I agree with that, and would like to add a few more points (not sure whether they're valid or not in this case, just general):
Why would the computers or their LAN have to be connected to the Internet? That's one major attack vector. I can understand they need to interface with other networks - Internet can help - but how about simply whitelisting those allowed connections in a firewall? And reject any and all incoming connections to the network on firewall level?
Why allow users to attach any external media: CDs, USB sticks, whatever, to their computers? This is also easy to prevent. Either by rules, or by physical measures.
And of course keep your wireless networks on a separate "dirty" subnet. Outside the firewall. Or on their own firewall and own physical network. Yes it costs a bit more, but that's the price of keeping your production machines safe.
Those measures should keep even unpatched Windows installations safe. Getting a virus onto the network must have been either one of the above.
Which is why modern fly-by-wire aircraft will come with five systems with identical functionality, but build on different hardware running different software written by independent suppliers. So even if they put Windows in the mix it's not likely they would crash all at the exact same moment.
Unix and Linux, contrary to popular belief, is not crash-free. Running your whole ship on a single Unix base may result in less crashes than a Windows based system, it doesn't make such crashes less catastrophic.
To have iOS as nr. one on mobile phones means Apple is the #1 selling manufacturer. Symbian (Nokia) is doing very well too considering it's only Nokia that ships it - again when Symbian is #1, that implies that Nokia is the #1 seller of smartphone hand sets. Nevertheless they seem to do well.
Android is sold by dozens of manufacturers, if each of those has only a few % market share that still gives Android the advantage. Not being the #1 in total devices sold would be pretty pathetic.
Looking at the numbers in a different way it seems that about 1/3 of the smartphone market is for Nokia, 1/3 is for Apple, and 1/3 is for the rest of world to fight over. That rest of the world may be getting a bit more than that 1/3, it still means the slice of the pie for an average Android manufacturer is much much less than what Apple and Nokia have. All those Android sellers are doing peanuts compared to the giants Apple and Nokia.
That notwithstanding Android is nice. I like my phone.
Thanks, interesting. I don't know much about the background of random ISP's all over the world.
Nonetheless now he's set up that company to make a difference, the only way to keep doing what he's been doing is to turn a profit out of it. Maybe a lower profit than could be made with other business models - still he's got a business to run.
On a related note: in The Netherlands we have a chain called "wereldwinkel" - shops run mostly by volunteers selling fair trade stuff and handicrafts the organisation imports directly from poor countries, hoping to give the people there a better life. They're also typically "anti-commercial" and marketing, advertising and profits are dirty words to them. I say: you should advertise if it helps you selling more goods and maybe even make more profit, as the more you sell and grow your organisation, the more the people in the poor countries sell to you, and the more you're actually helping the people there. Still they didn't want to advertise... or do anything "commercial"... oh well.
Many facts have two faces, when seen from the opposite parties. Wars primarily so - even journalist reporting what they see will see and hear different things whether they are on the American side or on the Iraqi side. Even when reporting about the same facts. It is really really difficult to stick to pure observations without any interpretations, think the difference of "that child is shouting" and "that child is angry". The first is really an observation; the second could very well be an interpretation of the shouting behaviour. Very easy to misinterpret observations because of an expectation/opinion about a situation.
Yet of course all good journalists will do their best to separate fact and opinion. And proper news outlets will mark articles that are not plain reporting as opinion or analyses
Most of the general public is not touched by the ACTA directly. Especially the US public as it's primarily an attempt to spread existing US legislation to the rest of the world. It's the rest of the world that's actually really affected by this. For that alone it's no wonder the American public doesn't know/care about it.
And then the ACTA doesn't involve killing or violence against persons. That's also what keeps the general public less interested. Even with ACTA, bittorrent will continue to work and they will still be able to order their counterfeit handbags from Hong Kong based e-bay shops like they do now. It will take years for such a regulation to start to bite, and then it's too late. We're frogs in a pot of water.
Your US corporate-controlled media may be slow to follow; luckily there is still the BBC and many other independent European news agencies that do pick up those stories, that do their homework, and that will bring it out to the masses. And remember WikiLeaks exists for many years already, me as long-term/. reader (some 9-10 years by now - no my ID doesn't reflect that) knew about it from the beginning, but the general public and major news agencies only much more recently picked it up really. I've seen their name in the newspapers occasionally, but only with the Iraq war files they really got well known.
OpenLeaks is "advertising" where they should: primarily the media outlets that would want to use their material. That's likely the core of their marketing - it seems to me WikiLeaks has done the same. Make sure your organisation is known in the geek-scene, and to the outlets. Make sure also that your "drop-box" is secure, secure as in guaranteed anonymity for leakers. That may be the hardest part even, because you know affected parties will chase you for any traces left for where a leak comes from, and that potential wistleblowers want to be sure that they can leak safely and truly anonymously. Those things you don't advertise, those things you have to be, and over time prove so.
Re:Egypt just turned off all Internet access
on
Openleaks Goes Live
·
· Score: 0
I'm caught between giving you an extra "funny" point or giving you an "insightful" point... a previous mod thought the first, which is understandable, but sadly I think an "insightful" tag would be very appropriate here. So instead I'll just post this comment.
And anyway it's a prime example of the power of information - and why of course dictatorships tend to control just that.
They were giving energies of 3-8 MeV for the (fusion) reactions of the various isotopes in the article. I haven't fully read it; it appears they take not only the fusion but also the subsequent decay into account.
They're a business, they're in the business to make money, and will find ways to make as much money they can. That's plain economics, every business tries to do so (and, one could argue, that includes non-profit organisations). Altruism doesn't make money directly - however it can give goodwill, promotion, whatever that in the long run increases the company's profits.
Now back to the altruism/principles part what this is about: like Google with their famous "do no evil" slogan, they want to be seen as caring for their customers. There may or may not be personal reasons of the company's leadership behind this of course. Some companies will say "OK we'll just follow the law, store data as required, keep a low profile, go on with business", and set up their servers to comply with the law. This ISP and apparently others too have said "we don't agree with these laws; we consider it highly intrusive for our customers; and we will find ways to protect our customers' privacy while staying within the letter of the law", and are planning to make the necessary investments to do so. They obviously have to make bigger investments than the first group as they have to implement both the storage and the extra work for the workaround, and they have apparently thought publicity.
This publicity I think is good, really. It makes the law and it's intentions and consequences so much better known with the public - basically with this they could even hope to spark enough of an outrage to have the laws repealed. And if not, at least they got a lot of free advertising of their ISP out of it. That may be so good for their business that they make a net gain out of it.
Altruism is simply part of smart business operation. You give some you get some. Goodwill is important, and this way they could build up goodwill with their customers. Just don't expect a business is going all altruistic just because they can - their owners may on a personal basis, but businesses are about making money. That, and nothing less.
Well for such poor service it should be cheap, I hope that little bit what you get of what you're entitled to at least works reliably, not too much downtime. When they sell you a 20 Mb connection isn't it too much to ask to get at the very least 50% of that on a regular basis, and more than that the rest of the time? After all what they sell you is a 20 Mb connection, not a 3 Mb connection. You pay for a 20 Mb connection and get no more than 15% of what you pay for. That's bad.
Now that 3 Mb may be enough for you - I take your word for it, my office has 2M/2M so slower than yours for download. It's enough. But I do get 2 Mb, not less, and 2 Mb is what I pay for. At home I've 8 Mb down, and I actually get 7-7.5 Mb on a regular basis, 8 Mb on a good torrent. That I find an acceptable service level.
China currently has 7,431 km of high-speed rail, and is planning to expand this to 13,000 in the next 10 years.
The distance you indicate is about 5,100 km only. And doesn't make sense as there is not much in between; for those distances air travel remains the more economical option. So taking all China's rail you would still have a lot of rail left for various branch lines.
USA could do with two main routes: north-south along each coast, that's where the vast majority of the population lives. Trains need lots of travelers - aircraft not so much. And maybe one or two cross-links to connect oddities in the middle of nowhere like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Add some branches to the first routes and you connect most of the people to high speed rail.
China and Europe have their population centres a it more scattered around the area.
If the mass of the hydrogen plus nickel atoms is more than the mass of the resulting copper, the fusion will release energy. Let's check some values (source: Wikipedia).
So start with Ni-58 (the most abundant), mass 57.9353429 amu.
Add hydrogen: 1.00794 amu.
Total: 58.943283 amu.
Get Cu-59, mass 58.9394980 amu.
And you just lost 0.003785 amu - mass which has become energy. That's how you get the exothermic fusion.
The problem here is that Cu-59 is unstable with a half-life of just 81 seconds; pretty hard to detect. Though skimming through their research paper I found that they say that the decay results in other isotopes of copper, or even decaying back into nickel. Anyway if this fusion takes place, there will be copper left, and energy is set to be released.
Now whether this whole reaction takes place, that's for other researchers to figure out - "all" they have to do is "just" try to reproduce the results, which may not be easy. It seems something happens, and it may be interesting to figure out what it is. The amounts of energy they claim to have produced are significant, too much to be simply systemic errors. But what is going on - well that's nothing I can speculate on from here.
The current situation is that, when a song is released for play on the radio, it can be obtained via the illegal channels.
The new situation is that, when a song is released for play on the radio, it can be obtained via the illegal AND the legal channels.
So now people who want to buy, can. Previously, they could not. That's the difference. And the sales statistics from Apple indicate there are still people that actually are happy to pay for music.
My guess is they wanted to try out a single before pressing actual copies of it. Especially vinyl (these policies stem from that era of course) is relative expensive to press and distribute - you want to be somewhat sure that your product is selling. Otherwise you end up with large stacks of unsold records, or you don't have enough if a song proves to be an unexpected hit. With CD's the costs are lower, but still significant.
Now with iTunes that whole distribution and upfront printing cost is gone of course. If a song doesn't sell, well too bad for those 5 MB of iTMS' disk space wasted.
Yes yes Windows has a lot of holes in it, we know. Now think of what you just wrote. Not using Windows doesn't stop attacks like Stuxnet.
Stuxnet was designed to attack very specific systems; the real target being some embedded computer in a controller. No idea what OS that runs, not Windows I'd guess.
If someone were to specifically attack a government, they would target that specific system. It's not that if the government chooses Linux, that there will be dozens of versions around. As any large organisation would do, they would make it all the same. Central management and identical installations, preferably down to a standardised set of hardware. So it may not be Windows, it's still a "highly predictable execution environment".
Windows may have more openings for attack than Linux, it doesn't mean Linux is immune to attacks. Especially targeted attacks. Of course it is immune to your run-of-the-mill botnet worm, and not likely to be infected through USB drives and the like.
To be fair: how is the cross-application support for ODF? Does it really look the same in various word processors? Honest question, not trying to troll here.
I'm using OpenOffice.org myself exclusively - no fancy layout or any advanced features though - and it works fine. Only sharing within the office, all identical software.
But in this situation.doc(x) works fine too, especially when you do not share documents.
To me it seems that it is still a big problem to standardise and reliably implement a format for storing formatted, editable text. We all know how reliable the html format is, and that's not even meant to be editable.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Absolutely true. That's what I like about Ubuntu, no (at least not much) tinkering needed. The only thing that needs serious work is the network login: it's not easy to set up a system to do kerberos login, and get user/group details from an ldap server. Previously I used Mandriva (really loved that distro - worried about the future and tried Ubuntu which works well too) - there you could set that up very easily when installing the system. A tick mark, enter a few settings (kerberos realm, ldap server name), and done.
OTOH my server is Debian. Considered a good server platform, never tried another as I'm happy with it. No GUI installed, running headless, and it just works. Lots of tinkering needed but then it's a server and those things just need a lot of customisation. It's the nature of the beast.
Personally I don't have much of a problem with this "interesting" stuff popping up unexpectedly. The only filter that I use is called AdBlockPlus (and that's not intended to block adult stuff, it just blocks the unwanted part). Oh well and the pop-up blocker in FF of course (are there actually any sites still using pop-ups?).
Short of ads, the only way to see adult material is to intentionally go for it. Via Google searches (you may want to switch on SafeSearch - by the time they're interested enough to switch it off most other filters will be bypassed too) and the like.
For the rest I pretty much agree with you. Let them play. And be around to keep half an eye on what's going on. As for your P.S.: I don't know about IE much; it doesn't have a Linux version available.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For being memory hog, the "out of the box" installation is what counts. I install Ubuntu, comes with Gnome (but that's not the point), and don't want to start heavy configuring to make it less of a memory hog. I guess I could make it lighter, but it's too much effort for me. It has to just work.
You sound like a tinkerer (me too sometimes) but for most people stuff has to Just Work. And for most of my computers I also want them to Just Work. Which modern Linux distros luckily do more and more.
It's getting better: they create a profile of, say, someone called "Donald Duck".
Then another person that happens to have the same name comes to that site, wants to become a member, and finds there is a profile of "him" that is full of incorrect information. Can Donald take ownership of this profile?
And then they create a profile of Daisy Duck. Now the actual Daisy Duck finds out and wants to take control. But how does she prove that she is the Daisy Duck the profile is about?
Either they have to create lots of orphaned profiles; or they're going to create the easiest entry for scammers possible.
Probably they're looking at the legal side: they must have found a way to stay within the letter of the law.
You're probably thinking of the general feelings of the general public regarding privacy.
Unfortunately these two are not always the same. Hence the site has "no privacy issues" but you (and me, and probably most of/. and the rest of the thinking part of this world's population) will see it as a privacy issue.
Deniability stops as soon as they start publishing common statistics like latest login, times logged in, messages posted, etc. with the profile. Like most such dating/networking sites do. If only to show "look, person is active, good one to contact".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say your solution is as nice as it's readable!
Then just whitelist that in your firewall. May be a bitch to get it right the first time, but that's what we've invented sysadmins for.
I agree with that, and would like to add a few more points (not sure whether they're valid or not in this case, just general):
Why would the computers or their LAN have to be connected to the Internet? That's one major attack vector. I can understand they need to interface with other networks - Internet can help - but how about simply whitelisting those allowed connections in a firewall? And reject any and all incoming connections to the network on firewall level?
Why allow users to attach any external media: CDs, USB sticks, whatever, to their computers? This is also easy to prevent. Either by rules, or by physical measures.
And of course keep your wireless networks on a separate "dirty" subnet. Outside the firewall. Or on their own firewall and own physical network. Yes it costs a bit more, but that's the price of keeping your production machines safe.
Those measures should keep even unpatched Windows installations safe. Getting a virus onto the network must have been either one of the above.
Which is why modern fly-by-wire aircraft will come with five systems with identical functionality, but build on different hardware running different software written by independent suppliers. So even if they put Windows in the mix it's not likely they would crash all at the exact same moment.
Unix and Linux, contrary to popular belief, is not crash-free. Running your whole ship on a single Unix base may result in less crashes than a Windows based system, it doesn't make such crashes less catastrophic.
To have iOS as nr. one on mobile phones means Apple is the #1 selling manufacturer. Symbian (Nokia) is doing very well too considering it's only Nokia that ships it - again when Symbian is #1, that implies that Nokia is the #1 seller of smartphone hand sets. Nevertheless they seem to do well.
Android is sold by dozens of manufacturers, if each of those has only a few % market share that still gives Android the advantage. Not being the #1 in total devices sold would be pretty pathetic.
Looking at the numbers in a different way it seems that about 1/3 of the smartphone market is for Nokia, 1/3 is for Apple, and 1/3 is for the rest of world to fight over. That rest of the world may be getting a bit more than that 1/3, it still means the slice of the pie for an average Android manufacturer is much much less than what Apple and Nokia have. All those Android sellers are doing peanuts compared to the giants Apple and Nokia.
That notwithstanding Android is nice. I like my phone.
Thanks, interesting. I don't know much about the background of random ISP's all over the world.
Nonetheless now he's set up that company to make a difference, the only way to keep doing what he's been doing is to turn a profit out of it. Maybe a lower profit than could be made with other business models - still he's got a business to run.
On a related note: in The Netherlands we have a chain called "wereldwinkel" - shops run mostly by volunteers selling fair trade stuff and handicrafts the organisation imports directly from poor countries, hoping to give the people there a better life. They're also typically "anti-commercial" and marketing, advertising and profits are dirty words to them. I say: you should advertise if it helps you selling more goods and maybe even make more profit, as the more you sell and grow your organisation, the more the people in the poor countries sell to you, and the more you're actually helping the people there. Still they didn't want to advertise... or do anything "commercial"... oh well.
Many facts have two faces, when seen from the opposite parties. Wars primarily so - even journalist reporting what they see will see and hear different things whether they are on the American side or on the Iraqi side. Even when reporting about the same facts. It is really really difficult to stick to pure observations without any interpretations, think the difference of "that child is shouting" and "that child is angry". The first is really an observation; the second could very well be an interpretation of the shouting behaviour. Very easy to misinterpret observations because of an expectation/opinion about a situation.
Yet of course all good journalists will do their best to separate fact and opinion. And proper news outlets will mark articles that are not plain reporting as opinion or analyses
Most of the general public is not touched by the ACTA directly. Especially the US public as it's primarily an attempt to spread existing US legislation to the rest of the world. It's the rest of the world that's actually really affected by this. For that alone it's no wonder the American public doesn't know/care about it.
And then the ACTA doesn't involve killing or violence against persons. That's also what keeps the general public less interested. Even with ACTA, bittorrent will continue to work and they will still be able to order their counterfeit handbags from Hong Kong based e-bay shops like they do now. It will take years for such a regulation to start to bite, and then it's too late. We're frogs in a pot of water.
Your US corporate-controlled media may be slow to follow; luckily there is still the BBC and many other independent European news agencies that do pick up those stories, that do their homework, and that will bring it out to the masses. And remember WikiLeaks exists for many years already, me as long-term /. reader (some 9-10 years by now - no my ID doesn't reflect that) knew about it from the beginning, but the general public and major news agencies only much more recently picked it up really. I've seen their name in the newspapers occasionally, but only with the Iraq war files they really got well known.
OpenLeaks is "advertising" where they should: primarily the media outlets that would want to use their material. That's likely the core of their marketing - it seems to me WikiLeaks has done the same. Make sure your organisation is known in the geek-scene, and to the outlets. Make sure also that your "drop-box" is secure, secure as in guaranteed anonymity for leakers. That may be the hardest part even, because you know affected parties will chase you for any traces left for where a leak comes from, and that potential wistleblowers want to be sure that they can leak safely and truly anonymously. Those things you don't advertise, those things you have to be, and over time prove so.
I'm caught between giving you an extra "funny" point or giving you an "insightful" point... a previous mod thought the first, which is understandable, but sadly I think an "insightful" tag would be very appropriate here. So instead I'll just post this comment.
And anyway it's a prime example of the power of information - and why of course dictatorships tend to control just that.
They were giving energies of 3-8 MeV for the (fusion) reactions of the various isotopes in the article. I haven't fully read it; it appears they take not only the fusion but also the subsequent decay into account.
Yes, and kudos to Google's machine translation. It was actually a pretty pleasant read, the sentences made as much sense as the average /. reply.
They're a business, they're in the business to make money, and will find ways to make as much money they can. That's plain economics, every business tries to do so (and, one could argue, that includes non-profit organisations). Altruism doesn't make money directly - however it can give goodwill, promotion, whatever that in the long run increases the company's profits.
Now back to the altruism/principles part what this is about: like Google with their famous "do no evil" slogan, they want to be seen as caring for their customers. There may or may not be personal reasons of the company's leadership behind this of course. Some companies will say "OK we'll just follow the law, store data as required, keep a low profile, go on with business", and set up their servers to comply with the law. This ISP and apparently others too have said "we don't agree with these laws; we consider it highly intrusive for our customers; and we will find ways to protect our customers' privacy while staying within the letter of the law", and are planning to make the necessary investments to do so. They obviously have to make bigger investments than the first group as they have to implement both the storage and the extra work for the workaround, and they have apparently thought publicity.
This publicity I think is good, really. It makes the law and it's intentions and consequences so much better known with the public - basically with this they could even hope to spark enough of an outrage to have the laws repealed. And if not, at least they got a lot of free advertising of their ISP out of it. That may be so good for their business that they make a net gain out of it.
Altruism is simply part of smart business operation. You give some you get some. Goodwill is important, and this way they could build up goodwill with their customers. Just don't expect a business is going all altruistic just because they can - their owners may on a personal basis, but businesses are about making money. That, and nothing less.
Well for such poor service it should be cheap, I hope that little bit what you get of what you're entitled to at least works reliably, not too much downtime. When they sell you a 20 Mb connection isn't it too much to ask to get at the very least 50% of that on a regular basis, and more than that the rest of the time? After all what they sell you is a 20 Mb connection, not a 3 Mb connection. You pay for a 20 Mb connection and get no more than 15% of what you pay for. That's bad.
Now that 3 Mb may be enough for you - I take your word for it, my office has 2M/2M so slower than yours for download. It's enough. But I do get 2 Mb, not less, and 2 Mb is what I pay for. At home I've 8 Mb down, and I actually get 7-7.5 Mb on a regular basis, 8 Mb on a good torrent. That I find an acceptable service level.
China currently has 7,431 km of high-speed rail, and is planning to expand this to 13,000 in the next 10 years.
The distance you indicate is about 5,100 km only. And doesn't make sense as there is not much in between; for those distances air travel remains the more economical option. So taking all China's rail you would still have a lot of rail left for various branch lines.
USA could do with two main routes: north-south along each coast, that's where the vast majority of the population lives. Trains need lots of travelers - aircraft not so much. And maybe one or two cross-links to connect oddities in the middle of nowhere like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Add some branches to the first routes and you connect most of the people to high speed rail.
China and Europe have their population centres a it more scattered around the area.
If the mass of the hydrogen plus nickel atoms is more than the mass of the resulting copper, the fusion will release energy. Let's check some values (source: Wikipedia).
So start with Ni-58 (the most abundant), mass 57.9353429 amu.
Add hydrogen: 1.00794 amu.
Total: 58.943283 amu.
Get Cu-59, mass 58.9394980 amu.
And you just lost 0.003785 amu - mass which has become energy. That's how you get the exothermic fusion.
The problem here is that Cu-59 is unstable with a half-life of just 81 seconds; pretty hard to detect. Though skimming through their research paper I found that they say that the decay results in other isotopes of copper, or even decaying back into nickel. Anyway if this fusion takes place, there will be copper left, and energy is set to be released.
Now whether this whole reaction takes place, that's for other researchers to figure out - "all" they have to do is "just" try to reproduce the results, which may not be easy. It seems something happens, and it may be interesting to figure out what it is. The amounts of energy they claim to have produced are significant, too much to be simply systemic errors. But what is going on - well that's nothing I can speculate on from here.
The current situation is that, when a song is released for play on the radio, it can be obtained via the illegal channels.
The new situation is that, when a song is released for play on the radio, it can be obtained via the illegal AND the legal channels.
So now people who want to buy, can. Previously, they could not. That's the difference. And the sales statistics from Apple indicate there are still people that actually are happy to pay for music.
My guess is they wanted to try out a single before pressing actual copies of it. Especially vinyl (these policies stem from that era of course) is relative expensive to press and distribute - you want to be somewhat sure that your product is selling. Otherwise you end up with large stacks of unsold records, or you don't have enough if a song proves to be an unexpected hit. With CD's the costs are lower, but still significant.
Now with iTunes that whole distribution and upfront printing cost is gone of course. If a song doesn't sell, well too bad for those 5 MB of iTMS' disk space wasted.
Yes yes Windows has a lot of holes in it, we know. Now think of what you just wrote. Not using Windows doesn't stop attacks like Stuxnet.
Stuxnet was designed to attack very specific systems; the real target being some embedded computer in a controller. No idea what OS that runs, not Windows I'd guess.
If someone were to specifically attack a government, they would target that specific system. It's not that if the government chooses Linux, that there will be dozens of versions around. As any large organisation would do, they would make it all the same. Central management and identical installations, preferably down to a standardised set of hardware. So it may not be Windows, it's still a "highly predictable execution environment".
Windows may have more openings for attack than Linux, it doesn't mean Linux is immune to attacks. Especially targeted attacks. Of course it is immune to your run-of-the-mill botnet worm, and not likely to be infected through USB drives and the like.
To be fair: how is the cross-application support for ODF? Does it really look the same in various word processors? Honest question, not trying to troll here.
I'm using OpenOffice.org myself exclusively - no fancy layout or any advanced features though - and it works fine. Only sharing within the office, all identical software.
But in this situation .doc(x) works fine too, especially when you do not share documents.
To me it seems that it is still a big problem to standardise and reliably implement a format for storing formatted, editable text. We all know how reliable the html format is, and that's not even meant to be editable.
Absolutely true. That's what I like about Ubuntu, no (at least not much) tinkering needed. The only thing that needs serious work is the network login: it's not easy to set up a system to do kerberos login, and get user/group details from an ldap server. Previously I used Mandriva (really loved that distro - worried about the future and tried Ubuntu which works well too) - there you could set that up very easily when installing the system. A tick mark, enter a few settings (kerberos realm, ldap server name), and done.
OTOH my server is Debian. Considered a good server platform, never tried another as I'm happy with it. No GUI installed, running headless, and it just works. Lots of tinkering needed but then it's a server and those things just need a lot of customisation. It's the nature of the beast.
Personally I don't have much of a problem with this "interesting" stuff popping up unexpectedly. The only filter that I use is called AdBlockPlus (and that's not intended to block adult stuff, it just blocks the unwanted part). Oh well and the pop-up blocker in FF of course (are there actually any sites still using pop-ups?).
Short of ads, the only way to see adult material is to intentionally go for it. Via Google searches (you may want to switch on SafeSearch - by the time they're interested enough to switch it off most other filters will be bypassed too) and the like.
For the rest I pretty much agree with you. Let them play. And be around to keep half an eye on what's going on. As for your P.S.: I don't know about IE much; it doesn't have a Linux version available.
For being memory hog, the "out of the box" installation is what counts. I install Ubuntu, comes with Gnome (but that's not the point), and don't want to start heavy configuring to make it less of a memory hog. I guess I could make it lighter, but it's too much effort for me. It has to just work.
You sound like a tinkerer (me too sometimes) but for most people stuff has to Just Work. And for most of my computers I also want them to Just Work. Which modern Linux distros luckily do more and more.
It's getting better: they create a profile of, say, someone called "Donald Duck".
Then another person that happens to have the same name comes to that site, wants to become a member, and finds there is a profile of "him" that is full of incorrect information. Can Donald take ownership of this profile?
And then they create a profile of Daisy Duck. Now the actual Daisy Duck finds out and wants to take control. But how does she prove that she is the Daisy Duck the profile is about?
Either they have to create lots of orphaned profiles; or they're going to create the easiest entry for scammers possible.
Probably they're looking at the legal side: they must have found a way to stay within the letter of the law.
You're probably thinking of the general feelings of the general public regarding privacy.
Unfortunately these two are not always the same. Hence the site has "no privacy issues" but you (and me, and probably most of /. and the rest of the thinking part of this world's population) will see it as a privacy issue.
Deniability stops as soon as they start publishing common statistics like latest login, times logged in, messages posted, etc. with the profile. Like most such dating/networking sites do. If only to show "look, person is active, good one to contact".