Billions of people worldwide do work they don't particularly like for money. For small sums of money, too. The hundreds of millions of campaign contributions I can very easily see as public record given to these people followed by their $700,000+/yr jobs in the private sector after they retire can't possibly indicate that the same applies. Given enough money, most people do what they're told. This is completely valid and actually correct thinking. The tinfoil hat is when you talk about the corporations planning some kind of NWO, but really it's about control to kill competition and remain absurdly profitable with govt. assistance. It's called tyranny. You might want to read up in some history books.
The entire point of the President's veto capability was specifically for cases where the executive branch disagrees with the legislative. What the big corporate interests paid for when they paid to have Obama made president (and would've been the same of McCain, it's easy to make people think they have a choice when you control both of the choices) was a president who appeals to the people but really doesn't stand in the way of their majority ownership of the legislative branch.
Unfortunately, tyranny has never gone silently, as you suggest. When (not if) revolution happens in our country, there will be consequences for those involved, and there will be blood. It will not be a silent revolution done over the internets. The fact that now 4 different bills have been proposed and have "approval" from the executive and legislative branches that would permit wholesale censorship of the internet should convince you of that.
Unless there's an 0-day in MS's libraries again that lets browsers download/exec payload without user consent, you still need to click twice. If they download an exe, it's fairly obvious you need to run it to cause harm (don't ever run an exe linked in an e-mail, simple advice). There's also an abuse of the insecurity of the JRE inside browsers in that the JRE needs only ask for permission from the user to do even basic things (writing temp files, reading files, connecting to a server, etc). That permission includes downloading and running with current user privileges any payload from the web (connecting to a server and running a file, IMO, are two entirely different levels of permissions). So when it asks for permission in a totally benign looking website made to look like some legitimate business, we're all trained to click yes because that's what Java applets fucking do, they require you to click yes before you can use them, and this is without fail. Seriously, all of them. So you get some page that doesn't really work after the applet loads, but it downloads a malicious payload and your PC is fucked. I had this happen a few years ago to myself, reversed the malware & the delivery method, found their FTP and sent all of the undetected binaries over to MMPC. It wasn't a fake antivirus but it did have minor side effects (it was poorly written, after all), but I knew the second I hit a java applet that did nothing from a link from 4chan that I had an infection, so I found the jar file in my internet cache and went from there. It was just a very basic trojan for turning a machine into a bot:|. Good job, anonymous, there's a reason nobody of value visits 4chan anymore.
They patented it before they released it. They also didn't create it to comply with standards. But technically you can implement AJAX without XHR, using iframes or script tags, and the most browser-independent methods originally did this because IE wasn't compliant with what everyone else was doing. To this day, even IE9 and proposed IE10 is still dramatically different than every other browser in regards to standards (for eg. the handling of XHR request data, the browser still enforces control over MIME which may cause really-fucking-weird behavior on IE but nothing else, forcing you to sterilize the MIME type of your response). This is the reason IE is losing market share at an astronomical rate despite having the advantage of first-install and 100% availability to windows users. They don't advance web technology. They stand in its way.
UEFI supports network capability pre-boot, so a networked solution is possible. Optionally, UEFI could support signed bootloader changes only to certain partitions which would make this possible. If a bootloader signed by the mfg is the only thing that is able to write to some partition marked as "secure", it may be possible for the bootloader to check files in your Windows drive/partition (as it does currently to present you the "windows didn't shut down properly last time.. what do you want to do" screen), if it sees it should be refreshing/restoring windows, it'll just use that protected partition for its job. If it's for backups (like the initial image of the machine), it'll just restore to that or to the indicated back-up or write a new back-up if the operation is to save. If it's just to hold a copy of the install media, the first time the bootloader runs not on an optical drive (during install or during OEM initialization), it could see the partition for the copy of the install media is empty and go ahead and insert the install image at that time.
I don't think there's any other way to do it except that the bootloader supports via UEFI booting to some cloud-drive that Microsoft provides you. You'd be presented with a log-in and you could access your backups and the initial system image. But then that's less of a W8 feature and more of a Microsoft feature. If the image is stored in any place a program running in Windows can modify (especially in an image downloaded within Windows but not secured by some mechanism that precludes the possibility of malware infection, like a ROM firmware only writable with a physical switch on the machine).
Just storing a checksum does you no good. We can pretty easily force MD5 collisions, so it doesn't guarantee much. But a few checksums together could reliably determine that the image has been unaltered. The problem though is that if the image is altered, you wouldn't want to restore it. Thus, some malware could destroy the restore/refresh images of all machines it infects by simply writing a byte somewhere and people wouldn't be able to refresh/restore any longer.
Microsoft has a lot of really bright security people who've probably already thought about this. The idea of having a refresh and a re-install-but-keep-your-apps seems like the options available to you already when you insert the install medium. All that really needs to be done to implement something like that is for a single 4GB disk partition be secured via firmware (BIOS, or in the future UEFI) from write access. I haven't done much research on Microsoft's proposed UEFI/SecureBoot changes for W8, but it would be logical to assume those plans include this or similar functionality, even if as an "extension" to the UEFI standard (classic Microsoft) and so hopefully the answer to your question would be "not for a while."
However, if they do something as stupid as store a disk image in %SystemRoot%, it'll probably be a common feature to all malware before W8 hits RC1.
TOPIC: Religion in the Public Square RESPONSE: That's why President Obama supports the use of the words "under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance and "In God we Trust' on our currency. DE-STUPIDIFIED: Nope, we're keeping this govt. sanctioned religion!
TOPIC: Taking Action to Reduce the Burden of Student Loan Debt RESPONSE: We know that these steps don’t solve all our problems in higher education. There is still more work to be done to make it possible for every American to earn a quality education. But enormous progress has been made. DE-STUPIDIFIED: We lowered the interest rates on these loans saving them a few hundred dollars and gave some people $5500, what more do you want from us?
TOPIC: The Fair Tax – A National Sales Tax That Increases Tax Burdens for Middle-Class Families RESPONSE: In short, because it raises burdens on middle-class families and asks less from the most fortunate, this national sales tax is inconsistent with President Obama's principles for tax reform. DE-STUPIDIFIED: We can't really give you a good reason why we don't support the Fair Tax, so we've decided to present clear propaganda against it. Even the title of this section on our website indicates that it places an unfair burden on middle class families despite it doing no such thing. And throughout our response we've constantly hinted at this despite it being entirely false (but please don't actually research the Fair Tax, else you might discover that to be the case). The answer is no, that's all. We want tax reform, just tax reform that's inherently complex and has loopholes for our corporate owners (thanks guys, those millions and free tax evasion tips are really nice)!
TOPIC: What We Have to Say About Legalizing Marijuana RESPONSE: Preventing drug use is the most cost-effective way to reduce drug use and its consequences in America. DE-STUPIDIFIED: We didn't actually answer your question in this response. We dodged it over and over by talking about drug-related things. We made sure to drill that point home "drug." We want you to walk away from our "response to legalizing marijuana" remembering that we said the word "drug" in our response 17 times, more than any other word. In short: fuck you hippies. Marijuana would compete with alcohol and tobacco. You really think I'm going to give up $50,000,000 in campaign contributions so you can get high with your buddies with no consequences? LOL!
TOPIC: Why We Can’t Comment [at allegations of Judicial misconduct] RESPONSE: For the reasons given above, the White House declines to comment on matters raised by this petition. DE-STUPIDIFIED: Fuck off.
Stay classy, Washington. Keep up the good work. Not answering questions and constantly refusing your citizens the right to have the country run the way they want is a fucking brilliant way to go about running a democratic country. Oh wait, I made the mistake of assuming we still live in a democracy, didn't I? Lol. It's so funny watching them tell us why they won't do what we want. Nobama, 2012.
For the first time a user boots into a fresh copy of windows 8 (think a non-technical person), they'll be greeted with a Metro style interface. Now say they want to go browse a website. They do it from within metro, as if Windows 8 is completely integrated with "the web" -- the entire UI suddenly gives way to the website you wanted to view. From their perspective, they aren't actually using a web browser, it's just the OS going to the page they wanted. In this case, would (again, non-technical) people be able to discern the fact that they're browsing with IE10? That's just while using the metro UI. I think it's utter garbage (as does everyone I know) and so let's move into disable-this-shit-immediately-land.
So non-technical person dislikes the stupidly unusable and painfully tablet-and-phone-friendly metro UI. When they do start -> run and type in a URL or find a web browser icon on their desktop, is it going to just launch IE10? Is there no choice here? So the user still has to actually go download a new browser to displace IE? I'm sure there's some portion of less-than-well-educated and less-than-technical users who will not fully comprehend why they should do this or that they can do this. Maybe that number is somewhere around 40-45% of computer owners?
I'm not so worried about IE10 being an integral part of the OS (it's required for metro, but IMHO, metro is a piece of shit and should not be shipped with Windows 8 anyway), but I am worried about how web browsing is presented to users. If the OS completely assumes the user wants to use IE, and that user has to go out of his/her way to use another browser, it feels like a monopoly. I'd really prefer something like a EU-sanctioned requirement be put into Windows 8. When starting for the first time (after an OEM reset as well), it should ask you if you want to use Metro or the "classic" UI (if it doesn't ask this, I'm going to rage, seriously, I don't want to have to figure out how to turn that shit off when I install windows 8), and then it should ask you which web browser you want to use, and Windows 8 should fetch the latest version of whatever browser I specify, install it, and.. let me emphasize here: MAKE IT THE DEFAULT BROWSER AS WELL AS DISABLING THE FEATURE IN IE THAT SAYS "I AM NOT UR DEFAULT BROWSER/wrist". Is thinking about the customer and fairness just too much to ask from Microsoft? The sooner we can get the average users to stop using IE, the sooner we don't have to have if/elses all over our framework code just to make it run on IE.
Credentials mean nothing. WIth a few hundred thousand and a few years to spend, anyone who isn't an idiot can get a Ph.D. It does not imply that their opinion and misguided trollings on/. about any subject is even remotely accurate. It definitely does not absolve them from heinous ignorance and shortsightedness, as you have clearly demonstrated.
And what part of that isn't obscurity? Every layer you mention is just another obscurity on top of the previous. Is it potentially stronger obscurity? Sure. It's just obscurity. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
If I get a big chunk of data that's encrypted, YOU cannot change the key anymore. It's the same issue, but I agree, the basis of strength should rely solely on obscurity that is very easily and rapidly changed. A desirable trait in any security system.
Now you're talking about modularization of the "security mechanism" so that the weak piece is fundamentally simple to exchange. This is definitely a strength and a huge asset to security, but it is still based on obscurity.
It's a little scary someone from the NIH with a doctorate in a field is so short sighted. Never mind, that's really, really scary. It explains a lot, really.
You're claiming known (for now) calculable difficulty to crack is better than a system where the difficulty is not easily calculated. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Both are fundamentally based on obscurity, though. The difficulty with which you can correctly guess the obscurity I would term "strength" and that matters, of course. But it's still obscurity.
Someone else can get in -- all they need is a little bit of information you've left out (like a key). Obscurity. Right there. Self defeating posts are self defeating.
And once you guess their encryption password, their encryption isn't completely broken? Your analogy is flawed, fundamentally you are assuming someone leaves a key lying around in an easily accessible area.
No security we have isn't fundamentally based on obscurity. None.
It blows my mind that we take troll stories like this seriously enough to put them on the front page here. I just invested $1800 more into this "dying PC retailer," as the article would have me believe, which is more than I've ever spent on consoles, handhelds, and tablets COMBINED. That's additional to my current PC (but a fraction of the total cost), and that's one of 4 PCs I've built ordering from this "dying PC retailer." I know plenty of people who buy lots more than me from Newegg, and with a much more diverse selection, as well.
From what I've seen, it's been people who are enthusiastic about grabbing the latest iGotYourMoneyDevice and the latest smartphones while they're "cool" who are least likely to build PCs themselves anyway, or customize their existing PC, or to invest DIY home media systems and complex networks, etc. Two separate markets, the valid question is: will one dominate the other.
The simple answer is: undoubtedly no. Tablets and other handheld computing devices have a purpose that they serve, just as desktops and more powerful laptops do. These two realms often don't overlap, and it is very unlikely that a handheld device will be computationally equivalent to a desktop (of the same mfg date) in the foreseeable future. Combine that with the fact that PC parts is merely a fraction of what's sold on Newegg (you can buy iPads, phones, TVs, laptops, and a huge selection of other electronics & accessories at retail there, as well as furniture and other niceties, and you see that this article is just plain silly in premise.
So long as every alcoholic beverage comes with a clear indication of its effects as well. Including loss of inhibitions, self restraint (leading to violence including brutal fights), judgement, motor ability, visual acuity, etc. The list is impressively long, so perhaps a pamphlet should be distributed that requires that you read all the way to the end then click 'I Agree' before you can drink.
Hilarious how something like Alcohol bears no warning to its effects but a video game must claim "warning: simulated violence is linked to violent behaviors." Hilarious, really. Hilarious. Fucking morons.
That information shouldn't only require a subpoena. Until recently a similar situation existed with content of e-mail (and some other things) via the Stored Communications Act. If ISPs aren't storing more data in regards to a customer's activity than just addressing information, police would have very little use for the data at all. So it plainly follows that this data too should require a warrant.
Honestly? It's not about WHO supports net neutrality, it's that its idea isn't hijacked, bastardized, and killed by politicians and lobbyists. Spread the information, defeat misinformation. I couldn't care less that a religious organization approves or agrees.
That sounds much better than what I originally read about. When I last looked into the concept, it appeared to only be a fixed percentage spending tax (that % to be determined, but 35% estimates thrown around). I didn't read about a reimbursement from the govt. for cost of living, however that would definitely fix the issues for the poor, along with potentially lessened taxes on certain food items like we currently have.
In that case, I'm quite for this. But you have to fight against bringing the IRS down, killing the need for tax lawyers, etc.. we'll see "XX thousand jobs to be destroyed by this bill." Needless to say, the plenty of companies who specialize at cheating people out of their money to figure out their taxes up to this preposterous tax code we have aren't going to go quietly, and congress tends to respond to money and lobbyists more than voters.
I think you'll find the center wants health care reform, fair taxation, and gitmo closed on the condition that everyone there gets shipped back home or, for the lulz, into Russia (just so long as they aren't here). So you got 2 right, 1 pretty close. But HCO is a pretty far left ideal, the most centric idea in health care is just anti-corporate reform and regulation (almost everything they've proposed is pro-corporation, that's precisely what we don't want, k Obama?). In any case, with our current congress, the whole healthcare thing is a lose-lose situation since either way the big companies win, only real (read: anti-corporation, pro-consumer) reform and regulation would harm their bottom line and make healthcare more affordable without damaging our economy. And as for "fair taxation" -- that topic is so controversial it's likely impossible to achieve. Liberals want anyone making more money than they need to have the rest taxed away. Conservatives want any company making any profit at all to be completely untaxed. Two moronic extremes that are completely incompatible each other and what the average American is likely to want. Fair Tax has some good features but it glosses over parts that would unfairly tax the poor. Whatever happens, it needs to be simple, our current tax system breeds overpaid jobs and govt. agencies that over-consume budget but that complexity is entirely unnecessary -- it also tends to favor big corporations who can hire paralegals and tax specialists to find big holes for their money. That's a shocker, isn't it? *sigh*. The United Corporations of America.
Slashdot Mirror
Billions of people worldwide do work they don't particularly like for money. For small sums of money, too. The hundreds of millions of campaign contributions I can very easily see as public record given to these people followed by their $700,000+ /yr jobs in the private sector after they retire can't possibly indicate that the same applies. Given enough money, most people do what they're told. This is completely valid and actually correct thinking. The tinfoil hat is when you talk about the corporations planning some kind of NWO, but really it's about control to kill competition and remain absurdly profitable with govt. assistance. It's called tyranny. You might want to read up in some history books.
The entire point of the President's veto capability was specifically for cases where the executive branch disagrees with the legislative. What the big corporate interests paid for when they paid to have Obama made president (and would've been the same of McCain, it's easy to make people think they have a choice when you control both of the choices) was a president who appeals to the people but really doesn't stand in the way of their majority ownership of the legislative branch.
Unfortunately, tyranny has never gone silently, as you suggest. When (not if) revolution happens in our country, there will be consequences for those involved, and there will be blood. It will not be a silent revolution done over the internets. The fact that now 4 different bills have been proposed and have "approval" from the executive and legislative branches that would permit wholesale censorship of the internet should convince you of that.
Unless there's an 0-day in MS's libraries again that lets browsers download/exec payload without user consent, you still need to click twice. If they download an exe, it's fairly obvious you need to run it to cause harm (don't ever run an exe linked in an e-mail, simple advice). There's also an abuse of the insecurity of the JRE inside browsers in that the JRE needs only ask for permission from the user to do even basic things (writing temp files, reading files, connecting to a server, etc). That permission includes downloading and running with current user privileges any payload from the web (connecting to a server and running a file, IMO, are two entirely different levels of permissions). So when it asks for permission in a totally benign looking website made to look like some legitimate business, we're all trained to click yes because that's what Java applets fucking do, they require you to click yes before you can use them, and this is without fail. Seriously, all of them. So you get some page that doesn't really work after the applet loads, but it downloads a malicious payload and your PC is fucked. I had this happen a few years ago to myself, reversed the malware & the delivery method, found their FTP and sent all of the undetected binaries over to MMPC. It wasn't a fake antivirus but it did have minor side effects (it was poorly written, after all), but I knew the second I hit a java applet that did nothing from a link from 4chan that I had an infection, so I found the jar file in my internet cache and went from there. It was just a very basic trojan for turning a machine into a bot :|. Good job, anonymous, there's a reason nobody of value visits 4chan anymore.
They patented it before they released it. They also didn't create it to comply with standards. But technically you can implement AJAX without XHR, using iframes or script tags, and the most browser-independent methods originally did this because IE wasn't compliant with what everyone else was doing. To this day, even IE9 and proposed IE10 is still dramatically different than every other browser in regards to standards (for eg. the handling of XHR request data, the browser still enforces control over MIME which may cause really-fucking-weird behavior on IE but nothing else, forcing you to sterilize the MIME type of your response). This is the reason IE is losing market share at an astronomical rate despite having the advantage of first-install and 100% availability to windows users. They don't advance web technology. They stand in its way.
UEFI supports network capability pre-boot, so a networked solution is possible. Optionally, UEFI could support signed bootloader changes only to certain partitions which would make this possible. If a bootloader signed by the mfg is the only thing that is able to write to some partition marked as "secure", it may be possible for the bootloader to check files in your Windows drive/partition (as it does currently to present you the "windows didn't shut down properly last time.. what do you want to do" screen), if it sees it should be refreshing/restoring windows, it'll just use that protected partition for its job. If it's for backups (like the initial image of the machine), it'll just restore to that or to the indicated back-up or write a new back-up if the operation is to save. If it's just to hold a copy of the install media, the first time the bootloader runs not on an optical drive (during install or during OEM initialization), it could see the partition for the copy of the install media is empty and go ahead and insert the install image at that time.
I don't think there's any other way to do it except that the bootloader supports via UEFI booting to some cloud-drive that Microsoft provides you. You'd be presented with a log-in and you could access your backups and the initial system image. But then that's less of a W8 feature and more of a Microsoft feature. If the image is stored in any place a program running in Windows can modify (especially in an image downloaded within Windows but not secured by some mechanism that precludes the possibility of malware infection, like a ROM firmware only writable with a physical switch on the machine).
Just storing a checksum does you no good. We can pretty easily force MD5 collisions, so it doesn't guarantee much. But a few checksums together could reliably determine that the image has been unaltered. The problem though is that if the image is altered, you wouldn't want to restore it. Thus, some malware could destroy the restore/refresh images of all machines it infects by simply writing a byte somewhere and people wouldn't be able to refresh/restore any longer.
Microsoft has a lot of really bright security people who've probably already thought about this. The idea of having a refresh and a re-install-but-keep-your-apps seems like the options available to you already when you insert the install medium. All that really needs to be done to implement something like that is for a single 4GB disk partition be secured via firmware (BIOS, or in the future UEFI) from write access. I haven't done much research on Microsoft's proposed UEFI/SecureBoot changes for W8, but it would be logical to assume those plans include this or similar functionality, even if as an "extension" to the UEFI standard (classic Microsoft) and so hopefully the answer to your question would be "not for a while."
However, if they do something as stupid as store a disk image in %SystemRoot%, it'll probably be a common feature to all malware before W8 hits RC1.
So let's see here..
TOPIC:
Religion in the Public Square
RESPONSE:
That's why President Obama supports the use of the words "under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance and "In God we Trust' on our currency.
DE-STUPIDIFIED:
Nope, we're keeping this govt. sanctioned religion!
TOPIC:
Taking Action to Reduce the Burden of Student Loan Debt
RESPONSE:
We know that these steps don’t solve all our problems in higher education. There is still more work to be done to make it possible for every American to earn a quality education. But enormous progress has been made.
DE-STUPIDIFIED:
We lowered the interest rates on these loans saving them a few hundred dollars and gave some people $5500, what more do you want from us?
TOPIC:
The Fair Tax – A National Sales Tax That Increases Tax Burdens for Middle-Class Families
RESPONSE:
In short, because it raises burdens on middle-class families and asks less from the most fortunate, this national sales tax is inconsistent with President Obama's principles for tax reform.
DE-STUPIDIFIED:
We can't really give you a good reason why we don't support the Fair Tax, so we've decided to present clear propaganda against it. Even the title of this section on our website indicates that it places an unfair burden on middle class families despite it doing no such thing. And throughout our response we've constantly hinted at this despite it being entirely false (but please don't actually research the Fair Tax, else you might discover that to be the case). The answer is no, that's all. We want tax reform, just tax reform that's inherently complex and has loopholes for our corporate owners (thanks guys, those millions and free tax evasion tips are really nice)!
TOPIC:
What We Have to Say About Legalizing Marijuana
RESPONSE:
Preventing drug use is the most cost-effective way to reduce drug use and its consequences in America.
DE-STUPIDIFIED:
We didn't actually answer your question in this response. We dodged it over and over by talking about drug-related things. We made sure to drill that point home "drug." We want you to walk away from our "response to legalizing marijuana" remembering that we said the word "drug" in our response 17 times, more than any other word. In short: fuck you hippies. Marijuana would compete with alcohol and tobacco. You really think I'm going to give up $50,000,000 in campaign contributions so you can get high with your buddies with no consequences? LOL!
TOPIC:
Why We Can’t Comment [at allegations of Judicial misconduct]
RESPONSE:
For the reasons given above, the White House declines to comment on matters raised by this petition.
DE-STUPIDIFIED:
Fuck off.
Stay classy, Washington. Keep up the good work. Not answering questions and constantly refusing your citizens the right to have the country run the way they want is a fucking brilliant way to go about running a democratic country. Oh wait, I made the mistake of assuming we still live in a democracy, didn't I? Lol. It's so funny watching them tell us why they won't do what we want. Nobama, 2012.
I'm really worried about how it's presented.
.. let me emphasize here: MAKE IT THE DEFAULT BROWSER AS WELL AS DISABLING THE FEATURE IN IE THAT SAYS "I AM NOT UR DEFAULT BROWSER /wrist". Is thinking about the customer and fairness just too much to ask from Microsoft? The sooner we can get the average users to stop using IE, the sooner we don't have to have if/elses all over our framework code just to make it run on IE.
For the first time a user boots into a fresh copy of windows 8 (think a non-technical person), they'll be greeted with a Metro style interface. Now say they want to go browse a website. They do it from within metro, as if Windows 8 is completely integrated with "the web" -- the entire UI suddenly gives way to the website you wanted to view. From their perspective, they aren't actually using a web browser, it's just the OS going to the page they wanted. In this case, would (again, non-technical) people be able to discern the fact that they're browsing with IE10? That's just while using the metro UI. I think it's utter garbage (as does everyone I know) and so let's move into disable-this-shit-immediately-land.
So non-technical person dislikes the stupidly unusable and painfully tablet-and-phone-friendly metro UI. When they do start -> run and type in a URL or find a web browser icon on their desktop, is it going to just launch IE10? Is there no choice here? So the user still has to actually go download a new browser to displace IE? I'm sure there's some portion of less-than-well-educated and less-than-technical users who will not fully comprehend why they should do this or that they can do this. Maybe that number is somewhere around 40-45% of computer owners?
I'm not so worried about IE10 being an integral part of the OS (it's required for metro, but IMHO, metro is a piece of shit and should not be shipped with Windows 8 anyway), but I am worried about how web browsing is presented to users. If the OS completely assumes the user wants to use IE, and that user has to go out of his/her way to use another browser, it feels like a monopoly. I'd really prefer something like a EU-sanctioned requirement be put into Windows 8. When starting for the first time (after an OEM reset as well), it should ask you if you want to use Metro or the "classic" UI (if it doesn't ask this, I'm going to rage, seriously, I don't want to have to figure out how to turn that shit off when I install windows 8), and then it should ask you which web browser you want to use, and Windows 8 should fetch the latest version of whatever browser I specify, install it, and
Credentials mean nothing. WIth a few hundred thousand and a few years to spend, anyone who isn't an idiot can get a Ph.D. It does not imply that their opinion and misguided trollings on /. about any subject is even remotely accurate. It definitely does not absolve them from heinous ignorance and shortsightedness, as you have clearly demonstrated.
And what part of that isn't obscurity? Every layer you mention is just another obscurity on top of the previous. Is it potentially stronger obscurity? Sure. It's just obscurity. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
Writing code does not imply intelligence nor skill, similarly, neither does duration of residence. Nice try, though.
If I get a big chunk of data that's encrypted, YOU cannot change the key anymore. It's the same issue, but I agree, the basis of strength should rely solely on obscurity that is very easily and rapidly changed. A desirable trait in any security system.
Now you're talking about modularization of the "security mechanism" so that the weak piece is fundamentally simple to exchange. This is definitely a strength and a huge asset to security, but it is still based on obscurity.
It's a little scary someone from the NIH with a doctorate in a field is so short sighted. Never mind, that's really, really scary. It explains a lot, really.
You're claiming known (for now) calculable difficulty to crack is better than a system where the difficulty is not easily calculated. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Both are fundamentally based on obscurity, though. The difficulty with which you can correctly guess the obscurity I would term "strength" and that matters, of course. But it's still obscurity.
Someone else can get in -- all they need is a little bit of information you've left out (like a key). Obscurity. Right there. Self defeating posts are self defeating.
And once you guess their encryption password, their encryption isn't completely broken? Your analogy is flawed, fundamentally you are assuming someone leaves a key lying around in an easily accessible area. No security we have isn't fundamentally based on obscurity. None.
It blows my mind that we take troll stories like this seriously enough to put them on the front page here. I just invested $1800 more into this "dying PC retailer," as the article would have me believe, which is more than I've ever spent on consoles, handhelds, and tablets COMBINED. That's additional to my current PC (but a fraction of the total cost), and that's one of 4 PCs I've built ordering from this "dying PC retailer." I know plenty of people who buy lots more than me from Newegg, and with a much more diverse selection, as well.
From what I've seen, it's been people who are enthusiastic about grabbing the latest iGotYourMoneyDevice and the latest smartphones while they're "cool" who are least likely to build PCs themselves anyway, or customize their existing PC, or to invest DIY home media systems and complex networks, etc. Two separate markets, the valid question is: will one dominate the other.
The simple answer is: undoubtedly no. Tablets and other handheld computing devices have a purpose that they serve, just as desktops and more powerful laptops do. These two realms often don't overlap, and it is very unlikely that a handheld device will be computationally equivalent to a desktop (of the same mfg date) in the foreseeable future. Combine that with the fact that PC parts is merely a fraction of what's sold on Newegg (you can buy iPads, phones, TVs, laptops, and a huge selection of other electronics & accessories at retail there, as well as furniture and other niceties, and you see that this article is just plain silly in premise.
Case in point: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16858753023
So long as every alcoholic beverage comes with a clear indication of its effects as well. Including loss of inhibitions, self restraint (leading to violence including brutal fights), judgement, motor ability, visual acuity, etc. The list is impressively long, so perhaps a pamphlet should be distributed that requires that you read all the way to the end then click 'I Agree' before you can drink.
Hilarious how something like Alcohol bears no warning to its effects but a video game must claim "warning: simulated violence is linked to violent behaviors." Hilarious, really. Hilarious. Fucking morons.
That information shouldn't only require a subpoena. Until recently a similar situation existed with content of e-mail (and some other things) via the Stored Communications Act. If ISPs aren't storing more data in regards to a customer's activity than just addressing information, police would have very little use for the data at all. So it plainly follows that this data too should require a warrant.
Donald, is that you?
Honestly? It's not about WHO supports net neutrality, it's that its idea isn't hijacked, bastardized, and killed by politicians and lobbyists. Spread the information, defeat misinformation. I couldn't care less that a religious organization approves or agrees.
That sounds much better than what I originally read about. When I last looked into the concept, it appeared to only be a fixed percentage spending tax (that % to be determined, but 35% estimates thrown around). I didn't read about a reimbursement from the govt. for cost of living, however that would definitely fix the issues for the poor, along with potentially lessened taxes on certain food items like we currently have.
In that case, I'm quite for this. But you have to fight against bringing the IRS down, killing the need for tax lawyers, etc.. we'll see "XX thousand jobs to be destroyed by this bill." Needless to say, the plenty of companies who specialize at cheating people out of their money to figure out their taxes up to this preposterous tax code we have aren't going to go quietly, and congress tends to respond to money and lobbyists more than voters.
I think you'll find the center wants health care reform, fair taxation, and gitmo closed on the condition that everyone there gets shipped back home or, for the lulz, into Russia (just so long as they aren't here). So you got 2 right, 1 pretty close. But HCO is a pretty far left ideal, the most centric idea in health care is just anti-corporate reform and regulation (almost everything they've proposed is pro-corporation, that's precisely what we don't want, k Obama?). In any case, with our current congress, the whole healthcare thing is a lose-lose situation since either way the big companies win, only real (read: anti-corporation, pro-consumer) reform and regulation would harm their bottom line and make healthcare more affordable without damaging our economy. And as for "fair taxation" -- that topic is so controversial it's likely impossible to achieve. Liberals want anyone making more money than they need to have the rest taxed away. Conservatives want any company making any profit at all to be completely untaxed. Two moronic extremes that are completely incompatible each other and what the average American is likely to want. Fair Tax has some good features but it glosses over parts that would unfairly tax the poor. Whatever happens, it needs to be simple, our current tax system breeds overpaid jobs and govt. agencies that over-consume budget but that complexity is entirely unnecessary -- it also tends to favor big corporations who can hire paralegals and tax specialists to find big holes for their money. That's a shocker, isn't it? *sigh*. The United Corporations of America.
(nt)