That's what Mr. Chou wants: "We all have been living in this village for a long time, making smartphones. But one day this powerful man came in and said I invented this world, this world is mine. I don't think so. We have been making smartphones before the iPhone. This world belongs to all and nobody has a right to ask other people to leave. What it means is we don't want to copy anyone, we want to be a premium product. This world, this market is very big... is for all of us. Nobody should tell other people to leave and we should compete in the market place, let consumers decide... rather than in court."
It was downgraded in some media. Slate has an informative article that analyses the phenomenon:"Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn't Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn't)."
"So that Breivik would have attacked Norway’s liberal Prime Minister and his party is horrifying – but it is therefore not terribly surprising: these are the politicians who, in the name of civil rights and equality, have made most of the concessions."
That sounds very much like blaming the victims... Let's see how that works:
"So that Hitler would have attacked the Jews is horrifying – but it is therefore not terribly surprising: these are the people who, in the name of civil rights and equality, have made most of the concessions."
"So that bin Laden would have attacked the people of New York is horrifying – but it is therefore not terribly surprising: these are the people who, in the name of civil rights and equality, have made most of the concessions."
For some reason, Forbes/Ms. Esman thinks it is reasonable to blame the "liberal" Norwegian victims for an attack in a way that she never would for other groups.
(Maybe his aversion to "marxism" explains his distancing himself from "national socialism"?)
He distances himself from National Socialism because it is anti-Jewish. In his ideology, Israel is the frontline in a global fight against Islam, and Jews are the foot soldiers. They aren't Christians, and he probably doesn't want them living in Europe, but he's quite happy for them to be fighting his war in the Middle East.
There has been a very odd change in European extremism since 9/11 - the Jews, who were traditionally seen as the underhand enemy, manipulators of the banks, purveyors of the New World Order etc., have been embraced as brothers against Islam. This change isn't universal among extremists, but it is significant. I suspect the switch is purely one of convenience, and if these people were ever to gain power, then the Jews would be removed from Europe shortly after the Muslims and black people.
But let's not fool ourselves that like-minded people are going to look to Breivek's writings the way oodles of self-proclaimed revolutionaries have poured over Mao's Red Book or Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Perhaps not, but they might look to his writings the way people looked at Osama bin Laden's writings. Or Geert Wilder's Fitna. The new European right-wing have constructed a narrative where immigration and Islamification simultaneously represents both an invading army and the ultimate evil to be confronted, and one which the "liberal" governments of Europe are unwilling to fight, leaving brave determined indigenous people as the only resistance.
It is a compelling narrative for people who are that way inclined, and I expect we will be seeing much more violence of this type in the coming decade; the Guardian obtained some illuminating undercover videos of the EDL (who Breivik has been associated with) , which has been called "the most significant far-right street movement in the United Kingdom since the success of the National Front during the 1970s". They have successfully attracted all sorts: skin heads, disenfranchised youths, football hooligans, etc. and are stepping up the game by attacking mosques and planning marches through areas with large numbers of non-whites in an obvious attempt at provoking violence.
The Tea Party sought an alliance with the EDL last year. Oddly, some right-wing Jewish organisations also seem to be supporting the EDL - you'd have thought that encouraging European ethnic-nationalism was a dangerous game for an ethnic minority to play, but apparently they forget history and believe "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Iran has manufacturing capabilities to build the centrifuges. The parts and materials are imported from Chinese, Russian and Western companies - but these are dual use parts and materials, and the Iranian government use front companies, so it is not so obvious what is going on. The U.S. does have sanctions against several Iranian and Chinese companies for supplying materials.
Really, we aren't performing drone strikes, incursions, and firefights with Pakistan's border patrols on a daily basis?
No, I can assure you that if U.S. forces and the Pakistani military were waging war against each other, then we would hear about it. The U.S. drone strikes etc. are being carried out with the permission and cooperation of the Pakistani military and political ruling class. Around 4,000 Pakistani security members have been killed by local hostiles in the last decade, not by the U.S..
Scientist code is usually a giant JUST-SO story, sufficient to derive the results they need for the task at hand.
They either don't have, or avoid putting in data that will crash the program so limit checking is not necessary.
Welcome to the worlds of in-house, bespoke and embedded software engineering. This issue is not limited to scientists - in every company I have ever worked at, "getting it done" was more important to management than "code quality".
Again, bullshit. Keychains add real security. You can't just mount the filesystem and read the contents of the keychain. You can't use an app on a rooted/jailbroken iPhone to read the keychain contents.
What about this - they run an app on a jailbroken phone and get access to the contents of the keychain.
And what about Elcomsoft's forensic tools? They claim "The toolkit allows eligible customers acquiring bit-to-bit images of devices’ file systems, extracting phone secrets (passcodes, passwords, and encryption keys) and decrypting the file system dump. Access to most information is provided in real-time. In addition to Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker, the toolkit includes the ability to decrypt images of devices’ file systems, as well as a free tool that can extract the encrypted file system out of the device in raw form."
If an encrypted disk image can be decrypted by an attacker in realtime, then the encryption is not so good, is it?
As that article notes, you need physical access to the device. Not just being able to run software n the device, actual physical access to pull out the system keys.
You might need physical access to jailbreak it. Or you might not - there have been remote jailbreaks before. You don't need physical access to run software once you have jailbroken the phone and installed a backdoor. Note that in the Wired article they use SSH to retrieve the decrypted disk data.
A few months ago: APPLE STORED YOUR LOCATION DATA IN PLAIN TEXT!!! HOW STUPID ARE THEY? THE ONLY EXPLANATION IS THEY ARE TRACKING YOU!!! PEOPLE WILL BE STALKED USING THIS!!!
People (including many iPhone owners) were upset because Apple was storing location data at all, not because it wasn't encrypted.
Somehow, the OS X and iOS keychain manages to use encryption to protect passwords
Keychain stored passwords are encrypted using a key derived from data on the device. Encrypting data and storing the encrypted data on the phone along with the decryption key provides no security benefits - apparently it's trivial to extract Keychain passwords once you have software running as root on the device, link: "The attack works because the cryptographic key on current iOS devices is based on material available within the device and is independent of the passcode"
the entire disk on iOS (after the 3GS, I think, maybe the 3G) is encrypted, and processes are blocked from reading files outside of their sandbox.
'Apple claims that hundreds of thousands of iPhones are being used by corporations and government agencies. What it won’t tell you is that the supposedly enterprise-friendly encryption included with the iPhone 3GS is so weak it can be cracked in two minutes with a few pieces of readily available freeware.
“It is kind of like storing all your secret messages right next to the secret decoder ring,” said Jonathan Zdziarski, an iPhone developer and a hacker who teaches forensics courses on recovering data from iPhones. “I don’t think any of us [developers] have ever seen encryption implemented so poorly before, which is why it’s hard to describe why it’s such a big threat to security.'
Which as many Android enthusiasts point out is terribly easy to do. While it does not affect every user it affects huge subset of users.
In Linux a process will only run as root if you run it as root. A random process will not suddenly start running with root priviledges just because you enabled root logins (which is all that "rooting" does).
On the iPhone, even if you've jailbroken it there's no such weakness thanks to the Keychain. Jailbreaking allows side loading, it does not break the entire security model and expose things as basic as email passwords.
Apparently that is not true. According to this, you can access Keychain passwords if you have a jailbroken phone: "The attack works because the cryptographic key on current iOS devices is based on material available within the device and is independent of the passcode." Well, that is pretty much the same as Android. Encryption isn't much use if the key is stored or derived from data on the device.
I don't like the summary - from the article: A Chinese high-speed train derailed Saturday when it was hit by another express, state media said, throwing two carriages off a viaduct and killing at least 16 people.
When I wrote the summary a few hours ago the information regarding a lightning strike and collision was not available.
If you are actually doing research on bitstreams there's some more recent stuff - Florian Benz, his thesis is "Reverse Engineering the FPGA Bitstream Format" (not yet published?) and from the same research group Andreas Marinopoulos "Reverse Engineering of FPGA Netlists" 2010. Florian posted to some FPGA groups a few months ago saying he was wanting to publish his library as open source, but I didn't find it anywhere yet. I suspect if you emailed him he would provide you with a copy.
Positive rights (or entitlements, or whatever you want to call them) require the involuntary service of someone
My entire point was that every positive right requires force
What about the positive rights of, say, the Emirati people of Dubai? They pay no tax, and they have many positive rights, such as the right to a house from the government when they are married. However, this is completely funded by state enterprise - in effect, the government acts as a corporate entity which carries out profitable projects like construction, natural resource exploitation etc. The bulk of physical labour is carried out by immigrants who voluntarily enter into an employment contract. This system requires no force, no involuntary servitude, and yet still results in positive rights.
But what does a "right to live" actually mean? Does it mean that the government won't kill you? Does it mean that the government will protect you? Does it mean that other people won't kill you? Or is it just some convenient semantics that actually means "you might get killed, but the government won't try to kill you, will protect you if you are considered at immediate risk, and will try to track down your killer afterwards". Attempting to protect you and trying to track down your killer both require the involuntary service of someone, as someone has to pay for the police force. Every act by the government to enforce your "right to life" has a cost, and someone has to pay.
there are really two things that you can do with it...
2) Reverse engineer the code. However, you will NOT have anything that would help you do this, like net names or hierarchies. This will make actual reverse-engineering in order to change something or learn something very challenging.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of number 2. I know I guy who figured out the bitstream format of a particular FPGA type that he was using so that he could write his own synthesis tools for research. It took him a couple of months, but he did it. There are now published papers on this topic From the bitstream to the netlist, A library and platform for FPGA bitstream manipulation, so it should be somewhat easier. There was even a tool called "debit" that disassembled the bitstream back to FPGA tools format, but it got censored.
This exploit is a big deal. Every system that uses Xilinx FPGAs is now vulnerable. If you can get the bitstream, then you can decrypt it, modify it, and deploy it onto real devices. Some possibilities:
Pay TV hacking. Modify the bitstream to dump out the video encryption keys.
Those secure encryption PCI cards and credit card payment terminals can be modified to dump data (keys, pin codes).
Network switches can be modified to allow eavesdropping.
Mess with safety critical systems in some way to induce failure.
Basically, any system that used a Xilinx FPGA to perform some task, before this exploit the FPGA was considered tamperproof and therefore "safe" - it could be handed critical tasks and trusted to do them and not leak data. Now, someone with physical or remote access to the system can upload altered code and change the behaviour.. the functions of the FPGA can no longer be trusted. The only limitation is that you need physical access to at least one device in order to extract the symmetric signing key.
An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.
Not really. According the TFA, the majority of deployed systems utilise external memory for the bitstream, so an end user will be able to easily extract the bitstream. Also, many devices are now updatable via the internet - so the bitstream is accessible via web (or via satellite/cable, for Pay TV).
"One of the disadvantages of FPGAs, especially with respect to custom hardware such as ASICs, is that an attacker who has access to the bitstream can clone the system and extract the intellectual property of the design. Note that the bitstream is in the vast majority of systems stored externally to the FPGA in a dedicated configuration memory and is from there loaded into the FPGA on every power-up or reset — an adversary wire-tapping the relevant data signals can hence easily monitor the bitstream. The main answer of the industry for protecting the design is a security feature called bitstream encryption."
Linux was created in 1991 to be a POSIX compliant kernel, not to be a competitor to MS. The GNU tools were created to have a free Unix.
It doesn't really matter what the original intentions of the creators were - the fact is that Linux not only became a huge competitor to Windows, but went on to beat Windows in every single market except the desktop. Embedded systems? Check. Cell Phones? Check. High performance clusters? Check. Servers? Check. Consumer electronics? Check. Those were all areas that Microsoft wanted to dominate in, but ultimately they came (at best) second.
You may not believe in the fight, but Microsoft certainly did. I suspect they have now come to realise that the dominance of Linux in every area apart from the desktop is unstoppable, so they are trying to rewrite history to make it look like they never lost, because "there was no fight".
Health care is a "right" in the same way that child education is a "right". Or electricity. Or clean water. If enough people decide that something should be a right, then it becomes a right. You can argue over the semantics of a "right" vs "entitlement" or "negative/positive rights", but in the end you are arguing over words, and it really comes down to what people believe.
For many in the developed world (e.g. hundreds of millions of Europeans), health care is a "right". For most people outside the developed world (e.g. billion+ Chinese and Indians), health care is not a "right"... what is the difference, except for a set of beliefs?
I love freedom and I hate Republicans for trying to take away my rights and freedoms and for God's sake not letting me live alone in peace.
It's nice to hear that you hate people who think differently from you.
He didn't say he hated people who think differently - he said he hated people who tried to take away his rights and freedoms. Two different things.
Having said that, hate is not a good emotion, and it does tend to inflict more negativity on the hater than the target of their hate. Live and let live.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what Mr. Chou wants: "We all have been living in this village for a long time, making smartphones. But one day this powerful man came in and said I invented this world, this world is mine. I don't think so. We have been making smartphones before the iPhone. This world belongs to all and nobody has a right to ask other people to leave. What it means is we don't want to copy anyone, we want to be a premium product. This world, this market is very big... is for all of us. Nobody should tell other people to leave and we should compete in the market place, let consumers decide... rather than in court."
It was downgraded in some media. Slate has an informative article that analyses the phenomenon: "Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn't Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn't)."
"So that Breivik would have attacked Norway’s liberal Prime Minister and his party is horrifying – but it is therefore not terribly surprising: these are the politicians who, in the name of civil rights and equality, have made most of the concessions."
That sounds very much like blaming the victims... Let's see how that works:
"So that Hitler would have attacked the Jews is horrifying – but it is therefore not terribly surprising: these are the people who, in the name of civil rights and equality, have made most of the concessions."
"So that bin Laden would have attacked the people of New York is horrifying – but it is therefore not terribly surprising: these are the people who, in the name of civil rights and equality, have made most of the concessions."
For some reason, Forbes/Ms. Esman thinks it is reasonable to blame the "liberal" Norwegian victims for an attack in a way that she never would for other groups.
(Maybe his aversion to "marxism" explains his distancing himself from "national socialism"?)
He distances himself from National Socialism because it is anti-Jewish. In his ideology, Israel is the frontline in a global fight against Islam, and Jews are the foot soldiers. They aren't Christians, and he probably doesn't want them living in Europe, but he's quite happy for them to be fighting his war in the Middle East.
There has been a very odd change in European extremism since 9/11 - the Jews, who were traditionally seen as the underhand enemy, manipulators of the banks, purveyors of the New World Order etc., have been embraced as brothers against Islam. This change isn't universal among extremists, but it is significant. I suspect the switch is purely one of convenience, and if these people were ever to gain power, then the Jews would be removed from Europe shortly after the Muslims and black people.
But let's not fool ourselves that like-minded people are going to look to Breivek's writings the way oodles of self-proclaimed revolutionaries have poured over Mao's Red Book or Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Perhaps not, but they might look to his writings the way people looked at Osama bin Laden's writings. Or Geert Wilder's Fitna. The new European right-wing have constructed a narrative where immigration and Islamification simultaneously represents both an invading army and the ultimate evil to be confronted, and one which the "liberal" governments of Europe are unwilling to fight, leaving brave determined indigenous people as the only resistance.
It is a compelling narrative for people who are that way inclined, and I expect we will be seeing much more violence of this type in the coming decade; the Guardian obtained some illuminating undercover videos of the EDL (who Breivik has been associated with) , which has been called "the most significant far-right street movement in the United Kingdom since the success of the National Front during the 1970s". They have successfully attracted all sorts: skin heads, disenfranchised youths, football hooligans, etc. and are stepping up the game by attacking mosques and planning marches through areas with large numbers of non-whites in an obvious attempt at provoking violence.
The Tea Party sought an alliance with the EDL last year. Oddly, some right-wing Jewish organisations also seem to be supporting the EDL - you'd have thought that encouraging European ethnic-nationalism was a dangerous game for an ethnic minority to play, but apparently they forget history and believe "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
WHO is selling them these new centrifuges?
Iran has manufacturing capabilities to build the centrifuges. The parts and materials are imported from Chinese, Russian and Western companies - but these are dual use parts and materials, and the Iranian government use front companies, so it is not so obvious what is going on. The U.S. does have sanctions against several Iranian and Chinese companies for supplying materials.
Really, we aren't performing drone strikes, incursions, and firefights with Pakistan's border patrols on a daily basis?
No, I can assure you that if U.S. forces and the Pakistani military were waging war against each other, then we would hear about it. The U.S. drone strikes etc. are being carried out with the permission and cooperation of the Pakistani military and political ruling class. Around 4,000 Pakistani security members have been killed by local hostiles in the last decade, not by the U.S..
Scientist code is usually a giant JUST-SO story, sufficient to derive the results they need for the task at hand. They either don't have, or avoid putting in data that will crash the program so limit checking is not necessary.
Welcome to the worlds of in-house, bespoke and embedded software engineering. This issue is not limited to scientists - in every company I have ever worked at, "getting it done" was more important to management than "code quality".
Lots and lots of software is written by people worried about the results, and who don't care about the quality of the code itself.
Fixed that for you. Programmers who are more concerned with results than code quality are everywhere.
Again, bullshit. Keychains add real security. You can't just mount the filesystem and read the contents of the keychain. You can't use an app on a rooted/jailbroken iPhone to read the keychain contents.
What about this - they run an app on a jailbroken phone and get access to the contents of the keychain.
And what about Elcomsoft's forensic tools? They claim "The toolkit allows eligible customers acquiring bit-to-bit images of devices’ file systems, extracting phone secrets (passcodes, passwords, and encryption keys) and decrypting the file system dump. Access to most information is provided in real-time. In addition to Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker, the toolkit includes the ability to decrypt images of devices’ file systems, as well as a free tool that can extract the encrypted file system out of the device in raw form."
If an encrypted disk image can be decrypted by an attacker in realtime, then the encryption is not so good, is it?
As that article notes, you need physical access to the device. Not just being able to run software n the device, actual physical access to pull out the system keys.
You might need physical access to jailbreak it. Or you might not - there have been remote jailbreaks before. You don't need physical access to run software once you have jailbroken the phone and installed a backdoor. Note that in the Wired article they use SSH to retrieve the decrypted disk data.
A few months ago: APPLE STORED YOUR LOCATION DATA IN PLAIN TEXT!!! HOW STUPID ARE THEY? THE ONLY EXPLANATION IS THEY ARE TRACKING YOU!!! PEOPLE WILL BE STALKED USING THIS!!!
People (including many iPhone owners) were upset because Apple was storing location data at all, not because it wasn't encrypted.
Somehow, the OS X and iOS keychain manages to use encryption to protect passwords
Keychain stored passwords are encrypted using a key derived from data on the device. Encrypting data and storing the encrypted data on the phone along with the decryption key provides no security benefits - apparently it's trivial to extract Keychain passwords once you have software running as root on the device, link: "The attack works because the cryptographic key on current iOS devices is based on material available within the device and is independent of the passcode"
the entire disk on iOS (after the 3GS, I think, maybe the 3G) is encrypted, and processes are blocked from reading files outside of their sandbox.
Wired says different: Hacker Says iPhone 3GS Encryption Is ‘Useless’ for Businesses:
'Apple claims that hundreds of thousands of iPhones are being used by corporations and government agencies. What it won’t tell you is that the supposedly enterprise-friendly encryption included with the iPhone 3GS is so weak it can be cracked in two minutes with a few pieces of readily available freeware. “It is kind of like storing all your secret messages right next to the secret decoder ring,” said Jonathan Zdziarski, an iPhone developer and a hacker who teaches forensics courses on recovering data from iPhones. “I don’t think any of us [developers] have ever seen encryption implemented so poorly before, which is why it’s hard to describe why it’s such a big threat to security.'
Which as many Android enthusiasts point out is terribly easy to do. While it does not affect every user it affects huge subset of users.
In Linux a process will only run as root if you run it as root. A random process will not suddenly start running with root priviledges just because you enabled root logins (which is all that "rooting" does).
On the iPhone, even if you've jailbroken it there's no such weakness thanks to the Keychain. Jailbreaking allows side loading, it does not break the entire security model and expose things as basic as email passwords.
Apparently that is not true. According to this, you can access Keychain passwords if you have a jailbroken phone: "The attack works because the cryptographic key on current iOS devices is based on material available within the device and is independent of the passcode." Well, that is pretty much the same as Android. Encryption isn't much use if the key is stored or derived from data on the device.
I don't like the summary - from the article: A Chinese high-speed train derailed Saturday when it was hit by another express, state media said, throwing two carriages off a viaduct and killing at least 16 people.
When I wrote the summary a few hours ago the information regarding a lightning strike and collision was not available.
The religion of peace has struck again.
Turns out the killer is a right-wing Christian who hates Muslims: "On his Facebook profile, Breivik describes himself as a Christian and a conservative."
So I guess you were right - the religion of peace has indeed struck again.
If you are actually doing research on bitstreams there's some more recent stuff - Florian Benz, his thesis is "Reverse Engineering the FPGA Bitstream Format" (not yet published?) and from the same research group Andreas Marinopoulos "Reverse Engineering of FPGA Netlists" 2010. Florian posted to some FPGA groups a few months ago saying he was wanting to publish his library as open source, but I didn't find it anywhere yet. I suspect if you emailed him he would provide you with a copy.
berkeley. Also see section 3 of this.
Positive rights (or entitlements, or whatever you want to call them) require the involuntary service of someone
My entire point was that every positive right requires force
What about the positive rights of, say, the Emirati people of Dubai? They pay no tax, and they have many positive rights, such as the right to a house from the government when they are married. However, this is completely funded by state enterprise - in effect, the government acts as a corporate entity which carries out profitable projects like construction, natural resource exploitation etc. The bulk of physical labour is carried out by immigrants who voluntarily enter into an employment contract. This system requires no force, no involuntary servitude, and yet still results in positive rights.
But what does a "right to live" actually mean? Does it mean that the government won't kill you? Does it mean that the government will protect you? Does it mean that other people won't kill you? Or is it just some convenient semantics that actually means "you might get killed, but the government won't try to kill you, will protect you if you are considered at immediate risk, and will try to track down your killer afterwards". Attempting to protect you and trying to track down your killer both require the involuntary service of someone, as someone has to pay for the police force. Every act by the government to enforce your "right to life" has a cost, and someone has to pay.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of number 2.
Should obviously be "overestimate"...
there are really two things that you can do with it... 2) Reverse engineer the code. However, you will NOT have anything that would help you do this, like net names or hierarchies. This will make actual reverse-engineering in order to change something or learn something very challenging.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of number 2. I know I guy who figured out the bitstream format of a particular FPGA type that he was using so that he could write his own synthesis tools for research. It took him a couple of months, but he did it. There are now published papers on this topic From the bitstream to the netlist, A library and platform for FPGA bitstream manipulation, so it should be somewhat easier. There was even a tool called "debit" that disassembled the bitstream back to FPGA tools format, but it got censored. This exploit is a big deal. Every system that uses Xilinx FPGAs is now vulnerable. If you can get the bitstream, then you can decrypt it, modify it, and deploy it onto real devices. Some possibilities:
Basically, any system that used a Xilinx FPGA to perform some task, before this exploit the FPGA was considered tamperproof and therefore "safe" - it could be handed critical tasks and trusted to do them and not leak data. Now, someone with physical or remote access to the system can upload altered code and change the behaviour.. the functions of the FPGA can no longer be trusted. The only limitation is that you need physical access to at least one device in order to extract the symmetric signing key.
An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.
Not really. According the TFA, the majority of deployed systems utilise external memory for the bitstream, so an end user will be able to easily extract the bitstream. Also, many devices are now updatable via the internet - so the bitstream is accessible via web (or via satellite/cable, for Pay TV).
"One of the disadvantages of FPGAs, especially with respect to custom hardware such as ASICs, is that an attacker who has access to the bitstream can clone the system and extract the intellectual property of the design. Note that the bitstream is in the vast majority of systems stored externally to the FPGA in a dedicated configuration memory and is from there loaded into the FPGA on every power-up or reset — an adversary wire-tapping the relevant data signals can hence easily monitor the bitstream. The main answer of the industry for protecting the design is a security feature called bitstream encryption."
Linux was created in 1991 to be a POSIX compliant kernel, not to be a competitor to MS. The GNU tools were created to have a free Unix.
It doesn't really matter what the original intentions of the creators were - the fact is that Linux not only became a huge competitor to Windows, but went on to beat Windows in every single market except the desktop. Embedded systems? Check. Cell Phones? Check. High performance clusters? Check. Servers? Check. Consumer electronics? Check. Those were all areas that Microsoft wanted to dominate in, but ultimately they came (at best) second.
You may not believe in the fight, but Microsoft certainly did. I suspect they have now come to realise that the dominance of Linux in every area apart from the desktop is unstoppable, so they are trying to rewrite history to make it look like they never lost, because "there was no fight".
Health benefits are not rights
Health care is a "right" in the same way that child education is a "right". Or electricity. Or clean water. If enough people decide that something should be a right, then it becomes a right. You can argue over the semantics of a "right" vs "entitlement" or "negative/positive rights", but in the end you are arguing over words, and it really comes down to what people believe.
For many in the developed world (e.g. hundreds of millions of Europeans), health care is a "right". For most people outside the developed world (e.g. billion+ Chinese and Indians), health care is not a "right"... what is the difference, except for a set of beliefs?
I love freedom and I hate Republicans for trying to take away my rights and freedoms and for God's sake not letting me live alone in peace.
It's nice to hear that you hate people who think differently from you.
He didn't say he hated people who think differently - he said he hated people who tried to take away his rights and freedoms. Two different things.
Having said that, hate is not a good emotion, and it does tend to inflict more negativity on the hater than the target of their hate. Live and let live.