This would put to use by protesters, border jumpers, assorted criminals, etc... for the purpose of blinding cops and/or their victims.
After all, if you're blind, how could you identify the suspect?
I find it kind of scary that our government thinks it is somehow morally acceptable to develop weapons which blind people. Sure, it's temporary - now - but how long will it be before someone figures out a way to make the blindness permanent? Or, worse, what if it causes *permanent* damage in only a small portion of the population?
Okay, I know it isn't popular opinion around here, but I'm wondering exactly what the problem is with this.
The airwaves are a public medium. As in, they belong to the public, not to a private entity (in spite of the fact that many private interests behave as if they did own the airwaves... - but that's a different topic). Our democratically elected Congress passed this bill. This is what the public wants.
I understand if your definition of what is appropriate is different from mine. However, there are already alternatives available for those whose tastes lean toward the tawdry side. This isn't an issue of free speech, but rather, of how the public thinks its airwaves should be used. They belong to the public, and the people have spoken - through Congress - about what they want to hear on radio and see on tv. It's not censorship, but censureship - that is, the removal of something the people don't want to see or hear.
It's as simple as that.
You can call it absurd, fine. But there are things which, while they may be acceptable to certain individuals in society, are not appropriate for the public at large. And because the public owns the airwaves, they get to decide what's appropriate for them.
But it does keep liability-conscious companies from adopting Linux.
If you're going to make inroads into the proprietary-license software world, you've got to do it legally. Granted, we might not like software patents and draconian copyright terms, etc... but for now it is the law, at least in the US. To make Linux compelling, it has to give back to the community, rather than just piggybacking on the hard work of others. Implementing a copy of a popular product isn't innovation; producing a better code (Ogg?!) is.
Why would we want to emulate the proprietary software model? Instead, let's do something original and better. I'm much more open to using Ogg than MP3, because I know the former was produced in the spirit of free software, and the latter wasn't. If open standards really are better than closed ones, why do we bother using closed, proprietary codecs? The only conclusion the outsider is apt to draw is that closed code is somehow better.
And who knows? Maybe it is. After all, it made it into a Linux distribution...
Perhaps some other artists have signed deals which entitle them to only a fraction of the retail price of their works. But I have not, and even if I had, my agreement is between myself and a third party - not Microsoft. Microsoft would have no rights whatsoever to decide the terms on which my copyrighted works were sold unless I had an explicit agreement with them.
unless the user pays Microsoft a fee in order to continue to listen to the track, with a percentage going to the person who provided the song.
So, if I read this right, Microsoft has patented making money from copyright infringement of someone else's work.
If I was the artist, I wouldn't be happy to settle for a percentage of the sale. As the owner of a copyrighted work, I'm entitled to the full sale price regardless of what Microsoft and others may believe.
As a user, I'd be really angry if this "technology" decided that songs for which I had paid, or worse, recorded myself (as in, me being the artist) were invalid after 3 plays.
I'm pretty sure that any implementation of the patented invention would give rise to contributory infringement claims against the maker. The whole idea behind this is to encourage others to commit copyright infringement in order to benefit the patent holder, not the artist.
Biofilms are the bane of my brew. However, this is really not needed because the current sanitizing agents work well enough to eliminate bacteria.
My concern is that using a virus to disrupt biofilms will have much more undesirable side effects than the simple chemicals being used already. For example, I want to kill bacteria, but allow yeast to grow afterward. If I treat a fermenter with this virus, can I be sure that it won't affect the yeast in some way? I can be sure that rinsing will dilute the sanitizer enough so that it isn't a problem, but could one say the same thing of a virus? Probably not.
How can you prove something is secure if you can't see the source code?
You can't.
The FCC's position is that it is better to hide one's head in the sand and hope the vendor implemented a secure solution than to actually *prove* the solution is secure.
The FCC has always worried that the technology's flexible nature could allow hackers to gain access to inappropriate parts of the spectrum, such as that used for public safety. So the regulators required manufacturers to submit confidential descriptions showing that their products are safe from outside modifications that would run afoul of the government's rules. Cisco's petition asked the regulators to clarify how use of open-source security software, whose
code is by definition public, fit into that confidentiality mandate.
The problem is that, as any ham operator knows, access to any part of the spectrum is as simple as building your own homebrew equipment. Hackers, by their very nature, already know how to access the radio spectrum; it is the weak, or non-existent encryption which represents the real threat. Keeping your code closed allows security vulnerabilities to exist for much longer than they would if they could be scrutinized by the public at large.
Furthermore, any software defined radio, open source or not, can be made "open source" by simply replacing the binary in flash. Which means that any software defined radio, open source or not, can be hacked. Which might be a bigger issue worth more discussion.
Quote Old Testament scripture with respect to homosexuals... Then he'd be in *real* trouble.
The interesting thing about freedom of speech is that it's not absolute, not even in the most liberal of countries. In the more liberal countries, you're free to say anything you like, as long as your speech doesn't have the effect of prompting action.
Which kind of makes the so called "Freedom of Speech" pointless.
The sad fact of the matter is no matter how much we'd like to believe otherwise, people will be judged by what they say, and even by words of the people with whom they associate. Even though this was probably a smear tactic, the realization of freedom of speech requires that we live in some kind of fantasy world where speech never has an effect on the *actions* of people. In such a world, you could say whatever you want.
Instead, we ought to consider the consequences of speech before we speak. Speech with political consequences shouldn't be restrained, but speech with violent consequences ought not be protected. Drawing the line between the two isn't easy, because political speech often has violent consequences.
The problem is that advances in medicine have generally had the effect of prolonging life and making disease treatment more expensive rather than cheaper. Even one hundred years ago, people commonly died from diseases which are readily treatable today. Instead of incurring massive medical bills, their next of kin were usually left with the bill for a few doctor's visits, and that's it.
Now we have nuclear medicine, where a single 5 day dose of chemotherapy costs more than most folks make in a month... Instead of suddenly failing of an "unknown cause", cancer patients (and their families) often rack up hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars in medical bills before the disease takes them. Instead of a cure, the medical industry now gathers windfall profits from delaying the inevitable.
And now we have drug companies patenting heartburn medication - which is available only by prescription.
Drug companies and the medical field have little incentive to cure diseases, but every incentive to treat them - preferrably, for the remainder of the patient's life.
It doesn't matter how healthy the population is - the drug companies will find something wrong to treat. After all, look at heartburn - instead of doing the right thing and telling patients to eat healthy, balanced meals, doctors are now prescribing medication which does not leave the patient healthier, but merely masks the body's reaction to a poor diet.
And has for quite some time. Yet it continues to proliferate.
The problem is that true software freedom is hard to come by when software itself is considered property. Think about how many areas of real estate aren't owned by anyone. Even public land is considered owned by the government.
So you have the GPL, a license which uses our legal system of copyright to ensure that certain freedoms and obligations are extended to the users of software. Which is most unlike proprietary software, whose licenses use the legal system of copyright to deny freedoms to the user.
It doesn't matter whether it alienates developers or not. Quite frankly, I see no problem with proprietary licenses because they keep freeloaders from taking away my bread and butter. But in a similar vein, there are certain freedoms, certain basic functionality, which everyone who uses a computer should enjoy. For that, we license software under the GPL, because it improves society as a whole. Both kinds of licenses achieve a good end; proprietary licenses allow developers to make a living writing code, and GPL licenses allow developers to give their talents back to the community. There is a need for both, and whining about one being better than the other isn't constructive at all. Instead, we should be considering which licenses are most appropriate for a given situation.
In typical usage, the GPL favors the freedoms of the users over the need of the developer to make a living. Proprietary licenses place the needs of the developer above those of the user. What we really need is a license which denies niether the user's freedoms, nor the developer's reasonable compensation for their efforts. I suppose in a perfect world, people unable to pay for software would still get to use it, because, by gentlemen's honor, those who could afford it would pay for it. But, we unfortunately don't live in a perfect world, so we have to make software subject to licensing - whether GPL or otherwise.
The embedded world has had complete computers on "motherboards" this small for quite some time. Check out gumstix sometime.
The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors. Heck, the back panel of my desktop uses more area for the connectors than exists on this board. There are processor heatsinks bigger than this thing!
PC's have always been about cheap computing power, not low power dissipation or form factor. I remember a time when the power of your desktop was considered commensurate with the size of the box - we had friends putting regular motherboards into server towers so they could "impress" fellow geeks.
Not that I would mind x86 in the embedded world, but it seems to me that this is going nowhere fast. The problem isn't technical - it's business. Most embedded systems run some sort of ARM variant, which would mean that code would have to be ported to x86. Furthermore, there's no way this would make it into a cellphone - primarily because of the fact that it is x86, and the carriers are adamantly opposed to the prospect of the consumer being allowed to run unauthorized code on their cellphones.
Linux already runs on the ARM, and you still aren't seeing a proliferation of ARM-based general purpose computers. While this would be nice for a sub-notebook, the problem is that sub-notebooks, while a personal favorite of mine, typically have not done well in the marketplace. Consider the HP Jornada, which was discontinued after a few short years. And it seems today that that trend is toward larger, not smaller, laptops.
I read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, it has always occurred to me that any computer crime is completely untraceable. It is only laziness on the part of the criminal which allows him to get caught. It is possible for someone to completely cover their tracks and leave no evidence of their actions.
But it is also possible to log every action a hacker does. Erasing the logs doesn't do much when the compromised system is virtually hosted and every action recorded for later playback - on a system which isn't even visible to the hacker. And consider the possibility of tracing at the network level. It is possible to physically connect an ethernet chip to a network and capture all traffic on the network without ever joining the network. That is, the card can sniff the wire in a read-only mode without ever publishing its MAC address or responding to ARP queries. Even if the hacker does use encryption, can he really be sure that his machine hasn't been rooted and keylogged? Can today's hackers verify even the microcode inside their processors and BIOS? If he can cover his tracks, so can the FBI.
How does a hacker know his rootkit isn't spying on him? Even if you have the source, a compromised compiler or assembler can still produce a compromised executable. Should you verify the executable by hand, you still have the possibility of a vulnerability in the processor's microcode. Something as simple as making any area of memory available to the NIC when a certain opcode sequence is executed could be hidden very well and provide a veritable back door to law enforcement.
Unless you are willing to build your own computer from scratch and never connect it to a public network, you can never prove that you aren't compromised. Sure, we can talk statistics and likelihood and incentives and human factors and whatnot, but it doesn't change two fundamental aspects of the computer:
Changing computer data at the most basic level can be done without leaving any evidence, and
You can't prove the code you are running doesn't have security vulnerabilities without spending an inordinate and impractical amount of effort.
Your averge user - heck, even most programmers and hackers - don't have the time to trace through every possible instruction path in the software they use. They aren't going to burn their own BIOS EEPROMs to be sure the BIOS isn't bugging them. They aren't going to surgically remove the processor's cover and verify the die pattern to be sure the microcode isn't compromised.
Instead, they're going to trust the responses their computer shows them. Just like the rest of us - it's a gamble. Maybe the hacker compromised a bank - or maybe, the bank is in cahoots with the FBI, and he's just knocked over the honeypot. He won't know until he goes to the bank - and withdraws his cash, or gets arrested.
They're using stego? Maybe we drop some stego on them.
Yeah, cause my stego *ROCKS* yo!
I'm thinking even the most avante-garde anti-forensics tool could fool this guy. Yeah, anti-forensics might be a problem for him, but last time I checked, having a future date on your warez or kiddie porn won't save you from prosecution. In fact, using something like Timestomp is more or less likely to convince the jury that you are indeed a criminal.
And likewise, it takes a very *good* steganography tool to really hide things. Sure, you could fool your friends, but you aren't likely to fool a forensic investigator with a basic knowledge of statistics. Could I tell the difference between a good and mediocre steganography tool? Probably. Could the average criminal? Probably not. A mistake as simple as hiding your data in images gleaned from the web would be enough to trip someone up: Here's a hint - if the image looks the same as the one on the web, but the checksums don't match, something's up. I'm guessing a shell script could go through the hard drive and do most of the work for the investigator. 17 hours isn't so short anymore...
If you don't want the cops to find it, use encryption. If you want deniability, use the double-xor technique mentioned in Bruce Shneier's Applied Cryptography. But don't bother thinking that bogus timestamps are going to foil any serious forensic investigator. The relative location of a file's blocks on the hard drive is going to give at least an approximate date of file creation, even if you do obliterate the timestamp, and every forensic investigator worth his salt knows this.
Some people think that a Driver's License is their Constitutional right
Some people used to think habeas corpus and free speech were Constitutional rights - until the current attorney general clarified the situation.
While I understand that a driver's license isn't a Constitutional right, it is the attitude of laxity toward government interference with respect to our lives which most endangers all of our rights. Think about how difficult it would be to live without a driver's license - versus living without the legal ability to criticize the government.
Just because it wasn't conceived by the framers of the Constitution doesn't mean it's not a right, or that it isn't important. Sometimes I think people get too hysterical over violations of Constitutional rights while they miss the even greater violations of justice.
Actually, he hasn't. Unless, of course, you think the value of 4 to the 53 power has changed recently.
His notions about irreducible complexity were perhaps not as accurately presented as they should have been, but as far as I've read, no scientist has actually produced a series of actual intermediate stages which would explain the evolution of something like blood clotting or eye formation.
And the stone bridge example is interesting, but silly. Biological mechanisms are far more complicated than a stone bridge, and the statistical likelihood of useful structures forming is extremely small, let alone having the intermediate stages survive a system which selects for the fittest.
Regardless of what other theories may say, the claims of evolution are not falsifiable, not verifiable, and unproven - in short, it's not science, but scientific superstition. What the Creationists, Pastafarians, etc... believe is irrelevant to the matter, unless you want to start teaching philosophy and religion in science class.
And we do have a certain responsibility to reject illogical, or unscientific theories, even if they are the best ones available. The issue with evolution is that the statistical arguments against things like abiogenesis are extremely strong. While I don't believe in purely statistical proofs as a matter of semantics, it doesn't make much sense to me that biology has accepted theories which have only a minuscule chance of being true, and which are unprovable in any case.
They are ignoring philosophy dressed up as science.
When science represents unverifiable theories as fact, and accepts arguments in spite of the fact that they are statistically and rationally improbable, one has to question their motives. It seems the healthy skepticism which keeps bad theories out of physics and chemistry is entirely lacking in biology. Perhaps more embarassing is that the early theories of evolution gained widespread acceptance not because of their merits, but rather because it provided a scientific rationale for racism.
Real science is refined by skepticism, not dogmatic belief in the status quo. In my grade school and high school science classes, we did experiments which demonstrated the principle in question, reinforcing the lesson. How exactly is a high school biology teacher to show evolution, especially when one of the brighter students in the class could use arguments like Behe's to show that evolution is highly improbable from a statistical perspective?
I understand there's a need for better science education. But true science is skeptical, and it's easy to forget that those who refrain from teaching the theory of evolution as science are merely being skeptical - IOW, they're employing the scientific method. And this, I believe, is a better lesson to teach students - when it comes to science, be prepared to prove your hypothesis. Many of the theories in evolution - abiogenesis for example - are constructed specifically so they can't be proven. For some reason, this extraoardinary claim does not require extraordinary evidence. Interestingly, evolution is the only family of theories, and biology the only science, for which a substantial remains unprovable, and yet, accepted.
Perhaps evolution would be better suited in a comparative religions course. After all, you can't prove either the existence of God or abiogenesis.
It isn't slowed down by anti-virus software. Most Windows machines will run faster with Linux installed because it doesn't have the added burden of needing an AV client running. Windows is the only major OS platform for which anti-virus software is a de facto requirement for use.
You only need to install and configure it once. The annual wipe and reinstall is a Windows-only tradition.
Explicit mount and unmount are preferred to the cross your fingers and hope strategy of Windows volume management.
It is immune to those stupid popups Windows users can't seem to get rid of.
It is easier to use, once you understand how to use it. Try copy and paste with a single mouse click. Try command completion sometime. Try multiple desktops.
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the FBI take the easy route and bust them in WoW or Second Life...
This would put to use by protesters, border jumpers, assorted criminals, etc... for the purpose of blinding cops and/or their victims.
After all, if you're blind, how could you identify the suspect?
I find it kind of scary that our government thinks it is somehow morally acceptable to develop weapons which blind people. Sure, it's temporary - now - but how long will it be before someone figures out a way to make the blindness permanent? Or, worse, what if it causes *permanent* damage in only a small portion of the population?
If Microsoft will applaud the GPL developers for exercising their intellectual property rights...
When you think about it, if Skype had misappropriated WinCE, they'd be looking at a lot more damage than just releasing their source code...
Okay, I know it isn't popular opinion around here, but I'm wondering exactly what the problem is with this.
The airwaves are a public medium. As in, they belong to the public, not to a private entity (in spite of the fact that many private interests behave as if they did own the airwaves... - but that's a different topic). Our democratically elected Congress passed this bill. This is what the public wants.
I understand if your definition of what is appropriate is different from mine. However, there are already alternatives available for those whose tastes lean toward the tawdry side. This isn't an issue of free speech, but rather, of how the public thinks its airwaves should be used. They belong to the public, and the people have spoken - through Congress - about what they want to hear on radio and see on tv. It's not censorship, but censureship - that is, the removal of something the people don't want to see or hear.
It's as simple as that.
You can call it absurd, fine. But there are things which, while they may be acceptable to certain individuals in society, are not appropriate for the public at large. And because the public owns the airwaves, they get to decide what's appropriate for them.
But it does keep liability-conscious companies from adopting Linux.
If you're going to make inroads into the proprietary-license software world, you've got to do it legally. Granted, we might not like software patents and draconian copyright terms, etc... but for now it is the law, at least in the US. To make Linux compelling, it has to give back to the community, rather than just piggybacking on the hard work of others. Implementing a copy of a popular product isn't innovation; producing a better code (Ogg?!) is.
Why would we want to emulate the proprietary software model? Instead, let's do something original and better. I'm much more open to using Ogg than MP3, because I know the former was produced in the spirit of free software, and the latter wasn't. If open standards really are better than closed ones, why do we bother using closed, proprietary codecs? The only conclusion the outsider is apt to draw is that closed code is somehow better.
And who knows? Maybe it is. After all, it made it into a Linux distribution...
Child porn, illegal websites, etc...
Yawn. How many techies didn't see this coming?
But it will make a great coffee-table conversation topic...
Them: So you don't run Windows? Why not?
Me: Because I don't like supporting child porn.
And then the conversation will turn to how criminals use vulnerabilities in Windows to conduct their illicit affairs.
Perhaps some other artists have signed deals which entitle them to only a fraction of the retail price of their works. But I have not, and even if I had, my agreement is between myself and a third party - not Microsoft. Microsoft would have no rights whatsoever to decide the terms on which my copyrighted works were sold unless I had an explicit agreement with them.
unless the user pays Microsoft a fee in order to continue to listen to the track, with a percentage going to the person who provided the song.
So, if I read this right, Microsoft has patented making money from copyright infringement of someone else's work.
Some things used for brewing - like plastic buckets and hoses - can't be boiled. Hence the reliance on chemical sanitizers...
Biofilms are the bane of my brew. However, this is really not needed because the current sanitizing agents work well enough to eliminate bacteria.
My concern is that using a virus to disrupt biofilms will have much more undesirable side effects than the simple chemicals being used already. For example, I want to kill bacteria, but allow yeast to grow afterward. If I treat a fermenter with this virus, can I be sure that it won't affect the yeast in some way? I can be sure that rinsing will dilute the sanitizer enough so that it isn't a problem, but could one say the same thing of a virus? Probably not.
How can you prove something is secure if you can't see the source code?
You can't.
The FCC's position is that it is better to hide one's head in the sand and hope the vendor implemented a secure solution than to actually *prove* the solution is secure.
The FCC has always worried that the technology's flexible nature could allow hackers to gain access to inappropriate parts of the spectrum, such as that used for public safety. So the regulators required manufacturers to submit confidential descriptions showing that their products are safe from outside modifications that would run afoul of the government's rules. Cisco's petition asked the regulators to clarify how use of open-source security software, whose code is by definition public, fit into that confidentiality mandate.
The problem is that, as any ham operator knows, access to any part of the spectrum is as simple as building your own homebrew equipment. Hackers, by their very nature, already know how to access the radio spectrum; it is the weak, or non-existent encryption which represents the real threat. Keeping your code closed allows security vulnerabilities to exist for much longer than they would if they could be scrutinized by the public at large.
Furthermore, any software defined radio, open source or not, can be made "open source" by simply replacing the binary in flash. Which means that any software defined radio, open source or not, can be hacked. Which might be a bigger issue worth more discussion.
Quote Old Testament scripture with respect to homosexuals... Then he'd be in *real* trouble.
The interesting thing about freedom of speech is that it's not absolute, not even in the most liberal of countries. In the more liberal countries, you're free to say anything you like, as long as your speech doesn't have the effect of prompting action.
Which kind of makes the so called "Freedom of Speech" pointless.
The sad fact of the matter is no matter how much we'd like to believe otherwise, people will be judged by what they say, and even by words of the people with whom they associate. Even though this was probably a smear tactic, the realization of freedom of speech requires that we live in some kind of fantasy world where speech never has an effect on the *actions* of people. In such a world, you could say whatever you want.
Instead, we ought to consider the consequences of speech before we speak. Speech with political consequences shouldn't be restrained, but speech with violent consequences ought not be protected. Drawing the line between the two isn't easy, because political speech often has violent consequences.
The problem is that advances in medicine have generally had the effect of prolonging life and making disease treatment more expensive rather than cheaper. Even one hundred years ago, people commonly died from diseases which are readily treatable today. Instead of incurring massive medical bills, their next of kin were usually left with the bill for a few doctor's visits, and that's it.
Now we have nuclear medicine, where a single 5 day dose of chemotherapy costs more than most folks make in a month... Instead of suddenly failing of an "unknown cause", cancer patients (and their families) often rack up hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars in medical bills before the disease takes them. Instead of a cure, the medical industry now gathers windfall profits from delaying the inevitable.
And now we have drug companies patenting heartburn medication - which is available only by prescription.
Drug companies and the medical field have little incentive to cure diseases, but every incentive to treat them - preferrably, for the remainder of the patient's life.
It doesn't matter how healthy the population is - the drug companies will find something wrong to treat. After all, look at heartburn - instead of doing the right thing and telling patients to eat healthy, balanced meals, doctors are now prescribing medication which does not leave the patient healthier, but merely masks the body's reaction to a poor diet.
And has for quite some time. Yet it continues to proliferate.
The problem is that true software freedom is hard to come by when software itself is considered property. Think about how many areas of real estate aren't owned by anyone. Even public land is considered owned by the government.
So you have the GPL, a license which uses our legal system of copyright to ensure that certain freedoms and obligations are extended to the users of software. Which is most unlike proprietary software, whose licenses use the legal system of copyright to deny freedoms to the user.
It doesn't matter whether it alienates developers or not. Quite frankly, I see no problem with proprietary licenses because they keep freeloaders from taking away my bread and butter. But in a similar vein, there are certain freedoms, certain basic functionality, which everyone who uses a computer should enjoy. For that, we license software under the GPL, because it improves society as a whole. Both kinds of licenses achieve a good end; proprietary licenses allow developers to make a living writing code, and GPL licenses allow developers to give their talents back to the community. There is a need for both, and whining about one being better than the other isn't constructive at all. Instead, we should be considering which licenses are most appropriate for a given situation.
In typical usage, the GPL favors the freedoms of the users over the need of the developer to make a living. Proprietary licenses place the needs of the developer above those of the user. What we really need is a license which denies niether the user's freedoms, nor the developer's reasonable compensation for their efforts. I suppose in a perfect world, people unable to pay for software would still get to use it, because, by gentlemen's honor, those who could afford it would pay for it. But, we unfortunately don't live in a perfect world, so we have to make software subject to licensing - whether GPL or otherwise.
The embedded world has had complete computers on "motherboards" this small for quite some time. Check out gumstix sometime.
The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors. Heck, the back panel of my desktop uses more area for the connectors than exists on this board. There are processor heatsinks bigger than this thing!
PC's have always been about cheap computing power, not low power dissipation or form factor. I remember a time when the power of your desktop was considered commensurate with the size of the box - we had friends putting regular motherboards into server towers so they could "impress" fellow geeks.
Not that I would mind x86 in the embedded world, but it seems to me that this is going nowhere fast. The problem isn't technical - it's business. Most embedded systems run some sort of ARM variant, which would mean that code would have to be ported to x86. Furthermore, there's no way this would make it into a cellphone - primarily because of the fact that it is x86, and the carriers are adamantly opposed to the prospect of the consumer being allowed to run unauthorized code on their cellphones.
Linux already runs on the ARM, and you still aren't seeing a proliferation of ARM-based general purpose computers. While this would be nice for a sub-notebook, the problem is that sub-notebooks, while a personal favorite of mine, typically have not done well in the marketplace. Consider the HP Jornada, which was discontinued after a few short years. And it seems today that that trend is toward larger, not smaller, laptops.
TI already has your system on a chip. It's called the DM6442, DaVinci.
I read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, it has always occurred to me that any computer crime is completely untraceable. It is only laziness on the part of the criminal which allows him to get caught. It is possible for someone to completely cover their tracks and leave no evidence of their actions.
But it is also possible to log every action a hacker does. Erasing the logs doesn't do much when the compromised system is virtually hosted and every action recorded for later playback - on a system which isn't even visible to the hacker. And consider the possibility of tracing at the network level. It is possible to physically connect an ethernet chip to a network and capture all traffic on the network without ever joining the network. That is, the card can sniff the wire in a read-only mode without ever publishing its MAC address or responding to ARP queries. Even if the hacker does use encryption, can he really be sure that his machine hasn't been rooted and keylogged? Can today's hackers verify even the microcode inside their processors and BIOS? If he can cover his tracks, so can the FBI.
How does a hacker know his rootkit isn't spying on him? Even if you have the source, a compromised compiler or assembler can still produce a compromised executable. Should you verify the executable by hand, you still have the possibility of a vulnerability in the processor's microcode. Something as simple as making any area of memory available to the NIC when a certain opcode sequence is executed could be hidden very well and provide a veritable back door to law enforcement.
Unless you are willing to build your own computer from scratch and never connect it to a public network, you can never prove that you aren't compromised. Sure, we can talk statistics and likelihood and incentives and human factors and whatnot, but it doesn't change two fundamental aspects of the computer:
Your averge user - heck, even most programmers and hackers - don't have the time to trace through every possible instruction path in the software they use. They aren't going to burn their own BIOS EEPROMs to be sure the BIOS isn't bugging them. They aren't going to surgically remove the processor's cover and verify the die pattern to be sure the microcode isn't compromised.
Instead, they're going to trust the responses their computer shows them. Just like the rest of us - it's a gamble. Maybe the hacker compromised a bank - or maybe, the bank is in cahoots with the FBI, and he's just knocked over the honeypot. He won't know until he goes to the bank - and withdraws his cash, or gets arrested.
Still a pretty big risk, imho.
In 'Merica, we call it gitmo. Encrypshun don't fool us nohow, nosir.
'fter all, if yah ain't guilty, watcha hidin' stuff fer? Dontcha know there's a war goin' on?
They're using stego? Maybe we drop some stego on them.
Yeah, cause my stego *ROCKS* yo!
I'm thinking even the most avante-garde anti-forensics tool could fool this guy. Yeah, anti-forensics might be a problem for him, but last time I checked, having a future date on your warez or kiddie porn won't save you from prosecution. In fact, using something like Timestomp is more or less likely to convince the jury that you are indeed a criminal.
And likewise, it takes a very *good* steganography tool to really hide things. Sure, you could fool your friends, but you aren't likely to fool a forensic investigator with a basic knowledge of statistics. Could I tell the difference between a good and mediocre steganography tool? Probably. Could the average criminal? Probably not. A mistake as simple as hiding your data in images gleaned from the web would be enough to trip someone up: Here's a hint - if the image looks the same as the one on the web, but the checksums don't match, something's up. I'm guessing a shell script could go through the hard drive and do most of the work for the investigator. 17 hours isn't so short anymore...
If you don't want the cops to find it, use encryption. If you want deniability, use the double-xor technique mentioned in Bruce Shneier's Applied Cryptography. But don't bother thinking that bogus timestamps are going to foil any serious forensic investigator. The relative location of a file's blocks on the hard drive is going to give at least an approximate date of file creation, even if you do obliterate the timestamp, and every forensic investigator worth his salt knows this.
Some people think that a Driver's License is their Constitutional right
Some people used to think habeas corpus and free speech were Constitutional rights - until the current attorney general clarified the situation.
While I understand that a driver's license isn't a Constitutional right, it is the attitude of laxity toward government interference with respect to our lives which most endangers all of our rights. Think about how difficult it would be to live without a driver's license - versus living without the legal ability to criticize the government.
Just because it wasn't conceived by the framers of the Constitution doesn't mean it's not a right, or that it isn't important. Sometimes I think people get too hysterical over violations of Constitutional rights while they miss the even greater violations of justice.
You've got an audiovox too?!
Actually, he hasn't. Unless, of course, you think the value of 4 to the 53 power has changed recently.
His notions about irreducible complexity were perhaps not as accurately presented as they should have been, but as far as I've read, no scientist has actually produced a series of actual intermediate stages which would explain the evolution of something like blood clotting or eye formation.
And the stone bridge example is interesting, but silly. Biological mechanisms are far more complicated than a stone bridge, and the statistical likelihood of useful structures forming is extremely small, let alone having the intermediate stages survive a system which selects for the fittest.
Regardless of what other theories may say, the claims of evolution are not falsifiable, not verifiable, and unproven - in short, it's not science, but scientific superstition. What the Creationists, Pastafarians, etc... believe is irrelevant to the matter, unless you want to start teaching philosophy and religion in science class.
And we do have a certain responsibility to reject illogical, or unscientific theories, even if they are the best ones available. The issue with evolution is that the statistical arguments against things like abiogenesis are extremely strong. While I don't believe in purely statistical proofs as a matter of semantics, it doesn't make much sense to me that biology has accepted theories which have only a minuscule chance of being true, and which are unprovable in any case.
They are ignoring philosophy dressed up as science.
When science represents unverifiable theories as fact, and accepts arguments in spite of the fact that they are statistically and rationally improbable, one has to question their motives. It seems the healthy skepticism which keeps bad theories out of physics and chemistry is entirely lacking in biology. Perhaps more embarassing is that the early theories of evolution gained widespread acceptance not because of their merits, but rather because it provided a scientific rationale for racism.
Real science is refined by skepticism, not dogmatic belief in the status quo. In my grade school and high school science classes, we did experiments which demonstrated the principle in question, reinforcing the lesson. How exactly is a high school biology teacher to show evolution, especially when one of the brighter students in the class could use arguments like Behe's to show that evolution is highly improbable from a statistical perspective?
I understand there's a need for better science education. But true science is skeptical, and it's easy to forget that those who refrain from teaching the theory of evolution as science are merely being skeptical - IOW, they're employing the scientific method. And this, I believe, is a better lesson to teach students - when it comes to science, be prepared to prove your hypothesis. Many of the theories in evolution - abiogenesis for example - are constructed specifically so they can't be proven. For some reason, this extraoardinary claim does not require extraordinary evidence. Interestingly, evolution is the only family of theories, and biology the only science, for which a substantial remains unprovable, and yet, accepted.
Perhaps evolution would be better suited in a comparative religions course. After all, you can't prove either the existence of God or abiogenesis.
The average user doesn't understand about Linux: