NOT the reason why there are so many
Windows viruses, and why they are so dangerous. In fact, there are Linux
exploits for which viruses could have been written, and if Linux was more
popular and user-friendly, "social engineering" attacks (like getting you
to run a program) will also become more successful.

But the point is that if a single operating system "rules the world", be it
Windows or Linux or MacOS, the situation is inherently dangerous because one
virus could harm most of the computers in the world. This problem is
increasingly touted, and labled "monoculture" (it can be compared to the
same problem in crops, which causes disasters like the Irish potato famine).

Perhaps the most well known document against Microsoft's monoculture is
http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf. It was written by a
group of computer security experts, including Bruce Schneier most famous
for his cryptography books.

> But I agree that with a good software management, open-source can certainly 

I'm not sure how. If it can reduce the number of security holes by 50%,
say, how does that help? How does having 10 major viruses a year instead
of 20 really help anything in the big picture?

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Sunday, Aug 22 2004, 5 Elul 5764
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A bird in the hand is safer than one
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |overhead.

---

From: Ori Idan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:18:26 +0300

I did not write this as a real history, this is just an opinion and 
points for thinking.
The idea for the great computer failure came from Eric Raymond, I don't 
remember the name
of his assay.

--
Ori Idan