The answer is right in front of you. Governments and spy shops pay for exploits before they're made public, so they can use them to enter your machine as they need to. In this case, we don't know how CIPAV was delivered, but it might be as simple as an undiscovered exploit in Outlook or a browser-based email system. While none of us trust government, I equally don't trust my fellow citizens, so the "ethics" of this point are moot.
At least in the old days, we used to call it "social engineering" and hacking meant any kind of programming outside the obvious. That included getting machines to fork over security credentials, but that meaning was a subset of the broader term, which meant both a cheesy quick fix ("what a hack!") and a dancelike circumnavigation of inherent limitations to produce a semi-elegant but sturdy fix ("kernel hackers drink coffee black").
Wouldn't it be nice if we stopped killing each other, stopped arguing, didn't have nuclear weapons, didn't have different religions or cultures, and were just all happy human beings living together in peace like the kids on the lawn at Woodstock?
Back to reality, all of these things are part of reality... and always will be, because you can't have peace unless everyone is so reasonable that society has evolved to a point of paralysis. War is necessary. Struggle is necessary. That's life, and that's how we find better solutions.
Looking at this from the point of view that robot armies are inevitable, I say spend little time with legislation and built in commands -- those are so hackable it's not even funny. Put your energy into creating humans with the abilities of robots, whether cyborgs or Zen masters, who can fight our own creations if the time comes.
Microsoft is not changing their tactic. Their tactic was this: push for a proprietary standard and if one cannot exist, accept what does exist, and then start making suggestions so it becomes clear MS are experts in that field.
Very few large businesses have a single option when they're pushing hard for something.
Business will support anything that can be made profitable. History shows us this. Governments support both oppressive governments and civil rights, both conservative Christians and liberal Atheists, homosexuals and homophobes, globalism and local culture. Business doesn't have an opinion. It simply does what makes money.
I'm not really enthralled with ODF, but I can't see how having more XML-based interchange formats could hurt us.
Their reasoning is that if they released all of their stuff under GPL then Red Hat would just scoop it up and serve it in place of the very inferior management tools bundled into RHEL5.
This paradox has always baffled me. The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge. It's one of the two biggest flaws of the current FOSS model, in my view. The other is that FOSS software tends to clone/emulate existing commercial products.
Both of these face the same problem, which is that in a media-driven capitalist economy, ideas need to become products that are sold in order to be recognized as "part of" the economy and society as a whole. While GPLv3 is a good start toward working around this, another thought is that FOSS should operate on commercial principles from the beginning, and serve as a think tank and consultant shop that hires out its programmers to implement their own code for customers, eliminating the need for boring and unrelated "day jobs."
Technical writers, sometimes called "tech writers," write manuals and help systems and procedures to help make sense of technology. We are unrelated to "technology writers," who depending on which one you encounter, may be people who failed to fill out admission papers correctly at the asylum or intelligent commentators.
Doesn't exist. Someone will hold it against you. This is why the more polite a society gets, the less it tolerates or even cares about truth, and the more its science gets politicized.
Free speech, like world peace, unconditional love, and true happiness in life are misnamed goals. They are symbols, not reality. Of course, some of this could be changed, but it would require getting over the aforementioned taboos.
...by the industrial revolution, economics, politics and The Media. I'm not sure a biological imperative means anything these days besides a bathroom trip.
This is part of the cumulative Microsoft vision that started when they wanted to make every part of their OS a configurable widget. The idea is that if you abstract the system enough into an insanely complex object model, you can give users control of it, and most programming tasks becoming a question of plugging together the right objects with the right filters and actors. The difference is that now they've brought.net-style wisdom into the picture, and are going to make it a net-wide, OS-less (but Vista-dependent, no doubt) version of the original ActiveX evangelism.
The good news is that this could make many programming tasks less tedious, and when a year later a more efficient (less corporate, fewer people) FOSS team takes on a clone project, it'll be fun for the rest of us as well.
Apple now controls this project, its direction, and what it will support. They don't "own" it in the conventional (pre-GPLv3) sense, but they own control of what it will do and from that, what will work with it and what it will not support. A very smart move on their part, because as long as we're a capitalist system, we need to have some control over IP that makes it exclusive enough that we can sell it.
This is the most significant development I've seen in IP practice for years. This is the largest of the corporate entities saying that IP-sharing is a good idea; they don't go full FOSS because that has them making costly products and giving them away for free, which doesn't work under capitalism. But they're approving the idea, and that will inspire others to follow their line of thinking.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, science allowed itself to be bought through sponsorship of research, and then politicized through endorsement of certain political agendas which were suggested to be incarnations of scientific truth. Now, science itself is sullied, and is forever going to be caught in this battle between special interest groups vying for control of an oblivious electorate.
I think Lou Dobbs said it well:
With the electorate asserting a strong impulse to be independent, and with populism exerting a significant influence in the 2006 midterm elections, there is a possibility that all of those incumbents in the House and Senate may have to consider the possibility of actually having to represent their constituents and the popular will, rather than corporate America, socio-ethnic special interest groups and the tens of thousands of lobbyists who represent every interest but that of the common good and the nation.
He's talking about government in general, but the same could be applied to science and even large parts of the computer industry. If science wants to have respect again, it needs to get rid of the perception that loyalties and bribes have made it a partisan football.
This doesn't get around a truth of a world in which ideas generate money in a hostile environment where those without money suffer badly. If you create something, and own it, and want to keep profiting off of it, the tendency is to reserve as many rights as possible. And until you get the fifty million bucks that puts you and your family out of society's reach, that's what you're gonna do.
Wonder how long that ill-designed paradigm will last.
People like Ubuntu because they have a perception that it installs easily on the desktop and just works. This is like the perception that Macs are arty, and that Windows runs all old software and comes from a stable company. Whether others did it first, Ubuntu is the first to brand itself with this identity and so is gaining new converts. The question is: how many were already Linux users, and how many have newly-fled from corporate platforms like OS X and Windows?
Too many people, few agree on anything, ideological directions fragment. Soon the nation is composed of people who violently disagree and want to get violent. The nation, without any ability to control itself, enacts "committee logic" on foreign policy (good intentions covering benefits for itself, horrible corporate followthrough) and makes a plethora of enemies. The leaders can't unite people on sane ideas so they talk about big scary concepts like terrorism, nuclear war, evil dictators and perverts. Conclusion? The nation goes to war against itself. Technology just makes it easier.
Too many fingers in the pie, and people are polite instead of telling the truth and offending those who need to grow up and deal with the fact that they're not always right.
Marketing wants to make sure we channel users toward buying the upgrade, legal is concerned about having too powerful of an mp3 ripper, management wants to simplify it so our support costs are less... the product that was once a great idea ends up being a stripped-down, pointless version of itself.
The problem that causes this isn't unique to corporations. It's unique to large groups of humans where we are afraid to tell the truth for social consequences. I've seen it in volunteer groups, the F/OSS movement, even friend groups trying to pick a restaurant.
It is the Human Disease, and the only solution is to get over our personal pretenses and look at the task, not how we represent ourselves in it.
Graphic artists, musicians, writers, developers or MBAs -- pick one group and love them until they love you back. Linux Year of the Graphic Artist Desktop will be followed by more desktops. That, after all, is how the Mac stayed alive and prospered, and even how to some degree Windows did it. It all starts with one type of desktop in a nice market, and from there the sky's the limit.
I'd have to give them a big "Yes and No." The breakpoint is whether or not there's an active community of people looking over the source and testing it. If there is, they're more likely to find insecurities before hackers. If not, and the only people reading the source are hackers, there could be a problem. All of this to me suggests that the Open Source community should consolidate, have fewer projects, and we can all subject each other's projects to more rigorous review.
$85 is not that unusual for this kind of labor. The phone has to be mailed in, and people need to keep track of it (which in the modern job, is complicated, because people are so mentally addled they often lose things at random). Then it has to be opened, the battery replaced, and the unit tested. While I wouldn't want to pay for it, given the cost to Apple, this isn't excessive.
As with anything technological, it seems to me, there's a 10% who explore and the rest settle for whatever is convenient and non-threatening. I'm interested in the 10%, because they'll forge the way for the rest............eventually.
This is a tiny step toward the inevitable. With the release of the iPhone, the world has become officially aware that our phones now are little computers without keyboards. From this point, it's only a few tiny steps away until the informed consumer is going to want the ability to treat the phone like a computer, including picking the operating system and any software that goes on it. At that point, having such a "mesh" won't be a news item -- it will be a fact of daily life.
For mainstream and corporate software, Windows may continue to rule, but the biggest leaps I've seen in development have been in the niches where Linux has prominence. Audio, networking, manufacturing and server-side work is booming for Linux.
In a perfect world, this article would distinguish between development "for pay" and all development.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is right in front of you. Governments and spy shops pay for exploits before they're made public, so they can use them to enter your machine as they need to. In this case, we don't know how CIPAV was delivered, but it might be as simple as an undiscovered exploit in Outlook or a browser-based email system. While none of us trust government, I equally don't trust my fellow citizens, so the "ethics" of this point are moot.
If they do whitelist gov't spyware, they will probably also lie about it.
I think modern government wouldn't do its own spying, but would find a subcontractor.
At least in the old days, we used to call it "social engineering" and hacking meant any kind of programming outside the obvious. That included getting machines to fork over security credentials, but that meaning was a subset of the broader term, which meant both a cheesy quick fix ("what a hack!") and a dancelike circumnavigation of inherent limitations to produce a semi-elegant but sturdy fix ("kernel hackers drink coffee black").
Wouldn't it be nice if we stopped killing each other, stopped arguing, didn't have nuclear weapons, didn't have different religions or cultures, and were just all happy human beings living together in peace like the kids on the lawn at Woodstock?
Back to reality, all of these things are part of reality... and always will be, because you can't have peace unless everyone is so reasonable that society has evolved to a point of paralysis. War is necessary. Struggle is necessary. That's life, and that's how we find better solutions.
Looking at this from the point of view that robot armies are inevitable, I say spend little time with legislation and built in commands -- those are so hackable it's not even funny. Put your energy into creating humans with the abilities of robots, whether cyborgs or Zen masters, who can fight our own creations if the time comes.
Business will support it.
Microsoft is not changing their tactic. Their tactic was this: push for a proprietary standard and if one cannot exist, accept what does exist, and then start making suggestions so it becomes clear MS are experts in that field.
Very few large businesses have a single option when they're pushing hard for something.
Business will support anything that can be made profitable. History shows us this. Governments support both oppressive governments and civil rights, both conservative Christians and liberal Atheists, homosexuals and homophobes, globalism and local culture. Business doesn't have an opinion. It simply does what makes money.
I'm not really enthralled with ODF, but I can't see how having more XML-based interchange formats could hurt us.
Their reasoning is that if they released all of their stuff under GPL then Red Hat would just scoop it up and serve it in place of the very inferior management tools bundled into RHEL5.
This paradox has always baffled me. The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge. It's one of the two biggest flaws of the current FOSS model, in my view. The other is that FOSS software tends to clone/emulate existing commercial products.
Both of these face the same problem, which is that in a media-driven capitalist economy, ideas need to become products that are sold in order to be recognized as "part of" the economy and society as a whole. While GPLv3 is a good start toward working around this, another thought is that FOSS should operate on commercial principles from the beginning, and serve as a think tank and consultant shop that hires out its programmers to implement their own code for customers, eliminating the need for boring and unrelated "day jobs."
Technical writers, sometimes called "tech writers," write manuals and help systems and procedures to help make sense of technology. We are unrelated to "technology writers," who depending on which one you encounter, may be people who failed to fill out admission papers correctly at the asylum or intelligent commentators.
Doesn't exist. Someone will hold it against you. This is why the more polite a society gets, the less it tolerates or even cares about truth, and the more its science gets politicized.
Free speech, like world peace, unconditional love, and true happiness in life are misnamed goals. They are symbols, not reality. Of course, some of this could be changed, but it would require getting over the aforementioned taboos.
...by the industrial revolution, economics, politics and The Media. I'm not sure a biological imperative means anything these days besides a bathroom trip.
Do the little guys get pardons too? It sure would be embittering to see Scooter Libby go free when salt of the earth NWO grunts got sent to prison.
This is part of the cumulative Microsoft vision that started when they wanted to make every part of their OS a configurable widget. The idea is that if you abstract the system enough into an insanely complex object model, you can give users control of it, and most programming tasks becoming a question of plugging together the right objects with the right filters and actors. The difference is that now they've brought .net-style wisdom into the picture, and are going to make it a net-wide, OS-less (but Vista-dependent, no doubt) version of the original ActiveX evangelism.
The good news is that this could make many programming tasks less tedious, and when a year later a more efficient (less corporate, fewer people) FOSS team takes on a clone project, it'll be fun for the rest of us as well.
Apple now controls this project, its direction, and what it will support. They don't "own" it in the conventional (pre-GPLv3) sense, but they own control of what it will do and from that, what will work with it and what it will not support. A very smart move on their part, because as long as we're a capitalist system, we need to have some control over IP that makes it exclusive enough that we can sell it.
This is the most significant development I've seen in IP practice for years. This is the largest of the corporate entities saying that IP-sharing is a good idea; they don't go full FOSS because that has them making costly products and giving them away for free, which doesn't work under capitalism. But they're approving the idea, and that will inspire others to follow their line of thinking.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, science allowed itself to be bought through sponsorship of research, and then politicized through endorsement of certain political agendas which were suggested to be incarnations of scientific truth. Now, science itself is sullied, and is forever going to be caught in this battle between special interest groups vying for control of an oblivious electorate.
I think Lou Dobbs said it well:
With the electorate asserting a strong impulse to be independent, and with populism exerting a significant influence in the 2006 midterm elections, there is a possibility that all of those incumbents in the House and Senate may have to consider the possibility of actually having to represent their constituents and the popular will, rather than corporate America, socio-ethnic special interest groups and the tens of thousands of lobbyists who represent every interest but that of the common good and the nation.
Lou Dobbs - July 11, 2007
He's talking about government in general, but the same could be applied to science and even large parts of the computer industry. If science wants to have respect again, it needs to get rid of the perception that loyalties and bribes have made it a partisan football.
Then it's legal.
This doesn't get around a truth of a world in which ideas generate money in a hostile environment where those without money suffer badly. If you create something, and own it, and want to keep profiting off of it, the tendency is to reserve as many rights as possible. And until you get the fifty million bucks that puts you and your family out of society's reach, that's what you're gonna do.
Wonder how long that ill-designed paradigm will last.
People like Ubuntu because they have a perception that it installs easily on the desktop and just works. This is like the perception that Macs are arty, and that Windows runs all old software and comes from a stable company. Whether others did it first, Ubuntu is the first to brand itself with this identity and so is gaining new converts. The question is: how many were already Linux users, and how many have newly-fled from corporate platforms like OS X and Windows?
Too many people, few agree on anything, ideological directions fragment. Soon the nation is composed of people who violently disagree and want to get violent. The nation, without any ability to control itself, enacts "committee logic" on foreign policy (good intentions covering benefits for itself, horrible corporate followthrough) and makes a plethora of enemies. The leaders can't unite people on sane ideas so they talk about big scary concepts like terrorism, nuclear war, evil dictators and perverts. Conclusion? The nation goes to war against itself. Technology just makes it easier.
Too many fingers in the pie, and people are polite instead of telling the truth and offending those who need to grow up and deal with the fact that they're not always right.
Marketing wants to make sure we channel users toward buying the upgrade, legal is concerned about having too powerful of an mp3 ripper, management wants to simplify it so our support costs are less... the product that was once a great idea ends up being a stripped-down, pointless version of itself.
The problem that causes this isn't unique to corporations. It's unique to large groups of humans where we are afraid to tell the truth for social consequences. I've seen it in volunteer groups, the F/OSS movement, even friend groups trying to pick a restaurant.
It is the Human Disease, and the only solution is to get over our personal pretenses and look at the task, not how we represent ourselves in it.
Graphic artists, musicians, writers, developers or MBAs -- pick one group and love them until they love you back. Linux Year of the Graphic Artist Desktop will be followed by more desktops. That, after all, is how the Mac stayed alive and prospered, and even how to some degree Windows did it. It all starts with one type of desktop in a nice market, and from there the sky's the limit.
I'd have to give them a big "Yes and No." The breakpoint is whether or not there's an active community of people looking over the source and testing it. If there is, they're more likely to find insecurities before hackers. If not, and the only people reading the source are hackers, there could be a problem. All of this to me suggests that the Open Source community should consolidate, have fewer projects, and we can all subject each other's projects to more rigorous review.
$85 is not that unusual for this kind of labor. The phone has to be mailed in, and people need to keep track of it (which in the modern job, is complicated, because people are so mentally addled they often lose things at random). Then it has to be opened, the battery replaced, and the unit tested. While I wouldn't want to pay for it, given the cost to Apple, this isn't excessive.
I know it's a fanatical user base, but this seems to go a bit far. Wait... maybe I mis-read...
As with anything technological, it seems to me, there's a 10% who explore and the rest settle for whatever is convenient and non-threatening. I'm interested in the 10%, because they'll forge the way for the rest............eventually.
This is a tiny step toward the inevitable. With the release of the iPhone, the world has become officially aware that our phones now are little computers without keyboards. From this point, it's only a few tiny steps away until the informed consumer is going to want the ability to treat the phone like a computer, including picking the operating system and any software that goes on it. At that point, having such a "mesh" won't be a news item -- it will be a fact of daily life.
For mainstream and corporate software, Windows may continue to rule, but the biggest leaps I've seen in development have been in the niches where Linux has prominence. Audio, networking, manufacturing and server-side work is booming for Linux.
In a perfect world, this article would distinguish between development "for pay" and all development.