Seeing as how the EU is moving towards a "United States of Europe" concept whats wrong with EU-wide arrest warrants?
First, read this story - about a Belgian court trying to prosecute General Franks for his role in the Iraq war. Then bear in mind, with the proposed warrant system, any British soldier could simply be arrested, in Britain, by Belgian police, to face similar charges. For that matter, Blair himself could be arrested that way - and the UK would be powerless to stop it legally.
Then look recent prosecutions - Yahoo!, for example - by French courts. Freedom of speech is giving much less weight there. Then remember French law is very different from British and American law: the burden of proof is reversed - guilty until proven innocent!
Chilling enough, I think. Finally, I would point out the US itself doesn't have such a system! Instead, an extradition request is made, allowing your arrest in that state by that state's officials, followed by a court appearance in that state. (Article IV of the Constitution.) This grants EU member states a power over each others' citizens which is denied even to the States within the US - even without the grotesque parody of justice practiced in parts of Europe, I find this alarming...
Besides, GSM was implemnted properly and the channel is considered open to eavesdropping. So all communications are cyphered with a session key, negociated with the network.
Unfortunately, that key takes Here is a page talking about it: both A5/1 and A5/2 are trivial to crack - probably significantly easier than receiving the radio signal itself!
ISTR France insisted on limiting GSM's crypto strength; at the time the standards were being written, their crypto laws made US export restrictions seem positively libertarian! (Remember when browsers came in three crypto strengths - US domestic [128 bit], export [40 bit] and French [no crypto at all]?) I can't see any obvious reports on this in Google, but Lucky Green has some, er, "suspect" results - for example, the GSM key generation is deliberately crippled. (10 of the 64 bits are hard-wired to 0...) GSM was certainly designed with priorities other than the user's privacy...
What's in it for Microsoft? The underground community that wouldn't normally buy anything branded by Microsoft are clamouring over each other to get Xboxes. Face it, the Xbox is cool to a whole different community now, and the faster the machines sell, the faster Microsoft gets its investment back.
No, the faster the machines sell, slower Microsoft has to sell to get its investment back! (Their big Achilles' heel against Sony is the X-box's much higher hardware costs. Sony have aggressively slashed production costs, to the extent the PS2 is down to about two fancy chips, some RAM and a DVD drive - they actually break even on hardware alone. Microsoft have had to match Sony's price, but without the same cost savings - which means anyone buying an X-box who doesn't buy X-box games as well is eating away at their cashflow...)
Besides, if you've got a modded Xbox, getting an emulator is the only way you can play decent games on it. The Xbox has been out for a year and a half and Microsoft is still peddling its launch titles, and Halo 2 won't be out until next year. Call me cynical, but don't other games machines get good games on a more frequent basis?
Yep - that, of course, is why MS are fighting to sell X-box machines. If you were a games company, and had the resources to release a new game on one platform, you'd probably go for the most popular one - the PS2 wins. Even if it is a multi-platform launch, priority will go to PS2 over X-box.
To fight this, MS can either "bribe" the games company (cheaper deals on development kits, cut the licensing fee, even buy some or all of the company) - but that gets very expensive very quickly, and even MS have a point where it is just too expensive - or wave impressive console sales figures under their nose ("Look, we've got X million potential customers for you!"). So far, MS got some mileage out of the first strategy, at great expense, and are getting wiped out by Sony on the second...
X-box certainly hasn't been a flop; I certainly get the impression it's lagging behind the Sony juggernaut so far, though!
Could you provide more details on this please? I didn't find any reference to the host you mentioned in the google results page source (which had text ads)...
Different system. Google's search results have the text inserted inline, by the search engine itself; I was talking about the "banner ads" carried by other sites (including Slashdot). Obviously, Google can't insert those ads inline as they do for their own site - instead, the site includes a snippet of javascript, which retrieves the appropriate banner ad from that host. Browse around Slashdot until you hit one of these ads, then look at that page's source.
Oh, wait.... It says "User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*" can scan everything. This surprises me however. Still, that's not "GoogleBot", which I see from time to time in my apache logs.
Anybody got an idea what "Mediapartners-Google*" exactly is?
Mediapartners-Google would appear to be Google's ad engine - it tries to determine "relevant" ads for the page by spidering it beforehand. Presumably, you would only see hits from that bot if you serve Google text-ads; GoogleBot is the crawler which drives the actual search engine.
(Aside: Those text ads were quite tricky to filter out - not being images, there's no 'block images' option! Putting "127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com" in/etc/hosts did the trick, though...)
Anthony Blair is one of the greatest Prime Ministers Britain has ever had. I'd rank only Churchill and Thatcher (for her dissolving the ownership of the commanding heights of your economy and privitising them thus preventing the UK's economy from retarding like the rest of Europe's) above him.
As an American I salute Blair and can only hope that someday the people of the UK will realize just how great of a leader he is.
I agree with all of that - from a non-UK perspective, he's great. Unfortunately, his domestic policies so far have been the opposite; he stood up to corrupt liars like Chirac over Iraq, but has so far appeared determined to grovel to the Franco-German agenda on domestic issues, from EU-wide arrest warrants (instead of extradition), to the Euro, and the Euro-army. Hopefully recent events have changed his mind, at least on that last element...
Ironically, Blair was originally elected as an MP on the back of a promise to withdraw from the EEC, as he attacked Thatcher for "getting us into" the Falklands conflict and pledged to abandon nuclear weapons and cruise missiles!
You're forgetting lawyers. Tony Blair is a lawyer...
As is his wife - who makes a fortune out of human "rights" cases, many of them created by her husband's Human Rights Act. *cough*conflict of interest?*cough*
OTOH, "behind every sleazy lawyer is a sleazy client" - lawyers distort facts to serve their client's interests, politicians do it to get power, journalists do it to get money. I'd rank politicians as the worst in that respect, followed by journalists: at least lawyers help someone else in the process! (Of course, Blair manages to combine two of those categories, making him worse still...)
Sadly, one of the defining characteristics of such a person would be that they would not be egotistical enough to enter a nation-wide popularity contest. I generally regard anyone who chooses to stand for election to be unelectable on those grounds. This makes voting difficult.
Indeed: almost by definition, everyone appearing on the ballot sheet is seeking power - a definite bad sign in itself. In their attempt to gain power, they all claim to have the purest motives, wonderful intentions and be above reproach - despite being politicians, which tends to discredit all those claims.
The only exception to this I have seen was an independent candidate who stood in the UK elections a few years back. The incumbent had been accused of corruption, and the independent stated that he would run against him, but would not run against another candidate that the Conservative party selected. They didn't back down, and the independent candidate won.
The great irony being, the independent candidate in question was a journalist - probably the only legal occupation as morally questionable as a politician! (This particular one was actually a war reporter; an honest and respectable guy, especially by politician or journalist standards.)
I sometimes wish politicians had to write a contract, rather than a mere "manifesto". Instead of vague waffle, they have to give concrete aims. We then vote based on that, and the successful candidate is then judged based on that contract. Fail to meet enough aims, you're disqualified next race; make trivial aims, you won't get elected.
Too right. If you ever hear of such a candidate I'd suggest voting for him or her and get the current retarded red-neck criminal draft-dodging lying wife-beating hypocritical usurper and his money-laundering, weapon selling, oil sucking, evil, vicious, dishonest, corporate-controled cronies out of power ASAP.
Too late: Clinton's already been replaced. Before he achieved the regime change in Iraq he pledged back in 1998, too (Iraq Liberation Act); never managed to get round the Senate's unanimous (95-0) rejection of his beloved Kyoto treaty, either...
Nice idea; I've always wanted to do a sort of on-demand custom service, though. Have a vending machine in the record store - like a jukebox, the customers pick out the tracks they want, and it's burned onto CDR for them.
The trouble with p2p is - yes, it exposes the public to that artist's music - but why would they pay for a copy of music they already have in mp3 form? Unlike radio play and MTV, an mp3 isn't different enough from the CD to make people want to buy it...
Yes, this missile would never manage anything remotely ballistic. Hitting a football game - besides being a dumb approach (much easier McVeigh-style) - would have the same problem as hitting an airliner: the error range (100m) would be enough to make the difference between hitting the inside of the stadium, killing people, and the car park outside, damaging some vehicles.
As for the damage 10kg would cause: Panam flight 103 was fragmented by 300g of Semtex. Granted, that was in flight, so all the charge had to do was breach the fuselage and airflow would do the rest - on the other hand, this is more than 30 times that amount of explosive. The coordinates would be fairly easy (positions are fixed and marked at each gate) - no harder than for your football game, anyway. The update frequency doesn't determine the accuracy; line up with the target using DGPS, and all you need is precise timing, which any computer can do trivially.
This may not be a good way to take out an aircraft, but it's much better for that than for a football game!
Yeah, now why exactly are we to blame this guy? Because he is doing something that will stop much of the popup add abuse? I don't understand what the poster is getting at.
Same here: I'm very much hoping he goes round and rips Gator a new one... (Pats Ad-Aware on the head for killing that lousy scumware)
Even if he just says "You must give me $0.0001 per popup you deliver", it'll push up the cost of popups; remember, banner ads depend on huge, cheap volume with a tiny click-through ratio to be effective. Every 1% increase in cost makes them a bit less cost-effective...
There's absolutely nothing to stop a group or artist doing what you suggest right now. For that matter, there's nothing to stop them selling their own CDs to retailers, or to a distributor like the labels do - and yes, they can (and do) get more than 3% for it. Most of them, however, go for the big-label-deal route. Why? The big initial chunk of cash is appealing, of course, but more importantly I think they want their music heard. They'd rather sell half a million CDs in retail stores and Amazon than a couple of thousand through mp3.com or their own little stall - even if the latter route would give them more money. Right now, it's a choice between a small slice of a huge pie, or all of a tiny little pie. It's also less risky: with the label, they get a minimum of the $200k advance (after expenses) you said, even if their CD sells like a cup of cold sick - with your DIY route, they might get 0. I have seen groups going your route - they were quite good, but I doubt they were shifting anything like enough CDs to match even the minimum income a record deal would give.
I am all for removing copyright as a "standard" the way it is now. Copyright was originated to protect artists from not being compensated for their creations. As it is today it appears to do very little in that regard.
The current system guarantees the creators a certain minimum per copy, as well as giving the copyright holder an income to share out. Remove that, and there's nothing to stop some enterprising character standing outside each concert venue, selling copies of that CD for $2 a time. They put nothing in besides a few minutes with a CD copier and some $0.30 blanks - how do you deal with that?
Dood: that is nonsense. I worked in numerous retail chains across Canada, and dealt with numerous US retailers. They make next to nothing on a CD. Sure, if they sell a back catalog item at typically full retail price (which is way more than $17 still) then yeah they make a profit on that title. Those titles represent 2% of all retail sales on average.
Negligible profit on those CDs, I'll agree: buying the little pieces of plastic to put on the shelves is only one of the costs to the retailer. There are all kinds of other overheads - staffing, tax, rent/mortgage/whatever on the store itself, insurance, theft, damaged goods, and maybe some returns depending on policy. The store has to recoup all of that from their markup on the CDs - it's a big markup, but it has a lot of costs to cover.
Copyright is to blame.
How? Copyright does not make the artists sign those deals. Without the copyright, what money would the artist get from retail CD sales, and how?
An artist gets: on average 3 - 5% of sales *after* they have recouped.
Yes...
That's based on mechanical royalties, which is a form of copyright.
... and no. It's a payment mandated by copyright; remove copyright, you've just removed that payment. This is not an improvement...
That's based on mechanical royalties, which is a form of copyright. That whole system is bulls**t in my opinion, and the opinion of most artists. Labels love it. They get the "everything else" that is left over after manufacturing, distribution, marketing and promotional costs are taken into account. And the guy is right: it's still millions. After only gold sales! (500,000 in the US.)
I agree the artist gets a small slice of the copyright revenue. How exactly is this copyright's fault?
The average good musician *could* survive on 20,000 copies sold in the US at current prices,
Only with copyright. Without it, those 20,000 copies would be sold by other people - without the artist getting a single penny - and there would be nothing they could do.
and make a decent profit if they don't go to a record label to do so. That's a fact. Very few artists do this or know this. They've been brought up on a steady diet of rockstar lifestyle record deals. That's what they want. It's sad and I expect it will not last.
Yes, the successful artists get screwed by the labels. I agree there, and I'd like to see that change -but copyright is not the fault here! Remove it, and the artist and label both get 100% of 0 from the record sales.
Dont worry about what he says. This is the guy that has been trying to replace PC's with Dummy terminals (well maybe smart terminals).
Network Computers, Java - well, Java's quite popular, but nothing like the Windows-killer he predicted it would be, and NCs? They have a niche market - and apart from Sun's SunRay, use something like Citrix to access the same old Windows apps, under a hacked version of the same old Windows NT. When someone with a track record like this says "your market is doomed", I'll take that as "buy, buy, buy"!
I did like the tale of his speech at some Ivy League place, though: "To those graduating today: it's too late. You're doomed. You've already been brainwashed and had all the creativity and potential crushed. Everyone else: it's not too late. You can still drop out early and be a success, like I did!"...
The software industry may get worse because of outsourcing to 3rd world countries where the labor costs are lower but it will not just die.
Maybe, maybe not. So far, I get the impression those countries are OK for cheap "grunt work", but if you want decent coding, you're still better off with the usual US/UK/Canada. Apparently those countries tend to emphasize rote learning in schools, rather than trying to foster the creativity and problem-solving needed to be a good programmer. Don't worry about it too much - apart from anything else, grunt work tends to be the first to be taken over by automation - and even the cheapest third world country will struggle to compete with a robot on efficiency, reliability and running costs!
I'd never join the military, but if anyone (USA included) was invading my country, I'd pick up a gun and defend it.
Assuming, of course, your government hasn't stolen them all... AFAIK, the Canadian government's not bad in that respect, though not to the extent of the US - but if the UK were ever invaded, we're screwed. (After the UK's version of Columbine, Dunblane, the jerks jerked their knees and banned guns. Never mind that the existing gun laws would have banned the culprit from having guns anyway, but for corrupt law enforcement, the answer to law failing is always making more law! Duh.)
To anyone who chimes in with the claim about individuals with individual weapons not being able to resist an invasion, I suggest they go to Chechnya for a while. Or Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion. An organised army can be squashed by a bigger or better-equipped army - an armed population can't, short of genocide on a larger scale than Germany's in WWII.
Perhaps. It's not an obvious deal, like IBM or HP would be - but IBM or HP would never be allowed to eat Sun, on market share grounds. Anyone wanting to buy Sun would have to be in a different market segment: Dell might be allowed to (some overlap, but Dell max out at the 8 CPU x86 level).
Apple, on the other hand, have almost no overlap: the nearest they have is xServe, which is well below Sun's core market. Despite that, they have a lot in common on the software side - a heavy investment in Java, for example, and both using Unix platforms on RISC chips. More importantly, perhaps, a shared "enemy" in Microsoft. A combined Sun+Apple would be able to offer a much better package to businesses: serious servers (Sun), with nice user-friendly clients (Apple) and a non-MS office suite (Sun's StarOffice). Put the whole lot under Sun's industrial-strength support, and IT people would have a good rival to Wintel: anything goes wrong with any aspect of your network? Call Sun-Apple, and they'll sort it out - server hardware, client hardware, client OS, server OS, application - all under one roof.
Sun are already pretty good at the datacenter market; ditto Apple with the individual user or small office. Neither can compete with the likes of Dell or HP for business, though: Dell and HP can build you a whole network of x86 machines, running Windows, and support the whole lot. Apple can't - fine desktops, but the only server offering is xServe - and nor can Sun - no desktops, unless you go for the $$$$ workstations or SunRay thin clients.
I'm not at all convinced a merger or takeover would be the right way to achieve this "one stop shop", though. Perhaps an extension of their existing Sun-Veritas-Oracle alliance would be a better route?
I'm convinced you don't know very much about aviation
I'm convinced you haven't read the article... I wasn't talking about anything "internationally launched", or any kind of "international threat". The range is 100 miles! (I think those I've flown with, RAF and civilian, would disagree with you, too...)
Do you understand that dumping a bunch of foil somewhere isn't gonna do a whole lot except inconvenience controllers?
Yes. Do you understand that "inconvenience" is almost exactly what that kind of script kiddie aims for? Look at the chaos caused in the UK when the new NATS (air traffic control) computer failed: hours of delays, hundreds of cancelled flights, a fortune in compensation to the passengers affected. All that for something like the $5k the article mentions? A bargain, if that's the effect you're after. Lots of psychological (and financial) impact, but without all the hostility 9/11 bought Al Queda...
If you're going to use a cruise missile, using it against an aircraft on the ground is a pretty silly idea. LET"S THINK A SECOND. IT MOVES! IT'S RELATIVELY SMALL! THIS MAKES THINGS HARDER FOR NO GAIN. Suddenly you need target acquisition or remote control, and a whole lot more precision.
The jet fuel certainly will make a big difference: the warhead on this missile is 10kg. 10kg of home-made explosives really doesn't go very far, compared to a full load of fuel. Also: if you wanted to take out a football stadium, there are much easier ways. Carry a bomb in, leave it under a seat, and disappear as if going to the bathroom. Park a big truck fertiliser bomb outside, a la McVeigh.
Bear in mind terrorists are not aiming for body counts, or economic costs - they want psychological impact above all else. Taking out an airliner - after the passengers have all been through metal detectors, had their nail clippers confiscated, and been through all the other security checks - has much more impact. Especially if you choose the right target: do you really think the Secret Service could do anything when Air Force One is sitting on the ground, with the President on, and a missile is launched from a pickup 20 miles away? At the 380 mph quoted, they have about 3 minutes in which to detect and identify it, then figure out some response. For that situation, my money's on the missile...
Now: do you really think attacking a stationary aircraft, in a known location, would be so hard? The 100m accuracy quoted isn't quite enough, but could be improved - and do you really think a VIP aircraft like AF1 would be a less appealing target than a football game?!
Y'know, the definition of "cruise missile" means it doesn't fly a ballistic trajectory.
Yes, I know that pretty well...
Likewise, something with an air-breathing pulsejet isn't gonna stay ballistic very long no matter how much you alter it in other ways.
It wouldn't have to stay ballistic very long to upset a lot of people. Likewise, the body may not have a big radar signature at present, but just wrapping it in foil will make a big difference.
Sure, anything flying in an ADIZ would worry people. The thing is, if it crosses into an ADIZ and gets detected, it'll get shot down.
Yeah. We all saw on 9/11 how quickly the USAF could shoot down airborne vehicles going where they shouldn't be... I'm sure they'd react much faster now - but fast enough to take out a missile with very little radar signature?
There are really two issues here. One is the "DoS" attack: fly it somewhere it shouldn't be, maybe dump out a load of foil in an airport flight path. At the very least it'll worry a lot of people, when big radar blips suddenly appear where they shouldn't be. The other is blowing something up or crashing into it, where that small radar signature will help.
It would be hard to retrofit a cruise missile to be a decent surface to air missile. The problems are fundamentally different.
A true SAM, yes - but smacking into a fscking big airliner on the runway, or as it taxis? Much easier: no countermeasures, no cockpit warning, and it's moving very slowly compared to most SAM targets. For that matter just hitting an aircraft at the gate, once it's fuelled, would make quite a mess...
Gagh. Now I'll have to forget all this next time I fly anywhere! Somehow, I don't think I want to know how easy terrorist attacks are when I'm sitting in a potential target. (Anyone here remember the suggestion for the new WTC building - put the UN headquarters right at the top, so they'll take terrorism more seriously?)
Minor correction-- to discover domestic cruise missile launches.
Launch in the US, and it's domestic to US systems - but very much foreign to Russian, Chinese and other systems. Depending on size and flightpath, I think it could still worry a lot of people you don't want to piss off!
Something that goes up high and fast on a ballistic trajectory will get plenty of attention from USSPACECOM, and even more so from foreign infrared imagery and radars. But a cruise missile just acts like an airplane-- and an airplane flying without talking to ATC in uncontrolled airspace is just fine. And it looks small enough on radars it could be mistaken for a bird or ground reflections.
I'd expect it to be rather bigger than a bird, and I'm sure someone will make one which flies a ballistic trajectory instead - accidentally or otherwise. I bet there are already Darwin Award contenders going "Cool, I can yank NORAD's chain if I change this bit, and fire it like this..."
Or, as a previous poster suggested, you just get some terrorist firing one into a building. Or building an infra-red seeker head, and mangling a 747. (Yes, they've already tried using black-market Stingers, Al Queda recently in Kenya and a Palestinian group in Rome in the late 70s - but Stingers really suck for taking out airliners. A modified version of this thing might not...)
You don't have to commit suicide to use one of these. It should make a good weapon for a less dedicated terrorist.
Or, worse still, an idiot. Lots more of those than there are terrorists - harder to track, too. Anyone here remember the kid who built a crude nuclear "reactor" (i.e. put together something that sent Geiger counters off the top of the scale, and his sperm count off the other end)? Now imagine a similar kid building one of these, and accidentally firing it into a building. Even just firing it into the air could air traffic control and missile early warning systems, causing chaos!
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I never said copyright was to blame. Copyright is only the tool that record companies use to steal from artists, enslave them, if you will.
Yes, and that's the bit I was objecting to. Copyright is how the record companies make money from the music, a small portion of which goes to the artist. It doesn't enslave anybody: without the copyright fees, the artist would get a large share of the 0 each copy would make for the copyright owner. Remove copyright, and you remove the income it generates.
When an artist gets a return of less than a dollar on a $15 CD, I call it theft.
For the label, it isn't a $15 anything. If it's a $15 CD on the store shelves, it's a $7.50 CD from the distributor, for which the label might get $3 or so. (Rough figures; someone from a record label posted accurate figures on Slashdot a while ago for his own label.) From that $3, they then have to cover the manufacturing costs of the CDs, cases, cover art (more royalty payments), shipping, promotion, overheads - and the biggest cost of all, the payments to failed artists. Whether their album generates any sales or not, they still get paid: the label has to cover that out of sales of successful albums.
If the labels are screwing the artists so successfully, why have their profit margins dropped by 75%, and why are they laying off thousands of staff? The biggest chunk of the $15-$20 CD price goes straight into the retailer's account - the "greedy" label only gets a small fraction compared to the other commercial players. For a label, there is no $15 CD, only $3 CDs someone else retails for $15!
It isn't copyright they used to get their current position, either. True, without copyright they wouldn't get any money from CD sales - but nor would the artist! Not an improvement IMHO. As I said, what has given the "Big 5" control is payola - nothing whatsoever to do with copyright.
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Whatever buddy, keep believing that tripe if you want to. You take someone who owns something "potentially" worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that someone who has also never made much more than minimum wage their entire life.
Now promise them the world, toss a few thousand dollars to them in exchance for the copyright to a product worth orders of magnitude more. They'll sign, because they're young and still believe that people are fair, until Universal Music sends them the bill for the tour promotion they did for them, and now they're in the hole, own no copyrights and don't get shite.
Bollocks yourself. If you think that record companies are fair, you are a fool.
I never said they were fair. I said copyright was not to blame. (The post claimed the artists were "enslaved" using copyright, which is complete crap. They may perhaps be "enslaved" by a crap record contract, but that's another matter entirely.)
Incidentally, there is no "few thousand dollars": it's a hell of a lot more than that, and even if the record is the worst flop in history, they don't owe the record label any money. They just take the advance, minus whatever they spent, and go back to flipping burgers. They're richer, the label is poorer, and another crap record sits on the shelves for a while. There are lots of figures out there claiming the "poor artist" gets screwed, notably Courtney Love's; if you look closely at her figures, you'll see each of her four group members ended up getting $90k, minus tax. She claims this is less than they'd make in a 7-11; if it's true, please show me to a 7-11 paying that kind of money! Also note they never had to repay the advance: you are never given a bill, as you claim. It's just deducted from any royalties you've earned.
Yes, there have been high profile artists going bankrupt. (Elton John, for example.) This is not because he earns nothing - he earned a small fortune, but spent a large one. Result: huge debts.
The record companies are using copyright to enslave musicians and steal their work.
Bollocks. Complete and utter bollocks.
Copyright - initially - belongs entirely to the artist(s). They then have a contract with a record label, whereby the copyright is sold to that label in exchange for money.
Don't want your copyright going to a label? Simple: don't sign that contract. Most bands, however, find that difficult when the label is waving hundreds $k under their noses while they're living on Ramen or whatever: it's a very tempting offer.
If there's one root problem here, it's still payola. Without that, artists would all be on a level playing field, whoever their label was: send a free CD of your music to a bunch of radio stations, get played, sell records. Copyright doesn't come into it, it's the airplay control that matters.
Incidently, although the kernels were explicitly mentioned for those, I have yet to see a system operate with only the kernel itself installed.
Care to tell that to my firewall? The kernel is fully capable of acting as a firewall without any userspace services running. (You still need some kind of init script to configure interfaces, but there is no security exposure there: they aren't network services.)
Other things that are a requirement to installing programs, such as glibc, have had major [cert.org] security [cert.org] holes [cert.org] in the past.
Funny, my firewall's boot floppy doesn't seem to have glibc on. Or any network applications accessable from the Internet: being a firewall, that's all firewalled off.
Yes, glibc blows from a security point of view. That's why I didn't include it in my links above! Ditto wu-ftpd, BIND... - but it's entirely possible to run a system without any of that crap. Especially a desktop system: WTF would I need an FTP or DNS server on a desktop system for? Strip out all the services, and even the oldest of unpatched RedHat systems will be secure from network intrusion - not so Windows, thanks to ActiveX, Windows Scripting Host and Outlook!
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First, read this story - about a Belgian court trying to prosecute General Franks for his role in the Iraq war. Then bear in mind, with the proposed warrant system, any British soldier could simply be arrested, in Britain, by Belgian police, to face similar charges. For that matter, Blair himself could be arrested that way - and the UK would be powerless to stop it legally.
Then look recent prosecutions - Yahoo!, for example - by French courts. Freedom of speech is giving much less weight there. Then remember French law is very different from British and American law: the burden of proof is reversed - guilty until proven innocent!
Chilling enough, I think. Finally, I would point out the US itself doesn't have such a system! Instead, an extradition request is made, allowing your arrest in that state by that state's officials, followed by a court appearance in that state. (Article IV of the Constitution.) This grants EU member states a power over each others' citizens which is denied even to the States within the US - even without the grotesque parody of justice practiced in parts of Europe, I find this alarming...
Unfortunately, that key takes Here is a page talking about it: both A5/1 and A5/2 are trivial to crack - probably significantly easier than receiving the radio signal itself!
ISTR France insisted on limiting GSM's crypto strength; at the time the standards were being written, their crypto laws made US export restrictions seem positively libertarian! (Remember when browsers came in three crypto strengths - US domestic [128 bit], export [40 bit] and French [no crypto at all]?) I can't see any obvious reports on this in Google, but Lucky Green has some, er, "suspect" results - for example, the GSM key generation is deliberately crippled. (10 of the 64 bits are hard-wired to 0...) GSM was certainly designed with priorities other than the user's privacy...
No, the faster the machines sell, slower Microsoft has to sell to get its investment back! (Their big Achilles' heel against Sony is the X-box's much higher hardware costs. Sony have aggressively slashed production costs, to the extent the PS2 is down to about two fancy chips, some RAM and a DVD drive - they actually break even on hardware alone. Microsoft have had to match Sony's price, but without the same cost savings - which means anyone buying an X-box who doesn't buy X-box games as well is eating away at their cashflow...)
Besides, if you've got a modded Xbox, getting an emulator is the only way you can play decent games on it. The Xbox has been out for a year and a half and Microsoft is still peddling its launch titles, and Halo 2 won't be out until next year. Call me cynical, but don't other games machines get good games on a more frequent basis?
Yep - that, of course, is why MS are fighting to sell X-box machines. If you were a games company, and had the resources to release a new game on one platform, you'd probably go for the most popular one - the PS2 wins. Even if it is a multi-platform launch, priority will go to PS2 over X-box.
To fight this, MS can either "bribe" the games company (cheaper deals on development kits, cut the licensing fee, even buy some or all of the company) - but that gets very expensive very quickly, and even MS have a point where it is just too expensive - or wave impressive console sales figures under their nose ("Look, we've got X million potential customers for you!"). So far, MS got some mileage out of the first strategy, at great expense, and are getting wiped out by Sony on the second...
X-box certainly hasn't been a flop; I certainly get the impression it's lagging behind the Sony juggernaut so far, though!
Different system. Google's search results have the text inserted inline, by the search engine itself; I was talking about the "banner ads" carried by other sites (including Slashdot). Obviously, Google can't insert those ads inline as they do for their own site - instead, the site includes a snippet of javascript, which retrieves the appropriate banner ad from that host. Browse around Slashdot until you hit one of these ads, then look at that page's source.
Anybody got an idea what "Mediapartners-Google*" exactly is?
Mediapartners-Google would appear to be Google's ad engine - it tries to determine "relevant" ads for the page by spidering it beforehand. Presumably, you would only see hits from that bot if you serve Google text-ads; GoogleBot is the crawler which drives the actual search engine.
(Aside: Those text ads were quite tricky to filter out - not being images, there's no 'block images' option! Putting "127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com" in /etc/hosts did the trick, though...)
As an American I salute Blair and can only hope that someday the people of the UK will realize just how great of a leader he is.
I agree with all of that - from a non-UK perspective, he's great. Unfortunately, his domestic policies so far have been the opposite; he stood up to corrupt liars like Chirac over Iraq, but has so far appeared determined to grovel to the Franco-German agenda on domestic issues, from EU-wide arrest warrants (instead of extradition), to the Euro, and the Euro-army. Hopefully recent events have changed his mind, at least on that last element...
Ironically, Blair was originally elected as an MP on the back of a promise to withdraw from the EEC, as he attacked Thatcher for "getting us into" the Falklands conflict and pledged to abandon nuclear weapons and cruise missiles!
As is his wife - who makes a fortune out of human "rights" cases, many of them created by her husband's Human Rights Act. *cough*conflict of interest?*cough*
OTOH, "behind every sleazy lawyer is a sleazy client" - lawyers distort facts to serve their client's interests, politicians do it to get power, journalists do it to get money. I'd rank politicians as the worst in that respect, followed by journalists: at least lawyers help someone else in the process! (Of course, Blair manages to combine two of those categories, making him worse still...)
Indeed: almost by definition, everyone appearing on the ballot sheet is seeking power - a definite bad sign in itself. In their attempt to gain power, they all claim to have the purest motives, wonderful intentions and be above reproach - despite being politicians, which tends to discredit all those claims.
The only exception to this I have seen was an independent candidate who stood in the UK elections a few years back. The incumbent had been accused of corruption, and the independent stated that he would run against him, but would not run against another candidate that the Conservative party selected. They didn't back down, and the independent candidate won.
The great irony being, the independent candidate in question was a journalist - probably the only legal occupation as morally questionable as a politician! (This particular one was actually a war reporter; an honest and respectable guy, especially by politician or journalist standards.)
I sometimes wish politicians had to write a contract, rather than a mere "manifesto". Instead of vague waffle, they have to give concrete aims. We then vote based on that, and the successful candidate is then judged based on that contract. Fail to meet enough aims, you're disqualified next race; make trivial aims, you won't get elected.
Too late: Clinton's already been replaced. Before he achieved the regime change in Iraq he pledged back in 1998, too (Iraq Liberation Act); never managed to get round the Senate's unanimous (95-0) rejection of his beloved Kyoto treaty, either...
Nice idea; I've always wanted to do a sort of on-demand custom service, though. Have a vending machine in the record store - like a jukebox, the customers pick out the tracks they want, and it's burned onto CDR for them.
The trouble with p2p is - yes, it exposes the public to that artist's music - but why would they pay for a copy of music they already have in mp3 form? Unlike radio play and MTV, an mp3 isn't different enough from the CD to make people want to buy it...
As for the damage 10kg would cause: Panam flight 103 was fragmented by 300g of Semtex. Granted, that was in flight, so all the charge had to do was breach the fuselage and airflow would do the rest - on the other hand, this is more than 30 times that amount of explosive. The coordinates would be fairly easy (positions are fixed and marked at each gate) - no harder than for your football game, anyway. The update frequency doesn't determine the accuracy; line up with the target using DGPS, and all you need is precise timing, which any computer can do trivially.
This may not be a good way to take out an aircraft, but it's much better for that than for a football game!
Same here: I'm very much hoping he goes round and rips Gator a new one... (Pats Ad-Aware on the head for killing that lousy scumware)
Even if he just says "You must give me $0.0001 per popup you deliver", it'll push up the cost of popups; remember, banner ads depend on huge, cheap volume with a tiny click-through ratio to be effective. Every 1% increase in cost makes them a bit less cost-effective...
I am all for removing copyright as a "standard" the way it is now. Copyright was originated to protect artists from not being compensated for their creations. As it is today it appears to do very little in that regard.
The current system guarantees the creators a certain minimum per copy, as well as giving the copyright holder an income to share out. Remove that, and there's nothing to stop some enterprising character standing outside each concert venue, selling copies of that CD for $2 a time. They put nothing in besides a few minutes with a CD copier and some $0.30 blanks - how do you deal with that?
Negligible profit on those CDs, I'll agree: buying the little pieces of plastic to put on the shelves is only one of the costs to the retailer. There are all kinds of other overheads - staffing, tax, rent/mortgage/whatever on the store itself, insurance, theft, damaged goods, and maybe some returns depending on policy. The store has to recoup all of that from their markup on the CDs - it's a big markup, but it has a lot of costs to cover.
Copyright is to blame.
How? Copyright does not make the artists sign those deals. Without the copyright, what money would the artist get from retail CD sales, and how?
An artist gets: on average 3 - 5% of sales *after* they have recouped.
Yes...
That's based on mechanical royalties, which is a form of copyright.
... and no. It's a payment mandated by copyright; remove copyright, you've just removed that payment. This is not an improvement...
That's based on mechanical royalties, which is a form of copyright. That whole system is bulls**t in my opinion, and the opinion of most artists. Labels love it. They get the "everything else" that is left over after manufacturing, distribution, marketing and promotional costs are taken into account. And the guy is right: it's still millions. After only gold sales! (500,000 in the US.)
I agree the artist gets a small slice of the copyright revenue. How exactly is this copyright's fault?
The average good musician *could* survive on 20,000 copies sold in the US at current prices,
Only with copyright. Without it, those 20,000 copies would be sold by other people - without the artist getting a single penny - and there would be nothing they could do.
and make a decent profit if they don't go to a record label to do so. That's a fact. Very few artists do this or know this. They've been brought up on a steady diet of rockstar lifestyle record deals. That's what they want. It's sad and I expect it will not last.
Yes, the successful artists get screwed by the labels. I agree there, and I'd like to see that change -but copyright is not the fault here! Remove it, and the artist and label both get 100% of 0 from the record sales.
Network Computers, Java - well, Java's quite popular, but nothing like the Windows-killer he predicted it would be, and NCs? They have a niche market - and apart from Sun's SunRay, use something like Citrix to access the same old Windows apps, under a hacked version of the same old Windows NT. When someone with a track record like this says "your market is doomed", I'll take that as "buy, buy, buy"!
I did like the tale of his speech at some Ivy League place, though: "To those graduating today: it's too late. You're doomed. You've already been brainwashed and had all the creativity and potential crushed. Everyone else: it's not too late. You can still drop out early and be a success, like I did!"...
The software industry may get worse because of outsourcing to 3rd world countries where the labor costs are lower but it will not just die.
Maybe, maybe not. So far, I get the impression those countries are OK for cheap "grunt work", but if you want decent coding, you're still better off with the usual US/UK/Canada. Apparently those countries tend to emphasize rote learning in schools, rather than trying to foster the creativity and problem-solving needed to be a good programmer. Don't worry about it too much - apart from anything else, grunt work tends to be the first to be taken over by automation - and even the cheapest third world country will struggle to compete with a robot on efficiency, reliability and running costs!
Assuming, of course, your government hasn't stolen them all... AFAIK, the Canadian government's not bad in that respect, though not to the extent of the US - but if the UK were ever invaded, we're screwed. (After the UK's version of Columbine, Dunblane, the jerks jerked their knees and banned guns. Never mind that the existing gun laws would have banned the culprit from having guns anyway, but for corrupt law enforcement, the answer to law failing is always making more law! Duh.)
To anyone who chimes in with the claim about individuals with individual weapons not being able to resist an invasion, I suggest they go to Chechnya for a while. Or Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion. An organised army can be squashed by a bigger or better-equipped army - an armed population can't, short of genocide on a larger scale than Germany's in WWII.
Perhaps. It's not an obvious deal, like IBM or HP would be - but IBM or HP would never be allowed to eat Sun, on market share grounds. Anyone wanting to buy Sun would have to be in a different market segment: Dell might be allowed to (some overlap, but Dell max out at the 8 CPU x86 level).
Apple, on the other hand, have almost no overlap: the nearest they have is xServe, which is well below Sun's core market. Despite that, they have a lot in common on the software side - a heavy investment in Java, for example, and both using Unix platforms on RISC chips. More importantly, perhaps, a shared "enemy" in Microsoft. A combined Sun+Apple would be able to offer a much better package to businesses: serious servers (Sun), with nice user-friendly clients (Apple) and a non-MS office suite (Sun's StarOffice). Put the whole lot under Sun's industrial-strength support, and IT people would have a good rival to Wintel: anything goes wrong with any aspect of your network? Call Sun-Apple, and they'll sort it out - server hardware, client hardware, client OS, server OS, application - all under one roof.
Sun are already pretty good at the datacenter market; ditto Apple with the individual user or small office. Neither can compete with the likes of Dell or HP for business, though: Dell and HP can build you a whole network of x86 machines, running Windows, and support the whole lot. Apple can't - fine desktops, but the only server offering is xServe - and nor can Sun - no desktops, unless you go for the $$$$ workstations or SunRay thin clients.
I'm not at all convinced a merger or takeover would be the right way to achieve this "one stop shop", though. Perhaps an extension of their existing Sun-Veritas-Oracle alliance would be a better route?
I'm convinced you haven't read the article... I wasn't talking about anything "internationally launched", or any kind of "international threat". The range is 100 miles! (I think those I've flown with, RAF and civilian, would disagree with you, too...)
Do you understand that dumping a bunch of foil somewhere isn't gonna do a whole lot except inconvenience controllers?
Yes. Do you understand that "inconvenience" is almost exactly what that kind of script kiddie aims for? Look at the chaos caused in the UK when the new NATS (air traffic control) computer failed: hours of delays, hundreds of cancelled flights, a fortune in compensation to the passengers affected. All that for something like the $5k the article mentions? A bargain, if that's the effect you're after. Lots of psychological (and financial) impact, but without all the hostility 9/11 bought Al Queda...
If you're going to use a cruise missile, using it against an aircraft on the ground is a pretty silly idea. LET"S THINK A SECOND. IT MOVES! IT'S RELATIVELY SMALL! THIS MAKES THINGS HARDER FOR NO GAIN. Suddenly you need target acquisition or remote control, and a whole lot more precision.
The jet fuel certainly will make a big difference: the warhead on this missile is 10kg. 10kg of home-made explosives really doesn't go very far, compared to a full load of fuel. Also: if you wanted to take out a football stadium, there are much easier ways. Carry a bomb in, leave it under a seat, and disappear as if going to the bathroom. Park a big truck fertiliser bomb outside, a la McVeigh.
Bear in mind terrorists are not aiming for body counts, or economic costs - they want psychological impact above all else. Taking out an airliner - after the passengers have all been through metal detectors, had their nail clippers confiscated, and been through all the other security checks - has much more impact. Especially if you choose the right target: do you really think the Secret Service could do anything when Air Force One is sitting on the ground, with the President on, and a missile is launched from a pickup 20 miles away? At the 380 mph quoted, they have about 3 minutes in which to detect and identify it, then figure out some response. For that situation, my money's on the missile...
Now: do you really think attacking a stationary aircraft, in a known location, would be so hard? The 100m accuracy quoted isn't quite enough, but could be improved - and do you really think a VIP aircraft like AF1 would be a less appealing target than a football game?!
Yes, I know that pretty well...
Likewise, something with an air-breathing pulsejet isn't gonna stay ballistic very long no matter how much you alter it in other ways.
It wouldn't have to stay ballistic very long to upset a lot of people. Likewise, the body may not have a big radar signature at present, but just wrapping it in foil will make a big difference.
Sure, anything flying in an ADIZ would worry people. The thing is, if it crosses into an ADIZ and gets detected, it'll get shot down.
Yeah. We all saw on 9/11 how quickly the USAF could shoot down airborne vehicles going where they shouldn't be... I'm sure they'd react much faster now - but fast enough to take out a missile with very little radar signature?
There are really two issues here. One is the "DoS" attack: fly it somewhere it shouldn't be, maybe dump out a load of foil in an airport flight path. At the very least it'll worry a lot of people, when big radar blips suddenly appear where they shouldn't be. The other is blowing something up or crashing into it, where that small radar signature will help.
It would be hard to retrofit a cruise missile to be a decent surface to air missile. The problems are fundamentally different.
A true SAM, yes - but smacking into a fscking big airliner on the runway, or as it taxis? Much easier: no countermeasures, no cockpit warning, and it's moving very slowly compared to most SAM targets. For that matter just hitting an aircraft at the gate, once it's fuelled, would make quite a mess...
Gagh. Now I'll have to forget all this next time I fly anywhere! Somehow, I don't think I want to know how easy terrorist attacks are when I'm sitting in a potential target. (Anyone here remember the suggestion for the new WTC building - put the UN headquarters right at the top, so they'll take terrorism more seriously?)
Launch in the US, and it's domestic to US systems - but very much foreign to Russian, Chinese and other systems. Depending on size and flightpath, I think it could still worry a lot of people you don't want to piss off!
Something that goes up high and fast on a ballistic trajectory will get plenty of attention from USSPACECOM, and even more so from foreign infrared imagery and radars. But a cruise missile just acts like an airplane-- and an airplane flying without talking to ATC in uncontrolled airspace is just fine. And it looks small enough on radars it could be mistaken for a bird or ground reflections.
I'd expect it to be rather bigger than a bird, and I'm sure someone will make one which flies a ballistic trajectory instead - accidentally or otherwise. I bet there are already Darwin Award contenders going "Cool, I can yank NORAD's chain if I change this bit, and fire it like this..."
Or, as a previous poster suggested, you just get some terrorist firing one into a building. Or building an infra-red seeker head, and mangling a 747. (Yes, they've already tried using black-market Stingers, Al Queda recently in Kenya and a Palestinian group in Rome in the late 70s - but Stingers really suck for taking out airliners. A modified version of this thing might not...)
Or, worse still, an idiot. Lots more of those than there are terrorists - harder to track, too. Anyone here remember the kid who built a crude nuclear "reactor" (i.e. put together something that sent Geiger counters off the top of the scale, and his sperm count off the other end)? Now imagine a similar kid building one of these, and accidentally firing it into a building. Even just firing it into the air could air traffic control and missile early warning systems, causing chaos!
Yes, and that's the bit I was objecting to. Copyright is how the record companies make money from the music, a small portion of which goes to the artist. It doesn't enslave anybody: without the copyright fees, the artist would get a large share of the 0 each copy would make for the copyright owner. Remove copyright, and you remove the income it generates.
When an artist gets a return of less than a dollar on a $15 CD, I call it theft.
For the label, it isn't a $15 anything. If it's a $15 CD on the store shelves, it's a $7.50 CD from the distributor, for which the label might get $3 or so. (Rough figures; someone from a record label posted accurate figures on Slashdot a while ago for his own label.) From that $3, they then have to cover the manufacturing costs of the CDs, cases, cover art (more royalty payments), shipping, promotion, overheads - and the biggest cost of all, the payments to failed artists. Whether their album generates any sales or not, they still get paid: the label has to cover that out of sales of successful albums.
If the labels are screwing the artists so successfully, why have their profit margins dropped by 75%, and why are they laying off thousands of staff? The biggest chunk of the $15-$20 CD price goes straight into the retailer's account - the "greedy" label only gets a small fraction compared to the other commercial players. For a label, there is no $15 CD, only $3 CDs someone else retails for $15!
It isn't copyright they used to get their current position, either. True, without copyright they wouldn't get any money from CD sales - but nor would the artist! Not an improvement IMHO. As I said, what has given the "Big 5" control is payola - nothing whatsoever to do with copyright.
Now promise them the world, toss a few thousand dollars to them in exchance for the copyright to a product worth orders of magnitude more. They'll sign, because they're young and still believe that people are fair, until Universal Music sends them the bill for the tour promotion they did for them, and now they're in the hole, own no copyrights and don't get shite.
Bollocks yourself. If you think that record companies are fair, you are a fool.
I never said they were fair. I said copyright was not to blame. (The post claimed the artists were "enslaved" using copyright, which is complete crap. They may perhaps be "enslaved" by a crap record contract, but that's another matter entirely.)
Incidentally, there is no "few thousand dollars": it's a hell of a lot more than that, and even if the record is the worst flop in history, they don't owe the record label any money. They just take the advance, minus whatever they spent, and go back to flipping burgers. They're richer, the label is poorer, and another crap record sits on the shelves for a while. There are lots of figures out there claiming the "poor artist" gets screwed, notably Courtney Love's; if you look closely at her figures, you'll see each of her four group members ended up getting $90k, minus tax. She claims this is less than they'd make in a 7-11; if it's true, please show me to a 7-11 paying that kind of money! Also note they never had to repay the advance: you are never given a bill, as you claim. It's just deducted from any royalties you've earned.
Yes, there have been high profile artists going bankrupt. (Elton John, for example.) This is not because he earns nothing - he earned a small fortune, but spent a large one. Result: huge debts.
Bollocks. Complete and utter bollocks.
Copyright - initially - belongs entirely to the artist(s). They then have a contract with a record label, whereby the copyright is sold to that label in exchange for money.
Don't want your copyright going to a label? Simple: don't sign that contract. Most bands, however, find that difficult when the label is waving hundreds $k under their noses while they're living on Ramen or whatever: it's a very tempting offer.
If there's one root problem here, it's still payola. Without that, artists would all be on a level playing field, whoever their label was: send a free CD of your music to a bunch of radio stations, get played, sell records. Copyright doesn't come into it, it's the airplay control that matters.
Care to tell that to my firewall? The kernel is fully capable of acting as a firewall without any userspace services running. (You still need some kind of init script to configure interfaces, but there is no security exposure there: they aren't network services.)
Other things that are a requirement to installing programs, such as glibc, have had major [cert.org] security [cert.org] holes [cert.org] in the past.
Funny, my firewall's boot floppy doesn't seem to have glibc on. Or any network applications accessable from the Internet: being a firewall, that's all firewalled off.
Yes, glibc blows from a security point of view. That's why I didn't include it in my links above! Ditto wu-ftpd, BIND... - but it's entirely possible to run a system without any of that crap. Especially a desktop system: WTF would I need an FTP or DNS server on a desktop system for? Strip out all the services, and even the oldest of unpatched RedHat systems will be secure from network intrusion - not so Windows, thanks to ActiveX, Windows Scripting Host and Outlook!