Microsoft made mistakes, and it is not my desire to defend them for any of their actions. Im simply pointing out that to call Windows 7 insecure is either ignorant, or holding them to a standard none of the other OSes are.
the level of security that Unix in general managed back in the 90's
Ahhh, revisionist history, isnt it fun. ASLR was added to vista before it was added to MacOSX, and it just came to Linux recently as well. DEP was just added to hardware in the last 10 years, so I would be intrigued to know how Unix had it a full 10 years prior to that. Kernel patch protection.... Im not sure Im aware of a linux flavor that requires kernel patches to be cryptographically signed.
Im not saying that Windows 7 is the most secure thing ever; but you seem to be awfully biased and misinformed on this topic, especially as you by your own admission have never even used the OS. And XP had a lot of this stuff in place; it simply didnt FORCE users to be non-admin. That sort of thing only really became common with Vista, and in the Linux world, with Ubuntu (which actually does not let you run as root without either doing sudo su, or sudo passwd first to enable the account).
It is not a human right to be able to visit any and every site on the web on their own terms.
Google can track you without ever visiting one of their sites. Millions of sites have google ads on them. Millions more use google analytics
THEN DONT VISIT THOSE SITES!!! Perhaps Giant Foods (grocery store) sources its beef from a farm that contributes to political causes you object to. Dont like it? Dont shop at Giant foods! If they start getting hit hard enough, they will change their practices; but in the mean time it is THEIR store. You dont have some innate right to view their content; stop pretending you do.
For example, there is confusion whether at the present levels the exclusion zone should stay at 30 kms or, as the US is suggesting, be expanded to 80 kms
It sounds like your definition of "confusion" is "Japan has clear cut policies, but the US thinks theyre wrong". Well gee, Im glad its our country to run then.
Are you seriously trying to argue that Internet is now a human right?
Lets look at your real world analogy. Can a shop ask you to pay $30000 for a steak? Why yes, actually, they are permitted to do so. What about say "the price for this lobster is to see your 2008 tax return"? Im fairly certain they could, if the prices were advertised clearly. Can they refuse to serve you (as long as you cant prove racial / religious / disability discrimination)? Video tape you as you enter the store with notice? Yes, and yes.
Why do you want to treat google different? Every one of their pages has their privacy policy listed. They for many of their products allow you to delete the data they have gathered. And the information they gather is generally not even all that private. Why can they not monitor who enters their site? Why are existing laws not sufficient for internet businesses?
Yet they don't either clean up their operating system's act by actually making it semi-secure or make their own antivirus software, something that really does seem as though it should happen at the deep OS level
By all accounts Ive seen, you are wrong on both points.
Windows 7 is by any standard I could come up with as secure as either MacOSX or classic Linux, if not more so, because it is actually "battle-hardened" by the attention of every malware writer on the planet. It supports all the latest security mechanisms, from sandboxing (IE8/9), ASLR, DEP, kernel patch protection (PatchGuard), system file protection (SFC), non-admin by default (UAC), and all the rest. Possibly you could argue some breeds of Linux with AppArmor and SELinux are more secure, but as a general rule, windows stacks up quite nicely against its competition. Blaming MS for the programs its users authorize, or for the lax security of Adobe, isnt really fair.
As for antivirus, MS cannot prevent competitors from selling AV, and that would in fact likely get them smacked with another antitrust suit. They do, however, make both AV for home users, and AV for big business.
Are you referring to the part where there was an earth quake, or the fact that the 50-year-old nuclear facility was unable to cope with the wave that wiped out pretty much everything else in the area?
You mean the callous disregard for the real disaster, or the way theyre turning it from "Nuclear issues in Japan, should we help" to "Should we ban nuclear in the US"? I just love how its no longer about them and the tens of thousands of displaced people, its about us, and what we should do about a non issue.
If it is now obvious that nuclear power generation is a long complex chain,
You wouldnt possibly be making an assumption here, would you? My understanding is that its a rather short chain, and with proper design, the reactors automatically shut down-- LIKE ALL OF THEIR REACTORS DID. Everything generally went as well as can be expected, given the most severe earthquake ever recorded by japan.
he Japanese are number 1 when it comes to earthquake proofing. So if they are unable to build plants that can take a big natural disaster (very big sure, but certainly not unheard of) without turning into a catastrophy
Deaths from the quake / wave: Thousands. Deaths from the "nuclear issue": 0
Unit 1 was designed for a peak ground acceleration of 0.18 g (1.74 m/s2) and a response spectrum based on the 1952 Kern County earthquake. All units were inspected after the 1978 Miyagi earthquake when the ground acceleration was 0.125 g (1.22 m/s2) for 30 seconds, but no damage to the critical parts of the reactor was discovered. However the 2011 Sendai earthquake recorded a ground acceleration of 0.35 g (3.43 m/s2) near the epicenter.
And this one...
Estimates of the Thoku earthquake's magnitude make it the most powerful known earthquake to hit Japan
So basically, they DID design for an earthquake. Possibly the fact that this was the most intense earthquake in ever recorded in Japan could explain why theyre having so many issues? Lets also note that they apparently have several other reactors which responded as they should have...
Lets keep in mind here that aside from the excuse "the plants are 50 years old", pretty much everything in the area was taken out, and the nuclear reactors STILL shut down automatically as they were designed to do. The issue now is cooling, because all of the redundant generators were taken out.
The media has an incentive to make this as big as it possibly can, because aside from just generally not liking nuclear, "Japan the new Chernobyl" generates views, and they can keep the story going all day long.
I would say the same about the media (though im not sure that their name alone is sufficient to give them credibility)-- their obligations are to make sensationalist stories.
Hence why you will see a whopping 2 minute segment on how thousands have died and tens of thousands have no power or water, and then a 3 hour segment on how there is low level radiation that might conceivably kill some of the plant workers if the radiation levels spike significantly and the plant blows up.
Thats real responsible reporting guys, really makes me trust everything you have to say.
Symantec? REALLY? At least microsoft actually improves their product from version to version; Symantec looks for ways to make it break worse, and then spends 80% of their budget on marketing to convince every mom and pop that they need Norton, despite the fact that it is consistently one of the WORST pieces of software to install on a computer.
I don't think they should have the right to record you by default, but if you want them do... that's entirely up to you.
This should be one of the first things they teach people before they get on the web. Dont like what a website operator (google) is doing? STOP VISITING THEIR SITE. The internet isnt a democracy; each site is its own monarchy, and if you dont like it you can leave.
This is a religious cause for the Google apologists, unfortunately.
This is an important fight rather for the people who have decided ahead of time that no matter WHAT the actual story or facts of the situation are, Slashdot will make as inflammatory a summary as possible if corporations or government are involved, and then 80% of posts will be about how said subject wants to murder babies.
So forgive me if my initial reflex on reading a summary such as "Google to break into your house and steal your file cabinets" is to think "gee, I wonder just how different the reality of the situation is".
That percentage doesnt mean much. How much energy does it take to recycle aluminum? How much energy does it take to recycle glass? If the former is more than the latter, the fact that its "only 5%" is irrelevant.
and - for many people - it may be just as good (or better, to avoid interruptions to work and leisure) to simply not have one at all.
I imagine you dont do any type of on-call or urgent work. I imagine consultants, Server-room techs, doctors, attorneys, secretaries, and anyone on call would disagree with you. You see, if they dont have cellphones, their competitors will, and they simply wont be able to compete.
How will having an encrypted TOR'd mesh network affect my latency, do tell?
Open sourced hardware.
Whos footing the bill on the SOC design? How are you going to convince a manufacturer to pump out your design? Why should they expect it to be more profitable than the ill-fated OpenMoko?
restrict users to audio and limited data. If you want to watch TV, get a government-approved cell phone.
Im sorry, I must have missed the part in the consitution where thats the government's roll, or why that is not a state-reserved right.
And Im rather suprised that the solution to "government is scary and wants to spy on me" is "outlaw all smartphones that arent government certified"; Im sure Stallman would be THRILLED at that suggestion.
Anonymous communications is utterly, almost uniquely necessary to maintain a free society against tyranny
Im not sure what makes you think thats true; and even if it is, we DO have laws which make it illegal to do unauthorized wiretaps / searches / seizures (in fact, we have an amendment). If you think the government has no issue flaunting that, what makes you think they wont operate TOR exit nodes, or insert backdoors into the smartphones @ manufacture, or forge phony certs (you didnt mention what type of encryption youre talking about, which is rather important if you want to avoid MITM attacks).
considered a violation of the rules at some universities, since he also told someone else his password
That has nothing to do with monitoring in 99% of cicrumstances (possibly it could on some corporate networks, but then it is their network). And I have never heard of someone being punished for sharing a password at a university.
His point wasnt just that "ive got nothing to hide"; we live in a world where any number of bad things can happen to us at any time. In order to not end up hiding under a rock, we need to evaluate the liklihood of threats; and the utility of cellphones outweighs their danger.
Er, that wasnt to control what we were allowed to read. That was a legal obligation due to that book not being properly licensed by Amazon; the real world equivalent would be if amazon had sold stolen merchandise-- I dont think you would be allowed to keep said merchandise.
To date, I am unaware of DRM being used for anything except profiteering; please show me one example of its use in censorship (isnt the point of DRM to get someone to use something, just a limited number of times?)
How do you propose to have a phone that neither itself nor the phone companies know the general (ie, which cell tower vicinity) location of?
And its worth noting that the world we live in simply isnt possible without instant methods of communication. Maybe Stallman wants to live in the 80s, not have a phone, live on campus at Berkeley, read his email by using wget, and not shower, but the rest of us have actual jobs and work to do. The man makes no money nor has a paying job; is it suprising that he thinks that a cellphone is unnecessary?
So its fine and dandy for him to explain how the rest of the world should behave; but Ill note that he doesnt have rent or bills to pay, which makes it rather easier to do things that are simply unworkable in the real world.
The point is that they should, and Stallman is trying to make that happen
Im not sure when it happened, but around the time Stallman started demanding that the world as we know it cease to function, he went from "insightful" to "loon".
All the internet does is remove the community boundaries. It still dies down after a few years, except now the community is so much larger. It would be the same if the kid were taped at a school of 1 million students.
Is this the same slashdot that throws a hissy fit whenever patents ending with "on a computer" are issued? What makes information "on a computer" so special other than that its easier to do some things? Why is it fundamentally different than "with a printing press"?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft made mistakes, and it is not my desire to defend them for any of their actions. Im simply pointing out that to call Windows 7 insecure is either ignorant, or holding them to a standard none of the other OSes are.
the level of security that Unix in general managed back in the 90's
Ahhh, revisionist history, isnt it fun. ASLR was added to vista before it was added to MacOSX, and it just came to Linux recently as well. DEP was just added to hardware in the last 10 years, so I would be intrigued to know how Unix had it a full 10 years prior to that. Kernel patch protection.... Im not sure Im aware of a linux flavor that requires kernel patches to be cryptographically signed.
Im not saying that Windows 7 is the most secure thing ever; but you seem to be awfully biased and misinformed on this topic, especially as you by your own admission have never even used the OS. And XP had a lot of this stuff in place; it simply didnt FORCE users to be non-admin. That sort of thing only really became common with Vista, and in the Linux world, with Ubuntu (which actually does not let you run as root without either doing sudo su, or sudo passwd first to enable the account).
It is not a human right to be able to visit any and every site on the web on their own terms.
Google can track you without ever visiting one of their sites. Millions of sites have google ads on them. Millions more use google analytics
THEN DONT VISIT THOSE SITES!!!
Perhaps Giant Foods (grocery store) sources its beef from a farm that contributes to political causes you object to. Dont like it? Dont shop at Giant foods! If they start getting hit hard enough, they will change their practices; but in the mean time it is THEIR store. You dont have some innate right to view their content; stop pretending you do.
For example, there is confusion whether at the present levels the exclusion zone should stay at 30 kms or, as the US is suggesting, be expanded to 80 kms
It sounds like your definition of "confusion" is "Japan has clear cut policies, but the US thinks theyre wrong". Well gee, Im glad its our country to run then.
Are you seriously trying to argue that Internet is now a human right?
Lets look at your real world analogy. Can a shop ask you to pay $30000 for a steak? Why yes, actually, they are permitted to do so. What about say "the price for this lobster is to see your 2008 tax return"? Im fairly certain they could, if the prices were advertised clearly. Can they refuse to serve you (as long as you cant prove racial / religious / disability discrimination)? Video tape you as you enter the store with notice? Yes, and yes.
Why do you want to treat google different? Every one of their pages has their privacy policy listed. They for many of their products allow you to delete the data they have gathered. And the information they gather is generally not even all that private. Why can they not monitor who enters their site? Why are existing laws not sufficient for internet businesses?
Yet they don't either clean up their operating system's act by actually making it semi-secure or make their own antivirus software, something that really does seem as though it should happen at the deep OS level
By all accounts Ive seen, you are wrong on both points.
Windows 7 is by any standard I could come up with as secure as either MacOSX or classic Linux, if not more so, because it is actually "battle-hardened" by the attention of every malware writer on the planet. It supports all the latest security mechanisms, from sandboxing (IE8/9), ASLR, DEP, kernel patch protection (PatchGuard), system file protection (SFC), non-admin by default (UAC), and all the rest. Possibly you could argue some breeds of Linux with AppArmor and SELinux are more secure, but as a general rule, windows stacks up quite nicely against its competition. Blaming MS for the programs its users authorize, or for the lax security of Adobe, isnt really fair.
As for antivirus, MS cannot prevent competitors from selling AV, and that would in fact likely get them smacked with another antitrust suit. They do, however, make both AV for home users, and AV for big business.
it is a crime
Are you referring to the part where there was an earth quake, or the fact that the 50-year-old nuclear facility was unable to cope with the wave that wiped out pretty much everything else in the area?
You mean the callous disregard for the real disaster, or the way theyre turning it from "Nuclear issues in Japan, should we help" to "Should we ban nuclear in the US"? I just love how its no longer about them and the tens of thousands of displaced people, its about us, and what we should do about a non issue.
If it is now obvious that nuclear power generation is a long complex chain,
You wouldnt possibly be making an assumption here, would you? My understanding is that its a rather short chain, and with proper design, the reactors automatically shut down-- LIKE ALL OF THEIR REACTORS DID. Everything generally went as well as can be expected, given the most severe earthquake ever recorded by japan.
he Japanese are number 1 when it comes to earthquake proofing. So if they are unable to build plants that can take a big natural disaster (very big sure, but certainly not unheard of) without turning into a catastrophy
Deaths from the quake / wave: Thousands.
Deaths from the "nuclear issue": 0
Lets also note this wikipedia quote:
Unit 1 was designed for a peak ground acceleration of 0.18 g (1.74 m/s2) and a response spectrum based on the 1952 Kern County earthquake. All units were inspected after the 1978 Miyagi earthquake when the ground acceleration was 0.125 g (1.22 m/s2) for 30 seconds, but no damage to the critical parts of the reactor was discovered. However the 2011 Sendai earthquake recorded a ground acceleration of 0.35 g (3.43 m/s2) near the epicenter.
And this one...
Estimates of the Thoku earthquake's magnitude make it the most powerful known earthquake to hit Japan
So basically, they DID design for an earthquake. Possibly the fact that this was the most intense earthquake in ever recorded in Japan could explain why theyre having so many issues? Lets also note that they apparently have several other reactors which responded as they should have...
Lets keep in mind here that aside from the excuse "the plants are 50 years old", pretty much everything in the area was taken out, and the nuclear reactors STILL shut down automatically as they were designed to do. The issue now is cooling, because all of the redundant generators were taken out.
The media has an incentive to make this as big as it possibly can, because aside from just generally not liking nuclear, "Japan the new Chernobyl" generates views, and they can keep the story going all day long.
I would say the same about the media (though im not sure that their name alone is sufficient to give them credibility)-- their obligations are to make sensationalist stories.
Hence why you will see a whopping 2 minute segment on how thousands have died and tens of thousands have no power or water, and then a 3 hour segment on how there is low level radiation that might conceivably kill some of the plant workers if the radiation levels spike significantly and the plant blows up.
Thats real responsible reporting guys, really makes me trust everything you have to say.
Symantec? REALLY? At least microsoft actually improves their product from version to version; Symantec looks for ways to make it break worse, and then spends 80% of their budget on marketing to convince every mom and pop that they need Norton, despite the fact that it is consistently one of the WORST pieces of software to install on a computer.
I don't think they should have the right to record you by default, but if you want them do... that's entirely up to you.
This should be one of the first things they teach people before they get on the web. Dont like what a website operator (google) is doing? STOP VISITING THEIR SITE. The internet isnt a democracy; each site is its own monarchy, and if you dont like it you can leave.
This is a religious cause for the Google apologists, unfortunately.
This is an important fight rather for the people who have decided ahead of time that no matter WHAT the actual story or facts of the situation are, Slashdot will make as inflammatory a summary as possible if corporations or government are involved, and then 80% of posts will be about how said subject wants to murder babies.
So forgive me if my initial reflex on reading a summary such as "Google to break into your house and steal your file cabinets" is to think "gee, I wonder just how different the reality of the situation is".
But they aren't deliberately listening in, recording it, transcribing it, and publishing it on the web.
Err.. care to explain when and where exactly they published it?
That percentage doesnt mean much. How much energy does it take to recycle aluminum? How much energy does it take to recycle glass? If the former is more than the latter, the fact that its "only 5%" is irrelevant.
Roll your own kernel, and you can remove drivers you dont want. You can also add whatever patches you want.
and - for many people - it may be just as good (or better, to avoid interruptions to work and leisure) to simply not have one at all.
I imagine you dont do any type of on-call or urgent work. I imagine consultants, Server-room techs, doctors, attorneys, secretaries, and anyone on call would disagree with you. You see, if they dont have cellphones, their competitors will, and they simply wont be able to compete.
How will having an encrypted TOR'd mesh network affect my latency, do tell?
Open sourced hardware.
Whos footing the bill on the SOC design? How are you going to convince a manufacturer to pump out your design? Why should they expect it to be more profitable than the ill-fated OpenMoko?
restrict users to audio and limited data. If you want to watch TV, get a government-approved cell phone.
Im sorry, I must have missed the part in the consitution where thats the government's roll, or why that is not a state-reserved right.
And Im rather suprised that the solution to "government is scary and wants to spy on me" is "outlaw all smartphones that arent government certified"; Im sure Stallman would be THRILLED at that suggestion.
Anonymous communications is utterly, almost uniquely necessary to maintain a free society against tyranny
Im not sure what makes you think thats true; and even if it is, we DO have laws which make it illegal to do unauthorized wiretaps / searches / seizures (in fact, we have an amendment). If you think the government has no issue flaunting that, what makes you think they wont operate TOR exit nodes, or insert backdoors into the smartphones @ manufacture, or forge phony certs (you didnt mention what type of encryption youre talking about, which is rather important if you want to avoid MITM attacks).
considered a violation of the rules at some universities, since he also told someone else his password
That has nothing to do with monitoring in 99% of cicrumstances (possibly it could on some corporate networks, but then it is their network). And I have never heard of someone being punished for sharing a password at a university.
His point wasnt just that "ive got nothing to hide"; we live in a world where any number of bad things can happen to us at any time. In order to not end up hiding under a rock, we need to evaluate the liklihood of threats; and the utility of cellphones outweighs their danger.
Er, that wasnt to control what we were allowed to read. That was a legal obligation due to that book not being properly licensed by Amazon; the real world equivalent would be if amazon had sold stolen merchandise-- I dont think you would be allowed to keep said merchandise.
To date, I am unaware of DRM being used for anything except profiteering; please show me one example of its use in censorship (isnt the point of DRM to get someone to use something, just a limited number of times?)
How do you propose to have a phone that neither itself nor the phone companies know the general (ie, which cell tower vicinity) location of?
And its worth noting that the world we live in simply isnt possible without instant methods of communication. Maybe Stallman wants to live in the 80s, not have a phone, live on campus at Berkeley, read his email by using wget, and not shower, but the rest of us have actual jobs and work to do. The man makes no money nor has a paying job; is it suprising that he thinks that a cellphone is unnecessary?
So its fine and dandy for him to explain how the rest of the world should behave; but Ill note that he doesnt have rent or bills to pay, which makes it rather easier to do things that are simply unworkable in the real world.
The point is that they should, and Stallman is trying to make that happen
Im not sure when it happened, but around the time Stallman started demanding that the world as we know it cease to function, he went from "insightful" to "loon".
All the internet does is remove the community boundaries. It still dies down after a few years, except now the community is so much larger. It would be the same if the kid were taped at a school of 1 million students.
Is this the same slashdot that throws a hissy fit whenever patents ending with "on a computer" are issued? What makes information "on a computer" so special other than that its easier to do some things? Why is it fundamentally different than "with a printing press"?