nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Giving Up Passwords for Chocolates Offered By Good Looking Women

Posted: 21 Apr 2008 06:29 PM CDT

Unbelievable!

People are too trusting, especially when there's chocolate on the line. A survey out today by the organizers of the tech-security conference Infosecurity Europe found that 21% of 576 London office workers stopped on the street were willing to share their computer passwords with a good looking woman holding a clipboard. People were offered a chocolate bar in exchange for the information. More than half of the people surveyed said they used the same password for everything.

Women far more likely to give away their passwords to total strangers than their male counterparts, with 45% of women versus 10% of men prepared to give away their password, to strangers masquerading as market researches with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for filling in the survey. The survey was actually part of a social engineering exercise to raise awareness about information security. The survey was conducted outside Liverpool Street Station in the City of London.

Sure, I will give up a fake password for a chocolate

Poll: Your UNIX / Linux Admin Automation Scripting Language

Posted: 21 Apr 2008 05:29 PM CDT

Result Last Poll: Your Remote Maintenance Services:

I'm not at all surprised with results. SSH is the most popular for managing server remotely. May be should donate some money to project, to show your support.

New Poll: Your SysAdmin Programming Language

A major class of scripting languages has grown out of the automation of job control under Linux and UNIX, which relates to starting and controlling the behavior of system programs. Personally I prefer to use perl and shell scripting. These days I'm also trying out python. Please vote your choice of scripting Language:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Open Source Software Saved Customers $60 Billion - It Is A Great Time To Be An Open Source Company

Posted: 21 Apr 2008 03:41 PM CDT

A new study report - free open source software is costing vendors $60 billion per annum. According to Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA :

Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies.

This is good news as you and me just saved $60 Billion. I'm now wondering how this revenue is calculated? Anyway, FOSS software is for all of us and it is a win win situation - screw the proprietary software

What do you think?

Ubuntu 'reaping Linux dividend'

Posted: 21 Apr 2008 12:17 PM CDT

Red Hat and Novell decided not to challenge Microsoft on desktop PCs. However, Canonical Ltd is getting ready to release a new version of Ubuntu on Thursday. According to Mark Shuttleworth:

The public perception of open source software is changing fast. French police force was currently deploying 50,000 Ubuntu-powered machines, while Spanish education authorities were rolling out 500,000 desktops with the OS. Hardy Heron also has improved support for multimedia, including photo editing, music sharing and video playback. It's a favorite version of Linux both for specialists and one that specialists would recommend to a cousin, aunt or uncle who want to have a stable desktop internet experience. There are other versions of Linux that are better for a particular purpose - but Ubuntu strives to be a general platform that is secure and self-maintained.

Ubuntu 'reaping Linux dividend'

Installing Apache, PHP and mod_ssl on MS Windows

Posted: 21 Apr 2008 06:14 PM CDT

How do I install Apache with SSL, Perl, Php, MySQL and other web development tools on Microsoft Windows Platform (XP / NT / 98 / Vista / Server 2003 / 2008)?

Answer to "Installing Apache, PHP and mod_ssl on MS Windows"