But the FBI are talking about installing their evilly thing in ISPs anyway so you can't trust anything once it's escaped your computer. Also, unless the sendmail daemons are talking all the time, there's still room for some traffic analysis anyway. And presumably the sendmail hosts are still adding to the path header so traffic can be analysed when the message pops out the other end.
I see your point though and ISPs should be using secure conenctions between sendmails just as a matter of good form.
Perhaps it's time for a new paradigm for message transmission anyway, one where the messages aren't sent directly to the target but to a central repository where the target connects to and retrieves the messages they're interested in plus a bunch of ones for other people (that they don't have the keys for) that they discard. Even then, it will still be vulnerable to analysis in the long term. It seems that defeating traffic analysis is complex and to be effective, demands largescale wasting of bandwidth.
I think for most people though, encryption of all messages they send and receive is an important first step. Definitely things like the subject line need to be wrapped up in the encryption though. I guess ideally the software would change the subject to "Encrypted message" or just random junk.
No, encryption is the responsibility of the client. Information should be obscured at the earliest opportunity and not revealed until it is firmly in the hands of the target user.
E-mail clients should have PGP built and switched on by default and be made easy to operate. Someone could write a reference implementation but unfortunately, most users will stick with the Outlook/Netscape/Eudora/AOL/etc software that they're used to. An intermediary step might be to have proxy pop3 and smtp services that run on the local machine (more difficult with multi-user systems) but again, this would require users to install another piece of software so most won't bother.
So what is really needed is an e-mail application with encryption built in which has a killer, must have feature as well. I don't have any idea what that might be.
MS does have presence in the EU so that part of it anyway is bound to observe the laws of the land(s). If Microsoft were based purely in the US and everthing was handled in the EU by importers and distributors, things would likely be different.
Worse than that, most of explorer is an ectiveX control so it gets copied over into the windows system directory anyway. You may think you're running an old version of IE but it'll be using the latest core that you installed.
I checked some of my posts going back a long time and it had changed on all of them. The fact is that Slashdot should append the sig to the stored message text so that viewing old messages gives you the actual text that people saw at the time and not allow people to change history.
A general rule of thumb for errors in counting in a sample is sqrt(n). So if they sample 150,000 the error is around +/-400 but of course, they then scale this up to apply to the internet with its' ~2^30 (usable) ip addresses. So they're scaling by a factor of ~7200 so their error is of the order of 7200*400 or nearly 3 million.
It's something to be borne in mind when you see polls on TV. Frequently the sample is so small that any lead one party has is lost in statistical noise. Say in a poll of 400 people, you have a statistical error of 20 or in other words, 1 in 20 or 5%. Thus if for example, in suchg a small sampled poll, Bush leads Gore by 8%, with a 5% error on each candidate's poopularity or 10% overall, it's statistically insignificant and doesn't show a thing.
Get them to write an HTML viewer. It's a great project because you can split your class up into groups. One group can write the e-mail client, one can write the news reader, one can write the instant messenger, one can write a really complex button handling routines, one can write the office suite and one can write the emacs emulator. Don't worry if you don't have enough groups to actually assign one to write the viewer cos it never has to see the light of day anyway.
what about the person who takes it out to a bonfire to start a fire?
Kids, don't try this at home
The correct way to light a bonfire is with paper, kindling and small twigs. It is however somewhat amusing to watch someone try and light a bonfire with petrol. 30 seconds of 10 foot high flames then nothing but slightly blackened logs. Got some free beers out of fixing that one (Donnington '88)
Internet explorer allows you to use the mouse to scroll if you click the middle button. I've also noticed this in a couple of other applications.
My Logitech Marble Trackman FX (lovely piece of hardware) has four buttons and you can choose one to use to turn movements on the ball to scrolling documents. Very very handy on long webpages.
The only problem I have with the trackball is that my 16 month old daughter has taken a liking to taking the ball out (it's held in by friction only) and hiding it. I would say it's slightly less accurate to use than a mouse but a heck of a lot more comfortable
Mozilla needs to (and has needed to for a long time) make a stable release, v1.0.0 . It can't go along fiddling with features and this and that. It has to be out there and usable.
Once upon a time, Linux was at 0.99 for a long time and it would never have been able to get where it was today if it had stayed there. But it went to 1.0 and plenty of features have been added since then, that's what major version revisions are about after all. The Mozilla team needs to realise that development doesn't stop at release and that it might be best to save some of those "cool shit" features for the next go round.
Mozilla's first aim should have been to get out a fast, stable HTML browser. Newsreaders, Inastant messengers, mail clients, and all that crappy chrome should hve been put on the back burner or at the very least, kept is a separate development branch the same way linux has stable and development versions running at the same time.
I mean really, what is with all this crap. Christmas and Birthdays fine. Mothers day and Valentines just to keep on the good side of the people concerned but all these other made up excuses for wasting money on crap? Bits of folded thick paper with pseudo-cute pictures on the front for $5? Bath salts, golf tee holders, novelty clocks which will go in the cupboard for the rest of the recipients' natural lives?
I say let's dump all this insincere crap and show people that we care by our actions. At least save it up for Cristmas/birthdays and get them something decent. But it just seems everything's guilt driven these days. We're guilted into buying presents for people that never expected them in the past, guilted into giving money to charities (which are usually run as businesses with appropriately fat salaried bosses), guilted into tipping 5% for lousy service, guilted into buying our kids that toy this christmas that will be out of fashion in six months.
Heck, you do a job, you get paid, if you help someone they say "thank you". Isn't that enough? Get over yourselves.
You still didn't address my point about all of us following what are in effect orders to pay taxes to a government that performs illegal actions. By your logic, we are responsible for these actions, as most people are aware of at least some of them.
Fair point. And I don't think I have a really good answer. I think to truly answer it would require going down a philosophical track that is too deep to get serious discussion in a two-day old thread on Slashdot.
But to take it on a simple level, yes, I guess we are all guilty to some degree for the abominations our governments commit. We invoke denial and try to justify ourselves in that we can't make a difference (hence massive voter apathy in USA and UK) or use phony logic that democracy somehow makes the government accountable to us so therefore they can't really be that bad.
The government (or governments) claims to be acting in your and my names. They claim that because you can put your mark on a ballot paper that the country they claim to represent has given them its authority to do pretty much what they want. And you know what, if you're not standing against it, you're giving your explicit approval.
Well, I guess a lot of people out there are now asking "so what are you doing about it" and want to demolish what I've said on the basis of my actions and the fact that I pay taxes (though I don't vote). Well, you know what, I don't claim to be a good man. I mostly try to do good things, sometimes I do evil things but like most people I try to get through the day. Currently, I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem but I'm keeping my eyes open for a time I can make a difference.
Rich
And of relevance to other articles in this thread, I define evil not to be "Going against god" or "doing the devils work" but the simpler "doing something which you know to be wrong"
OK, well, I tried to address two issues. Firstly, there are the people comitting the "evil" deed who are "only following orders". Clearly the magnitude of the evil deed has no comparison with what happened in WWII but I was not saying that it did, merely that you are responsible for your actions and it is not good enough to blame it on your superiors. The other point I addressed was the person who is not comitting evil deeds himself but is acting within an entity that he knows to be evil. This person may find it easier to excuse themself but they are also complicit in the evilness. "He also serves who stands and waits" after all. With these two types of people, it is possible for one bad man to rise to high levels of power and cause unspeakable acts on an unimaginable scale.
What I didn't address because it is fairly obvious is the person who acts within an evil entity without knowledge of it's evilness. Clearly, this person bears no responsibility, at least up to the point they realise the evilness of the entity.
As for the soldier, well of course, disobeying orders carries heavy penalties. But that was the whole point of the trials that even in the face of extreme duress, you are still responsible for your actions. How many Jews/Blacks/Gays/College students are you willing to kill to save your miserable life? To avoid a few years in the stockade? Or maybe even to suffer no consequences because your superior officer was found to be unfit for duty and shouldn't have been issuing those orders anyway. You are a human being and your finger is on the trigger and you don't get out of that because another human being with more stripes on his arm is telling you to pull it.
I will admit that the soldiers' case is slightly different for another reason and that is that modern training techniques tend to brutalise soldiers to the point of psychosis.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point though and ISPs should be using secure conenctions between sendmails just as a matter of good form.
Perhaps it's time for a new paradigm for message transmission anyway, one where the messages aren't sent directly to the target but to a central repository where the target connects to and retrieves the messages they're interested in plus a bunch of ones for other people (that they don't have the keys for) that they discard. Even then, it will still be vulnerable to analysis in the long term. It seems that defeating traffic analysis is complex and to be effective, demands largescale wasting of bandwidth.
I think for most people though, encryption of all messages they send and receive is an important first step. Definitely things like the subject line need to be wrapped up in the encryption though. I guess ideally the software would change the subject to "Encrypted message" or just random junk.
Rich
E-mail clients should have PGP built and switched on by default and be made easy to operate. Someone could write a reference implementation but unfortunately, most users will stick with the Outlook/Netscape/Eudora/AOL/etc software that they're used to. An intermediary step might be to have proxy pop3 and smtp services that run on the local machine (more difficult with multi-user systems) but again, this would require users to install another piece of software so most won't bother.
So what is really needed is an e-mail application with encryption built in which has a killer, must have feature as well. I don't have any idea what that might be.
Rich
486 PCs in 5 cubic inches.
Rich
Rich
Rich
Rich
Rich
Rich
Rich
When you change your sig, it is changed on all messages, even ones that you had posted previously.
So what?
It gives you the power to retroactively change the context and meaning of previous discussions. An example:
I post a comment with no body but my sig says
"Twinkies are great"
To which you reply
No, they are disgusting and they smell bad. We should ban them from this country as soon as possible. Nothing you can do to them is bad enough
I then change my sig to
I think it's great that black rights have come so far. Thank heavens we've progressed past lynch mobs that used to hang them from the trees.
Voila, you're an instant racist.
I think people should know about this.
Rich
P.S. Yes, I know sigs can't be that long but the point stands.
It's something to be borne in mind when you see polls on TV. Frequently the sample is so small that any lead one party has is lost in statistical noise. Say in a poll of 400 people, you have a statistical error of 20 or in other words, 1 in 20 or 5%. Thus if for example, in suchg a small sampled poll, Bush leads Gore by 8%, with a 5% error on each candidate's poopularity or 10% overall, it's statistically insignificant and doesn't show a thing.
Rich
Rich
Rich
Or was I thinking about another project?
Rich
Kids, don't try this at home
The correct way to light a bonfire is with paper, kindling and small twigs. It is however somewhat amusing to watch someone try and light a bonfire with petrol. 30 seconds of 10 foot high flames then nothing but slightly blackened logs. Got some free beers out of fixing that one (Donnington '88)
Rich
My Logitech Marble Trackman FX (lovely piece of hardware) has four buttons and you can choose one to use to turn movements on the ball to scrolling documents. Very very handy on long webpages.
The only problem I have with the trackball is that my 16 month old daughter has taken a liking to taking the ball out (it's held in by friction only) and hiding it. I would say it's slightly less accurate to use than a mouse but a heck of a lot more comfortable
Rich
Once upon a time, Linux was at 0.99 for a long time and it would never have been able to get where it was today if it had stayed there. But it went to 1.0 and plenty of features have been added since then, that's what major version revisions are about after all. The Mozilla team needs to realise that development doesn't stop at release and that it might be best to save some of those "cool shit" features for the next go round.
Mozilla's first aim should have been to get out a fast, stable HTML browser. Newsreaders, Inastant messengers, mail clients, and all that crappy chrome should hve been put on the back burner or at the very least, kept is a separate development branch the same way linux has stable and development versions running at the same time.
Rich
Rich
I mean really, what is with all this crap. Christmas and Birthdays fine. Mothers day and Valentines just to keep on the good side of the people concerned but all these other made up excuses for wasting money on crap? Bits of folded thick paper with pseudo-cute pictures on the front for $5? Bath salts, golf tee holders, novelty clocks which will go in the cupboard for the rest of the recipients' natural lives?
I say let's dump all this insincere crap and show people that we care by our actions. At least save it up for Cristmas/birthdays and get them something decent. But it just seems everything's guilt driven these days. We're guilted into buying presents for people that never expected them in the past, guilted into giving money to charities (which are usually run as businesses with appropriately fat salaried bosses), guilted into tipping 5% for lousy service, guilted into buying our kids that toy this christmas that will be out of fashion in six months.
Heck, you do a job, you get paid, if you help someone they say "thank you". Isn't that enough? Get over yourselves.
Rich
Rich
Rich
Man, you guys really can't get enough x-terms can you?
Rich
Fair point. And I don't think I have a really good answer. I think to truly answer it would require going down a philosophical track that is too deep to get serious discussion in a two-day old thread on Slashdot.
But to take it on a simple level, yes, I guess we are all guilty to some degree for the abominations our governments commit. We invoke denial and try to justify ourselves in that we can't make a difference (hence massive voter apathy in USA and UK) or use phony logic that democracy somehow makes the government accountable to us so therefore they can't really be that bad.
The government (or governments) claims to be acting in your and my names. They claim that because you can put your mark on a ballot paper that the country they claim to represent has given them its authority to do pretty much what they want. And you know what, if you're not standing against it, you're giving your explicit approval.
Well, I guess a lot of people out there are now asking "so what are you doing about it" and want to demolish what I've said on the basis of my actions and the fact that I pay taxes (though I don't vote). Well, you know what, I don't claim to be a good man. I mostly try to do good things, sometimes I do evil things but like most people I try to get through the day. Currently, I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem but I'm keeping my eyes open for a time I can make a difference.
Rich
And of relevance to other articles in this thread, I define evil not to be "Going against god" or "doing the devils work" but the simpler "doing something which you know to be wrong"
What I didn't address because it is fairly obvious is the person who acts within an evil entity without knowledge of it's evilness. Clearly, this person bears no responsibility, at least up to the point they realise the evilness of the entity.
As for the soldier, well of course, disobeying orders carries heavy penalties. But that was the whole point of the trials that even in the face of extreme duress, you are still responsible for your actions. How many Jews/Blacks/Gays/College students are you willing to kill to save your miserable life? To avoid a few years in the stockade? Or maybe even to suffer no consequences because your superior officer was found to be unfit for duty and shouldn't have been issuing those orders anyway. You are a human being and your finger is on the trigger and you don't get out of that because another human being with more stripes on his arm is telling you to pull it.
I will admit that the soldiers' case is slightly different for another reason and that is that modern training techniques tend to brutalise soldiers to the point of psychosis.
Rich
Rich