Sorry, are you sure you're showing how Windows is better than Linux?
No, I'm not trying to show that $A is better than $B. I'm trying to show that both $A and $B are sufficiently functional to do what they are designed to do.
In particular, the G(G)P was asking how can he securely copy a file from one box onto another. He said that on Linux he'd use SCP. He did not know how to do it on Windows. I provided the information. You can say that it's easier for you to copy the file in CLI, but Windows is not bought for its excellent CLI - it is bought for its pretty functional GUI. If you don't try to cram a square peg into a round hole, MS's file copy solution makes a lot of sense - Windows is just not designed for scripting; in Windows you do everything by hand. In Linux CLI tools are better. Doesn't the F/OSS argue for many varieties of software, to fit many different needs? Well, Windows certainly fulfills some of those needs, even if it is not free.
You can also expect Linux to have wider coverage of user's needs. Windows was built for a specific use scenario. That actually bit MS, and MS had to add the PowerShell. It's somewhat better now. But still Windows targets the minimal use scanario that does the job. There are no seventeen control panels that change the same set of controls; there is only one WM, whether you like it or not. Windows is a complete product. Linux, on the other hand, is a work in progress, where if you don't like how something is done you are welcome to change it or add your own. In some cases it's good; in other cases it's not so good (the audio stack is one such example.) User-driven extensions make their way into distributions and then to millions of users. In Windows none of ISV's wares ever make it into the Windows DVD. You have to deal with them on your own. But at least you have a built-in backup now, and in Win8 it has a history. What F/OSS software implements a similar Time Machine functionality in Linux? I do not know. But it's a valuable feature that everyone can immediately appreciate, as opposed to thirty two schedulers and fifteen types of filesystems.
10 MB of sources for a new and small game would be pretty bad because many coders can figure out how to compile the thing, and then perhaps improve or develop on it.
1 TB of sources is useless to anyone. You need a building full of coders who coded this very thing from the day zero to even put it all together, with all the libraries, linker files, batch files, tests, models, setup projects, and so on. Hardly anyone on this Earth has time to sift through a terabyte of sources. If I need a game, I will not spend a year of my life to hack it from a snapshot that was taken who knows when and without a guarantee that it is complete. In some software houses the head of the tree may compile, but it doesn't mean that the end product is a usable build. Only tagged revisions are of some value. This means that if I need a game I will spend $50 and buy one, with the latest code and with all the updates that are available to this date.
Downloading a bunch of random data isn't abetting.
Recent decisions of courts with regard to terrorism do not lend credence to this theory. If you take a gun, load it, point at a man and fire - but the gun fails to fire because of bad primer in that one round - you are still guilty.
Considering the situation, there is no lawful reason for you to download that file. It can be always shown that you hoped for a chance to gain access to illegally obtained software (if you get the key) or to threaten others with release of that software (if you don't yet have the key.) The latter becomes aiding, abetting, and probably conspiracy as well. If the judge asks you why you downloaded the file, what will you say?
It doesn't matter how much the phone line can theoretically support if there is no DSLAM within a few miles from your home, and a fiber from the said DSLAM to a better connected facility.
There were many instances of innocent people, one even being mayor of the town where it happened, receiving an unexpected package - and when they touched it they were arrested by cops who were lying in wait. Sometimes drug dealers ship drugs not to their own address, but to someone nearby, who receives packages at the door. If you get caught with illegal items, like a bag of drugs in your car, under the carpet, you will be presumed to be the owner of the contraband. If you think that the bag was dropped by a hitchhiker who you gave a lift a year ago, good luck proving that - you will never prove that it wasn't you.
Well, I don't want to sound like an apologist for Windows - it has its share of weirdnesses. However this particular complaint is unfounded. In Linux you cannot map a share to a drive, for example - there are no drives. Does this make Linux a bad OS? No. But it lacks the concept of drives - which are a level above the filesystem. In Linux you can have only one filesystem, but it can span many drives. In Windows you can have many filesystems, and each can span many drives.
I keep my music files on a little file server and have that mounted on/home/anonymous_coward/music and as for as the OS is concerned there is no difference between that folder and all the other folders that actually live on my computer.
In Windows the same works if you address \\server\share\music. The OpenFile() API call will open that one for you, just as if it were local. In Linux you have to have the share mounted ahead of time; in Windows you can connect to any server at run time, and the only thing you will be asked is your logon credentials (unless the domain provides that.)
None of that means that one OS is better, or worse, than another. They were designed by different people, using different ways to look at things - why are we surprised that the end result is different? The only thing that matters is that they both work. If we don't accept this and move on then it will be an endless flamefest, with proponents of one API gloating over other API not having something that they do. If you start counting, there are many things in {Linux,Windows} that {Windows,Linux} does not have.
The principle of "pour encourager les autres" is the primary one here. The system cannot take a hit and do nothing because that would only embolden others to do the same. All governments did that, do that, and will be doing that. It's just gibbeting is out of fashion; but the idea behind it remains.
Persecution of Julian Assange is a great example of how it's done against a man, a foreigner even, "who broke no laws." There isn't a single person alive on this planet who hasn't broken a law at least once in his life. But if you manage to find such an angelic being, it's not a problem either - just arrange for a law to be broken, no matter how stupid. If the angel refuses to be be dragged into a bad situation, then just frame the bastard. That's if you want to keep the man alive, for a public beating. If you just want him gone, an icepick over the head works wonders; or a quality umbrella; or poison in your glass of soda in your favorite restaurant, served by the waiter who you know for a decade. Governments are essentially infinitely powerful, compared to a common man. They can even send people to break your door down and shoot you dead - and they won't be punished for that. It will be simply announced that you were a drug dealer and you shot back. Even if you never had a weapon. Who will dare to check?
There was some conspiracy talk about Andrew Breitbart's death. So what. The society is so much fragmented that no single group has enough mass to influence anything. One group, who is impacted, is angry, but ten other groups use the incident against the victim. Then some other group gets hurt - and another bunch is delivering a beating. In the end everyone loses. It's called "divide and conquer."
About that "additional document"... I don't think blackmail is a good strategy for long term survival.
But how would you interpret him having a heart attack six months later? He is not dealing with mere humans, who are emotional and quick to retaliate. He is dealing with a machine-like system that carefully calculates its moves. Human cogs of that machine have no animosity toward the guy.
Six months down the line he will be history, and if on one fine morning he wakes up dead, with his veins full of heroin, it won't matter anymore if a couple news sources write about that.
It's a bad thing when the government breaks laws, and it takes another breaking of laws to even expose the crime. This results in widespread rejection of laws that only protect the government. Eventually the gap of doublethink cannot be crossed anymore, and you have to choose sides. Then the laws of your enemy do not apply to you anymore - and the enemy retaliates by wanting your head on a pike. This guy just participated in an early exchange of fire in the coming war: the government was digging a tunnel under the society, and Mr. Snowden shot at diggers. First shots in any civil war are always illegal; but after a while nobody pays attention to that anymore.
For all practical purposes, the civil war in the USA has already started; troops of one side are digging in while pretending that nothing devious is happening. (You can take a lot of ground this way.) The other side is largely unaware, but now and then an occasional firefight erupts. Those incidents are rare; but there is no law about how fast you must wage a war. If you add up all the recent incidents, such as DHS buying billions of rounds of ammo, ordering mobile checkpoints, armored vehicles, flying and shooting "for training" over major cities, renewing FEMA camps, opening new data processing centers, you can conclude that certain worrysome developments are occurring. From "their" point of view, the ideal scenario is that the opposition will sleep through all of it, and when they finally wake up they will be already marginalized, disarmed and rendered "safe." In such a scenario no shots will be necessary - why to waste a usable slave?
You're arguing that Chinese intelligence services couldn't get to people in the USA as well?
Not as easily. You'd have to send a large group to watch someone, then to abduct him, then to take him to some hideout, and then to take the group out of the country. Any mistake would mean HUGE political repercussions. Iraninans wanted to kill an ambassador, and they failed. Probably secret services of leading countries can do such things, but they are terribly risky. Doing the same on home turf... taking a candy from a baby is far more complicated.
He wont end up dead.
He has very powerful enemies, and those enemies want to make it known that such actions will not be tolerated. If I were him, I'd prefer to disappear, immediately and forever. Chinese intelligence is the least of his worries.
How do you know the NSA isn't using this information to terrorize people and destroy opposition?
Well, since *nobody* in the country is terrorized, one can certainly say that NSA isn't terrorizing people. Nobody is destroying the opposition in physical sense (such as mass arrests in tea houses) - it just isn't happening. Destruction of opposition in political sense is prohibited to the government, but it's probably not a crime per the Penal Code. It may be a crime against the Constitution.
There *are* abuses taking place. I don't think anyone argues that. But here we have two problems. The government broke one law, and the whistleblower broke another law. From the POV of a proponent of nation of laws, plague on both your houses. Rarely you can right a wrong by doing another wrong. When that happens people often call it war; each side rejects the laws of the opponent and allows crimes against the foe.
The court will not consider remote implications. The court will only ask if the political harm of surveillance could be mitigated by other, not so illegal, methods, like contacting a Senator and offering testimony. The court will likely ask if Mr. Showden did that, and what happened, and what he did then, and so on. The court will want to see progression of the need, from entirely legal to breaking a law. The court will also want to study if the law was broken only as little as needed to fulfill the greater duty to the society. So far it seems that Mr. Snowden is only talking about essentials; but who knows what else he is talking about, and to who. An NSA guy in China may not have too much choice if Chinese intelligence services want him. If he hasn't told everything yet, he will. He may end up dead, but he will tell everything before that. "Sorry, USA, your man went for a walk and was never seen since, honest."
The court will not convict if the need is serious enough - such as when human life is in danger. The surveillance program does not put anyone's life in danger. (Many laws take back seat when you need to save someone.) Actually, the opposite can be argued because a 100% police state, where everyone is always under the watchful eye, is the safest. Not the freeest, mind you; but the safest it is. The court will find no justification for what he did. The advantage of immediate disclosure (that is hard to quantify even) loses over the disadvantage of disclosing intelligence secrets, methods and systems to the #1 foe that China is today. (Whether that status is deserved or not, and who is the greater villain, is a different debate.)
Going public might be his life insurance. At least it'll make it more difficult to make him vanish.
His enemy doesn't want him to vanish. He knows nothing that they don't know already. Even his motives are clear to them now. His enemy wants him dead. This is not exceptionally difficult in HK, especially when the target cannot tell one Chinese face from another. His enemy fully believes that "if you don't succeed at first, try and try again" - and being a collective being, they are immortal and immune to dangers. He is entirely exposed in the hotel; I guess only ordering dinner on a cruise ship would be riskier.
Snowden made the same legal commitments as Manning. The oath is unrelated to access to state secrets. Many soldiers never get a clearance, and many civilans get it. The penalties for violating each are also separate. (Manning may be hit with both.)
I can imagine that the court may find some leaker innocent if his actions were necessary and the information could not be gotten out in any other way. (For an imaginary example: you send a spy across the border; he radioes that he fell into an abandoned mine shaft and is about to die if not helped. You call your counterpart in that country and tell him where to find the spy. The spy is saved. But you broke the laws on secrecy.)
In absence of clear danger (an asteroid hitting the planet, or a terrorist with a nuke,) I cannot imagine that the US court will find actions of Mr. Snowden necessary. The court will find that there was no immediate danger to anyone, and that the whole matter is purely political, and the disclosure was made for personal reasons. The conviction is then assured.
The war in Yugoslavia flamed up pretty damn quick - and those were all educated Europeans, with decent cars, with cash in the bank, and ability to travel - and with very few guns around.
I don't know, though, what could be the trigger for a war here. Mass arrests, perhaps, or confiscation of weapons? Only maybe 10% will participate, but that's a typical figure for most wars. The majority of population does not fight. You can have a civil war when just ten snipers in a large town randomly ambush and kill the enemy, one hit per day. With US sensibilities already dialed up to 11, this will be seen as the end of the world, and the National Guard will be sent in - to make more targets, apparently. The dividing line between a criminal gang and a movement lies in acceptance of the group's goals by noncombatants.
In this aspect, imprisonment of Anders Breivik is perfect. The convict is confined; he cannot do further harm. However he is safe, and he is allowed to educate himself (he has a computer, though probably without access to the Internet.) If I were in Breivik's situation, I'd ask for a compiler, and then lock the door of my cell from the inside for the nearest 100 years - I have lots of projects to do:-)
Did you know its not actually illegal to leak classified information to a reporter?
It is illegal. It may be illegal even to disclose classified information to a properly cleared person if she doesn't have the need to know.
A reporter, who hasn't signed on the dotted line and came across some classified information, is, to some extent, immune from prosecution. But have a look at Wikileaks - how is Julian Assange doing these days, having imprisoned himself for life?
One can always construct a personal fantasy world on the Internet and live in it. However when you are dragged into the court, it won't be judging you by the laws of your world. It will be judging you by the laws of the land.
Are you talking about KIO slaves? WinSCP has the same level of transparency, as it always had. You can drag and drop files from and to explorer windows. Neither Linux nor Windows allow you to mount(8) SCP/SFTP filesystems directly.
Perhaps I just don't understand the problem. To me, everything works fine when you use proper tools.
Why would you want to have millions of boxes listen on SSH ports if the service is not needed? It's not a Notepad, you know - it's an open TCP port. You can be hit with a SYN flood, for example, even if there are no vulnerabilities. But sometimes account's credentials can be simply brute-forced from the other side of the planet. You do not want to open ports on any interface except 127.0.0.1 and such without a need. Those with a need know where to get the software and what to do with it. The rest will be safe, blissfully unaware.
You can also say that Linux does not come with $program_of_your_choice preinstalled. There isn't that much that gets loaded by default. These days you install a working minimal system, and then you have apt-get for the rest.
It's even funny that on Monday people complain that OEMs load the new PCs with software not of their choice, and on Tuesday the same people complain that OEMs don't load the new PCs with software of their choice. The whole debate is stupid - computers are good for many things, and you prepare them for what you need them to do by installing software from your own list of stuff. Windows doesn't come with SSH, or even with HyperTerm anymore, simply because there is not enough interest. In my personal opinion, MS should scrap many of the other utilities as well, like Wordpad. They are ancient, and they add no value to the system, and they can be always downloaded if someone needs them.
Why would you cry? The developer rants about... about what? The fact that unplanned changes are not welcome is well known to every engineer. They indeed delay release, require more testing, and often they still introduce subtle bugs. Are they worth that? Windows is full of legacy code, and you cannot really do anything without stepping on someone's foot or without falling into a trap that ten people before you fell in, since they also considered themselves smart. But intelligence and knowledge are not the same thing.
Windows may be 5% slower than something else, but those 5% do not make or break anything. Windows does not sell by speed. If it were, MS would have sold exactly zero Windows Servers because they are amazingly slow - Sharepoint's first response time on anything below a big and hot box is measured in tens of seconds. But they do sell. Why? Because they provide functions that compensate for that sluggishness. Is there SharePoint for Linux that is also integrated with Office and everything? (Confluence is not it, and it's nowhere as usable either.) You cannot say that SP is slow if the competition's response time is infinite.
Should new features be worked on? I'd think so. After all, that's the only avenue of modernization that you have. Optimizing the filesystem for the last 1% in a corner case that three customers in the world may have is not very exciting.
The developer mentions many cultural problems at MS, but they are well known. They may not have the best developers automatically anymore, since they stopped making new millionaires. But that's everywhere. MS is hardly unique. They may have lots of problems; Win8 is a good evidence to that. But that's not the worst of what a company can come up with.
Speaking tonight at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, Senator Obama said, near the beginning of his speech: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
He is doing what he said he will do. Excuse me for trying to steer around Godwin here, but a certain other politician, almost a century ago, also told everyone, in writing, what he will do if he is elected - and then he did just that.
So until the insurance companies start requiring HD dashcams, we might not see them since the demand for them nearly anywhere else is naturally going to be weak.
My insurance company doesn't require a dashcam; nor it even offers a discount. I doubt that they even know about such cutting edge technology.
But I purchased one and use it daily. It's an HD dashcam, made in China (of course.) It records for 8 hours of HD onto a 32 GB SD card. I have it permanently plugged in, and it operates automatically.
I understand that in case of an accident it could be useful. But the primary purpose of the camera, for me, is to just record whatever happens around, for any reason. If I want the recording, it's there. If I don't want it, no problem - it will be overwritten in 8 hours. So if a UFO, or a bear, suddenly shows in front of my car, I don't need to do anything special to record it. I saw pheasants in the road, chickens, deer, turkeys, pigs... Sometimes you just want to understand what turns you took to get somewhere.
Theoretically, you could lose some business in the future if you don't support ipv6 and the customer doesn't have access to a 6to4 tunnel.
6to4 is an Internet transition mechanism for migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, a system that allows IPv6 packets to be transmitted over an IPv4 network (generally the IPv4 Internet) without the need to configure explicit tunnels.
Why would the customer need *that* if they are on native IPv6? They need address family translation services - such as "NAT64 technology provided by Cisco® ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers." Those have to be provided, one way or another, by ISPs, otherwise an IPv6 connection is useless. Most of valuable Internet resources are IPv4 now, and will stay that for a while. Perhaps Internet-facing HTTP servers are the easiest to migrate, but if that involves the back-end code and servers then contractors and consultants will be having a field day, just like around the year 2000. Lots of that code is out of maintenance, and people who wrote it have moved on already. Consultants would have to figure out what has to be upgraded, and in what order. For example, if the code uses an IP address of the client as a value in calculations, that will have an immediate impact. If the requests are handled on a separate, internal server, that one can stay IPv4 a bit longer. All in all, it's a huge effort. Most businesses will decide to keep existing services IPv4 forever, until they are replaced by new services.
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Sorry, are you sure you're showing how Windows is better than Linux?
No, I'm not trying to show that $A is better than $B. I'm trying to show that both $A and $B are sufficiently functional to do what they are designed to do.
In particular, the G(G)P was asking how can he securely copy a file from one box onto another. He said that on Linux he'd use SCP. He did not know how to do it on Windows. I provided the information. You can say that it's easier for you to copy the file in CLI, but Windows is not bought for its excellent CLI - it is bought for its pretty functional GUI. If you don't try to cram a square peg into a round hole, MS's file copy solution makes a lot of sense - Windows is just not designed for scripting; in Windows you do everything by hand. In Linux CLI tools are better. Doesn't the F/OSS argue for many varieties of software, to fit many different needs? Well, Windows certainly fulfills some of those needs, even if it is not free.
You can also expect Linux to have wider coverage of user's needs. Windows was built for a specific use scenario. That actually bit MS, and MS had to add the PowerShell. It's somewhat better now. But still Windows targets the minimal use scanario that does the job. There are no seventeen control panels that change the same set of controls; there is only one WM, whether you like it or not. Windows is a complete product. Linux, on the other hand, is a work in progress, where if you don't like how something is done you are welcome to change it or add your own. In some cases it's good; in other cases it's not so good (the audio stack is one such example.) User-driven extensions make their way into distributions and then to millions of users. In Windows none of ISV's wares ever make it into the Windows DVD. You have to deal with them on your own. But at least you have a built-in backup now, and in Win8 it has a history. What F/OSS software implements a similar Time Machine functionality in Linux? I do not know. But it's a valuable feature that everyone can immediately appreciate, as opposed to thirty two schedulers and fifteen types of filesystems.
10 MB of sources for a new and small game would be pretty bad because many coders can figure out how to compile the thing, and then perhaps improve or develop on it.
1 TB of sources is useless to anyone. You need a building full of coders who coded this very thing from the day zero to even put it all together, with all the libraries, linker files, batch files, tests, models, setup projects, and so on. Hardly anyone on this Earth has time to sift through a terabyte of sources. If I need a game, I will not spend a year of my life to hack it from a snapshot that was taken who knows when and without a guarantee that it is complete. In some software houses the head of the tree may compile, but it doesn't mean that the end product is a usable build. Only tagged revisions are of some value. This means that if I need a game I will spend $50 and buy one, with the latest code and with all the updates that are available to this date.
Downloading a bunch of random data isn't abetting.
Recent decisions of courts with regard to terrorism do not lend credence to this theory. If you take a gun, load it, point at a man and fire - but the gun fails to fire because of bad primer in that one round - you are still guilty.
Considering the situation, there is no lawful reason for you to download that file. It can be always shown that you hoped for a chance to gain access to illegally obtained software (if you get the key) or to threaten others with release of that software (if you don't yet have the key.) The latter becomes aiding, abetting, and probably conspiracy as well. If the judge asks you why you downloaded the file, what will you say?
It doesn't matter how much the phone line can theoretically support if there is no DSLAM within a few miles from your home, and a fiber from the said DSLAM to a better connected facility.
Unfortunately, "your wrong" © on all accounts. You may be not convicted if after several years of arrest and bond and trial you will prove that it's not your {CP,cocaine,whatever}. Even that is not obvious because your opposition is not empty-handed either.
There were many instances of innocent people, one even being mayor of the town where it happened, receiving an unexpected package - and when they touched it they were arrested by cops who were lying in wait. Sometimes drug dealers ship drugs not to their own address, but to someone nearby, who receives packages at the door. If you get caught with illegal items, like a bag of drugs in your car, under the carpet, you will be presumed to be the owner of the contraband. If you think that the bag was dropped by a hitchhiker who you gave a lift a year ago, good luck proving that - you will never prove that it wasn't you.
Well, I don't want to sound like an apologist for Windows - it has its share of weirdnesses. However this particular complaint is unfounded. In Linux you cannot map a share to a drive, for example - there are no drives. Does this make Linux a bad OS? No. But it lacks the concept of drives - which are a level above the filesystem. In Linux you can have only one filesystem, but it can span many drives. In Windows you can have many filesystems, and each can span many drives.
I keep my music files on a little file server and have that mounted on /home/anonymous_coward/music and as for as the OS is concerned there is no difference between that folder and all the other folders that actually live on my computer.
In Windows the same works if you address \\server\share\music. The OpenFile() API call will open that one for you, just as if it were local. In Linux you have to have the share mounted ahead of time; in Windows you can connect to any server at run time, and the only thing you will be asked is your logon credentials (unless the domain provides that.)
None of that means that one OS is better, or worse, than another. They were designed by different people, using different ways to look at things - why are we surprised that the end result is different? The only thing that matters is that they both work. If we don't accept this and move on then it will be an endless flamefest, with proponents of one API gloating over other API not having something that they do. If you start counting, there are many things in {Linux,Windows} that {Windows,Linux} does not have.
The principle of "pour encourager les autres" is the primary one here. The system cannot take a hit and do nothing because that would only embolden others to do the same. All governments did that, do that, and will be doing that. It's just gibbeting is out of fashion; but the idea behind it remains.
Persecution of Julian Assange is a great example of how it's done against a man, a foreigner even, "who broke no laws." There isn't a single person alive on this planet who hasn't broken a law at least once in his life. But if you manage to find such an angelic being, it's not a problem either - just arrange for a law to be broken, no matter how stupid. If the angel refuses to be be dragged into a bad situation, then just frame the bastard. That's if you want to keep the man alive, for a public beating. If you just want him gone, an icepick over the head works wonders; or a quality umbrella; or poison in your glass of soda in your favorite restaurant, served by the waiter who you know for a decade. Governments are essentially infinitely powerful, compared to a common man. They can even send people to break your door down and shoot you dead - and they won't be punished for that. It will be simply announced that you were a drug dealer and you shot back. Even if you never had a weapon. Who will dare to check?
There was some conspiracy talk about Andrew Breitbart's death. So what. The society is so much fragmented that no single group has enough mass to influence anything. One group, who is impacted, is angry, but ten other groups use the incident against the victim. Then some other group gets hurt - and another bunch is delivering a beating. In the end everyone loses. It's called "divide and conquer."
About that "additional document" ... I don't think blackmail is a good strategy for long term survival.
But how would you interpret him having a heart attack six months later? He is not dealing with mere humans, who are emotional and quick to retaliate. He is dealing with a machine-like system that carefully calculates its moves. Human cogs of that machine have no animosity toward the guy.
Six months down the line he will be history, and if on one fine morning he wakes up dead, with his veins full of heroin, it won't matter anymore if a couple news sources write about that.
It's a bad thing when the government breaks laws, and it takes another breaking of laws to even expose the crime. This results in widespread rejection of laws that only protect the government. Eventually the gap of doublethink cannot be crossed anymore, and you have to choose sides. Then the laws of your enemy do not apply to you anymore - and the enemy retaliates by wanting your head on a pike. This guy just participated in an early exchange of fire in the coming war: the government was digging a tunnel under the society, and Mr. Snowden shot at diggers. First shots in any civil war are always illegal; but after a while nobody pays attention to that anymore.
For all practical purposes, the civil war in the USA has already started; troops of one side are digging in while pretending that nothing devious is happening. (You can take a lot of ground this way.) The other side is largely unaware, but now and then an occasional firefight erupts. Those incidents are rare; but there is no law about how fast you must wage a war. If you add up all the recent incidents, such as DHS buying billions of rounds of ammo, ordering mobile checkpoints, armored vehicles, flying and shooting "for training" over major cities, renewing FEMA camps, opening new data processing centers, you can conclude that certain worrysome developments are occurring. From "their" point of view, the ideal scenario is that the opposition will sleep through all of it, and when they finally wake up they will be already marginalized, disarmed and rendered "safe." In such a scenario no shots will be necessary - why to waste a usable slave?
You're arguing that Chinese intelligence services couldn't get to people in the USA as well?
Not as easily. You'd have to send a large group to watch someone, then to abduct him, then to take him to some hideout, and then to take the group out of the country. Any mistake would mean HUGE political repercussions. Iraninans wanted to kill an ambassador, and they failed. Probably secret services of leading countries can do such things, but they are terribly risky. Doing the same on home turf ... taking a candy from a baby is far more complicated.
He wont end up dead.
He has very powerful enemies, and those enemies want to make it known that such actions will not be tolerated. If I were him, I'd prefer to disappear, immediately and forever. Chinese intelligence is the least of his worries.
How do you know the NSA isn't using this information to terrorize people and destroy opposition?
Well, since *nobody* in the country is terrorized, one can certainly say that NSA isn't terrorizing people. Nobody is destroying the opposition in physical sense (such as mass arrests in tea houses) - it just isn't happening. Destruction of opposition in political sense is prohibited to the government, but it's probably not a crime per the Penal Code. It may be a crime against the Constitution.
There *are* abuses taking place. I don't think anyone argues that. But here we have two problems. The government broke one law, and the whistleblower broke another law. From the POV of a proponent of nation of laws, plague on both your houses. Rarely you can right a wrong by doing another wrong. When that happens people often call it war; each side rejects the laws of the opponent and allows crimes against the foe.
The court will not consider remote implications. The court will only ask if the political harm of surveillance could be mitigated by other, not so illegal, methods, like contacting a Senator and offering testimony. The court will likely ask if Mr. Showden did that, and what happened, and what he did then, and so on. The court will want to see progression of the need, from entirely legal to breaking a law. The court will also want to study if the law was broken only as little as needed to fulfill the greater duty to the society. So far it seems that Mr. Snowden is only talking about essentials; but who knows what else he is talking about, and to who. An NSA guy in China may not have too much choice if Chinese intelligence services want him. If he hasn't told everything yet, he will. He may end up dead, but he will tell everything before that. "Sorry, USA, your man went for a walk and was never seen since, honest."
The court will not convict if the need is serious enough - such as when human life is in danger. The surveillance program does not put anyone's life in danger. (Many laws take back seat when you need to save someone.) Actually, the opposite can be argued because a 100% police state, where everyone is always under the watchful eye, is the safest. Not the freeest, mind you; but the safest it is. The court will find no justification for what he did. The advantage of immediate disclosure (that is hard to quantify even) loses over the disadvantage of disclosing intelligence secrets, methods and systems to the #1 foe that China is today. (Whether that status is deserved or not, and who is the greater villain, is a different debate.)
Going public might be his life insurance. At least it'll make it more difficult to make him vanish.
His enemy doesn't want him to vanish. He knows nothing that they don't know already. Even his motives are clear to them now. His enemy wants him dead. This is not exceptionally difficult in HK, especially when the target cannot tell one Chinese face from another. His enemy fully believes that "if you don't succeed at first, try and try again" - and being a collective being, they are immortal and immune to dangers. He is entirely exposed in the hotel; I guess only ordering dinner on a cruise ship would be riskier.
Snowden made the same legal commitments as Manning. The oath is unrelated to access to state secrets. Many soldiers never get a clearance, and many civilans get it. The penalties for violating each are also separate. (Manning may be hit with both.)
I can imagine that the court may find some leaker innocent if his actions were necessary and the information could not be gotten out in any other way. (For an imaginary example: you send a spy across the border; he radioes that he fell into an abandoned mine shaft and is about to die if not helped. You call your counterpart in that country and tell him where to find the spy. The spy is saved. But you broke the laws on secrecy.)
In absence of clear danger (an asteroid hitting the planet, or a terrorist with a nuke,) I cannot imagine that the US court will find actions of Mr. Snowden necessary. The court will find that there was no immediate danger to anyone, and that the whole matter is purely political, and the disclosure was made for personal reasons. The conviction is then assured.
The war in Yugoslavia flamed up pretty damn quick - and those were all educated Europeans, with decent cars, with cash in the bank, and ability to travel - and with very few guns around.
I don't know, though, what could be the trigger for a war here. Mass arrests, perhaps, or confiscation of weapons? Only maybe 10% will participate, but that's a typical figure for most wars. The majority of population does not fight. You can have a civil war when just ten snipers in a large town randomly ambush and kill the enemy, one hit per day. With US sensibilities already dialed up to 11, this will be seen as the end of the world, and the National Guard will be sent in - to make more targets, apparently. The dividing line between a criminal gang and a movement lies in acceptance of the group's goals by noncombatants.
In this aspect, imprisonment of Anders Breivik is perfect. The convict is confined; he cannot do further harm. However he is safe, and he is allowed to educate himself (he has a computer, though probably without access to the Internet.) If I were in Breivik's situation, I'd ask for a compiler, and then lock the door of my cell from the inside for the nearest 100 years - I have lots of projects to do :-)
Did you know its not actually illegal to leak classified information to a reporter?
It is illegal. It may be illegal even to disclose classified information to a properly cleared person if she doesn't have the need to know.
A reporter, who hasn't signed on the dotted line and came across some classified information, is, to some extent, immune from prosecution. But have a look at Wikileaks - how is Julian Assange doing these days, having imprisoned himself for life?
One can always construct a personal fantasy world on the Internet and live in it. However when you are dragged into the court, it won't be judging you by the laws of your world. It will be judging you by the laws of the land.
Are you talking about KIO slaves? WinSCP has the same level of transparency, as it always had. You can drag and drop files from and to explorer windows. Neither Linux nor Windows allow you to mount(8) SCP/SFTP filesystems directly.
Perhaps I just don't understand the problem. To me, everything works fine when you use proper tools.
Why would you want to have millions of boxes listen on SSH ports if the service is not needed? It's not a Notepad, you know - it's an open TCP port. You can be hit with a SYN flood, for example, even if there are no vulnerabilities. But sometimes account's credentials can be simply brute-forced from the other side of the planet. You do not want to open ports on any interface except 127.0.0.1 and such without a need. Those with a need know where to get the software and what to do with it. The rest will be safe, blissfully unaware.
You can also say that Linux does not come with $program_of_your_choice preinstalled. There isn't that much that gets loaded by default. These days you install a working minimal system, and then you have apt-get for the rest.
It's even funny that on Monday people complain that OEMs load the new PCs with software not of their choice, and on Tuesday the same people complain that OEMs don't load the new PCs with software of their choice. The whole debate is stupid - computers are good for many things, and you prepare them for what you need them to do by installing software from your own list of stuff. Windows doesn't come with SSH, or even with HyperTerm anymore, simply because there is not enough interest. In my personal opinion, MS should scrap many of the other utilities as well, like Wordpad. They are ancient, and they add no value to the system, and they can be always downloaded if someone needs them.
It almost made me cry.
Why would you cry? The developer rants about... about what? The fact that unplanned changes are not welcome is well known to every engineer. They indeed delay release, require more testing, and often they still introduce subtle bugs. Are they worth that? Windows is full of legacy code, and you cannot really do anything without stepping on someone's foot or without falling into a trap that ten people before you fell in, since they also considered themselves smart. But intelligence and knowledge are not the same thing.
Windows may be 5% slower than something else, but those 5% do not make or break anything. Windows does not sell by speed. If it were, MS would have sold exactly zero Windows Servers because they are amazingly slow - Sharepoint's first response time on anything below a big and hot box is measured in tens of seconds. But they do sell. Why? Because they provide functions that compensate for that sluggishness. Is there SharePoint for Linux that is also integrated with Office and everything? (Confluence is not it, and it's nowhere as usable either.) You cannot say that SP is slow if the competition's response time is infinite.
Should new features be worked on? I'd think so. After all, that's the only avenue of modernization that you have. Optimizing the filesystem for the last 1% in a corner case that three customers in the world may have is not very exciting.
The developer mentions many cultural problems at MS, but they are well known. They may not have the best developers automatically anymore, since they stopped making new millionaires. But that's everywhere. MS is hardly unique. They may have lots of problems; Win8 is a good evidence to that. But that's not the worst of what a company can come up with.
If you want SSH, go ahead and install it on Windows; who is stopping you? There are at least eight known SSH servers that run on Windows. That's two more than on Linux :-)
How do you do something as basic as copy a file securely to another computer? I use scp on Linux.
On Windows it's much simpler. You connect using RDP and then use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. The RDP connection itself is encrypted.
On 2008/10/31:
Speaking tonight at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, Senator Obama said, near the beginning of his speech: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
He is doing what he said he will do. Excuse me for trying to steer around Godwin here, but a certain other politician, almost a century ago, also told everyone, in writing, what he will do if he is elected - and then he did just that.
So until the insurance companies start requiring HD dashcams, we might not see them since the demand for them nearly anywhere else is naturally going to be weak.
My insurance company doesn't require a dashcam; nor it even offers a discount. I doubt that they even know about such cutting edge technology.
But I purchased one and use it daily. It's an HD dashcam, made in China (of course.) It records for 8 hours of HD onto a 32 GB SD card. I have it permanently plugged in, and it operates automatically.
I understand that in case of an accident it could be useful. But the primary purpose of the camera, for me, is to just record whatever happens around, for any reason. If I want the recording, it's there. If I don't want it, no problem - it will be overwritten in 8 hours. So if a UFO, or a bear, suddenly shows in front of my car, I don't need to do anything special to record it. I saw pheasants in the road, chickens, deer, turkeys, pigs... Sometimes you just want to understand what turns you took to get somewhere.
Theoretically, you could lose some business in the future if you don't support ipv6 and the customer doesn't have access to a 6to4 tunnel.
6to4 is an Internet transition mechanism for migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, a system that allows IPv6 packets to be transmitted over an IPv4 network (generally the IPv4 Internet) without the need to configure explicit tunnels.
Why would the customer need *that* if they are on native IPv6? They need address family translation services - such as "NAT64 technology provided by Cisco® ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers." Those have to be provided, one way or another, by ISPs, otherwise an IPv6 connection is useless. Most of valuable Internet resources are IPv4 now, and will stay that for a while. Perhaps Internet-facing HTTP servers are the easiest to migrate, but if that involves the back-end code and servers then contractors and consultants will be having a field day, just like around the year 2000. Lots of that code is out of maintenance, and people who wrote it have moved on already. Consultants would have to figure out what has to be upgraded, and in what order. For example, if the code uses an IP address of the client as a value in calculations, that will have an immediate impact. If the requests are handled on a separate, internal server, that one can stay IPv4 a bit longer. All in all, it's a huge effort. Most businesses will decide to keep existing services IPv4 forever, until they are replaced by new services.
not if the text box you're typing into is running an inserted javascript routine that tracks keystrokes..
NoScript is your friend. Most web sites do not require JS. Those that do can be dealt with separately - and not trusted.
Never heard of autocomplete?
Everyone who is even partially sane disables these "services." As result, the watchers can only monitor those who are content to being watched.