What you are describing is not end-to-end encryption. TFA seems to indicate that the Tom-Skype software is end-to-end encryption. One end encrypts the message such that that only the other end (the person the user is talking to) can decrypt. This is the same as when you send a PGP encrypted e-mail: you don't have to worry about the mail servers in the middle reading your mail. In true end-to-end encryption, at no point do the servers in the middle normally handle un-encrypted messages. From TFA,
The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of those words and a copy of the message is sent to a server.
The user was betrayed by Skype software itself, the "end", not some server in the middle. The software monitored the messages and sent anything that looked suspicious (i.e. matched a list of words) off to the government.
You should also read up on man-in-the-middle attack because what you described is also not MITM. MITM attacks are active attacks that take advantage of identification and authentication issues and can only be countered in some way external to the communication system that is being secured. A mail server simply eavesdropping (a passive attack) is not MITM.
In both cases, there's encryption over the "public wire" but the server's got access to ALL of it.
If you look at the summary, article, and this thread's subject line, they all say "end-to-end". That means the server doesn't have access to anything except the encrypted stream. Ignoring MITM attacks, you don't need to trust anything in the middle as long as they don't start dropping pakcets, just trust the software on the ends (which you can't do with proprietary software).
Another idea is to encrypt/decrypt the data on the client.
The common definition does not place free software inside the freeware category. In fact, they are disjoint sets (no software fits in both categories). Also, the "free" in both names are two completely different words.
This is the definition the parent is referring to:
The term "freeware" has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available). These packages are not free software, so please don't use "freeware" to refer to free software.
On a technically oriented computer website like this, the free software and freeware distinction is important. Mixing them up is just confusing.
This is the definition the parent is referring to:
The term "freeware" has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available). These packages are not free software, so please don't use "freeware" to refer to free software.
On a technically oriented computer website like this, the free software and freeware distinction is important. Mixing them up is just confusing.
Just to be completely sure, I would probably write a little program to dump the image into some raw format that I specified (knowing there was no metadata), then add (that is, xor) some noise generated from/dev/random to the least significant bits. I then write my own bitmap library (easy) to write the raw image out to a bitmap. Then use a very common, pre-compiled image conversion program/library (like MS Paint, or Photoshop, or a very popular GIMP build) to convert back into a JPEG or whatever. Or just submit the images as gzipped bitmaps, using a very common version/build of gzip.
Compiling, say, ImageMagick or GIMP myself might produce some unique images due to some specific tweak in the JPEG encoding, which is definitely what I don't want to do. I want the image to be as generic as possible.
I could try to maybe even be misleading by generating some fake EXIF metadata and attach it, but then we are starting to become unique again. Plus some innocent person with the same EXIF data may be put in danger.
By the way, as an extra touch, this is all done on an old laptop that I will carefully wipe, then discard far from my home. Actually, since this last step is somewhat expensive, I would probably skip the discarding it part.:-P
The goal of a lot of pirate web sites and such is to make it impossible to obtain revenue from music, movies, books, software and anything else that can be put in digital form. [...] Often, the pirate sites will come up first in Google before the publisher's web site.
[Citation Needed]. Do you have any examples of these "pirate" websites?
Likewise, whether or not you like the current state of copyright law, it is your responsibility as a citizen of country with said laws, to follow them
Not at all. If the law said you had to stand on your head at noon everyday, is it your responsibility to do so? Or, more seriously and realisticly, how about a law that says certain religions are not allowed? Laws are arbitrary. They provide an incentive to do or not do certain things.
I would argue that in some cases, it is your responsibility as a citizen to break laws, as a form of civil disobedience.
The only people that seem to be horribly affected by this is the people who seem to think it is ok to share copyrighted materials with as many people as want them
First of all, distributing copyrighted materials is not in itself illegal. It is only if it is not authorized. Those GNU/Linux ISOs are copyrighted, but everyone is authorized to share those, under a few conditions. Same goes for anything on which you yourself hold the copyright. So yes, it is "ok" or legal to share copyrighted materials.
Second, the law does not determine right and wrong. Just because some action is against the law doesn't make it wrong. This is especially true when the laws are so out of whack (as is copyright law) that a large part of the population breaks it on a regular basis (see Prohibition).
Sure, point-and-click GUIs may be really easy to use without having to spend much time at all learning it. But these are also the least efficient and least powerful interfaces. They're slow and the user does the same tedious work over and over: work a computer, perfectly suited for this, should be doing instead. The shell, along with all the basic tools you find on a Unix-like system, have a steep learning curve, but they are designed to be powerful. This is a trade-off between power and ease-of-use. More power means it's harder for a newbie to come along and use it, so more time needs to be invested to harness that power.
GUIs work for John Q. Public, who uses the computer mostly for e-mail and MySpace, because investing time learning something more powerful doesn't gain them much. It's not worth the effort. It is important that they get doing what they want to do quickly. This is a good situation for them.
However, if you use a computer professionally, from being a software developer all the way to being an accountant, investing time in learning the more powerful tools for your job pays off dramatically. You might suddenly find you can do your work 4-times faster than before. Unless you are a graphic designer, mouse input is the easiest, but slowest way to do things. Many programmers think of having to use the mouse while doing work as a cache miss.
This is precisely why we have text editor flamewars. The text editor, including the ones build into IDEs, is the primary tool for developers, so becoming as efficient as possible (meaning short, cryptic commands and keystrokes) is important. Things that are done often should be mapped to as little typing as possible (like Huffaman coding). The flamewars errupt when people don't agree on what is the most efficient way to do things.
With the shell, I can do almost any type of file system manipulation much faster than someone with some GUI file browser. When you don't have a powerful shell available, you end up with all kinds of weak specialty tools, like batch photo resizing software. On a Unix-like system, I can perform all the abilities of these tools with a quick one-liner, and this uses a simple set of generic powerful tools rather than calling some extremely specific program. Also without a shell around is when I see people at work spend an hour hand-editing giant CSV files in Excel, with potential human error involved, when a simple awk one-liner could do the same work flawlessly in seconds.
Well, removing the cruft is nice, but then adding some nice lightweight tools would be nice. You know, for when us Unix-like guys are forced to use Windows.
Throw in a decent bourne shell, which doesn't even have to be bash, so make it ksh or zsh or something. Then some basics: diff, patch, make, perl (or any other interpreter, even Lua... throw me a bone here), grep, find, ssh, etc. I guess what I am saying is drop BusyBox in there along with a usable, non-broken text editor (I'm an Emacs worshiper, but vi or nano would be fine since we want to be lightweight). I bet this will all together take up less disk space than Windows Movie Maker alone.
Then when they sit me down at once of these naked Windows stations with a single IDE installed, but no Internet access (so I can't install these tools myself), I can actually get some damn work done.
Not sure why this got modded up so, as the poster doesn't understand what DRM is. Don't take the term "Digital 'Rights' (or Restictions as we like to say) Management" absolutely literally, just as "Compact Disc" doesn't refer to squished donuts.
The cited examples are not DRM. These are tools a person can use to control access to their own stuff, their own property. It's exactly the same as locking your front door and is perfectly legitimate, no questions about it. Not DRM.
DRM is about someone else controlling access to your own stuff. It is analogous to someone else putting a lock on your door, and you have to ask him to unlock it for you when you want to use your own paid-for house. If he is too busy to unlock it, or even dies in a car accident (the company's DRM activation servers permanently shut down), you get to sleep on the sidewalk. Sure, you can break into your own house (circumvent the DRM), but it's against the law and the big guy with the key might call the cops on you.
You are mixing up privacy and copyright, two very unrelated things. And doing so just invalidates your argument.
fully supports unpacking RAR archives out of the box without having to have unrar or WinRAR at all.
Eh, not quite. It ships with the official proprietary unrar.dll library, so there is a little piece of the actual WinRAR in it. However, it is still a huge improvement over WinRAR.
This solution tightly integrates with existing desktop Windows infrastructures, allowing users to extend desktop technology and skills to the realm of HPC computing.
High-performance computing computing. Hmmmm... like some sort of meta computing?
Slashdot Mirror
What you are describing is not end-to-end encryption. TFA seems to indicate that the Tom-Skype software is end-to-end encryption. One end encrypts the message such that that only the other end (the person the user is talking to) can decrypt. This is the same as when you send a PGP encrypted e-mail: you don't have to worry about the mail servers in the middle reading your mail. In true end-to-end encryption, at no point do the servers in the middle normally handle un-encrypted messages. From TFA,
The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of those words and a copy of the message is sent to a server.
The user was betrayed by Skype software itself, the "end", not some server in the middle. The software monitored the messages and sent anything that looked suspicious (i.e. matched a list of words) off to the government.
You should also read up on man-in-the-middle attack because what you described is also not MITM. MITM attacks are active attacks that take advantage of identification and authentication issues and can only be countered in some way external to the communication system that is being secured. A mail server simply eavesdropping (a passive attack) is not MITM.
In both cases, there's encryption over the "public wire" but the server's got access to ALL of it.
If you look at the summary, article, and this thread's subject line, they all say "end-to-end". That means the server doesn't have access to anything except the encrypted stream. Ignoring MITM attacks, you don't need to trust anything in the middle as long as they don't start dropping pakcets, just trust the software on the ends (which you can't do with proprietary software).
Another idea is to encrypt/decrypt the data on the client.
Yes, that's called end-to-end. :-P
I didn't realize it until I took a look for myself, but there are so many people make this mistake. 41,900 hits worth.
The common definition does not place free software inside the freeware category. In fact, they are disjoint sets (no software fits in both categories). Also, the "free" in both names are two completely different words. This is the definition the parent is referring to:
The term "freeware" has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available). These packages are not free software, so please don't use "freeware" to refer to free software.
On a technically oriented computer website like this, the free software and freeware distinction is important. Mixing them up is just confusing.
This is the definition the parent is referring to:
The term "freeware" has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available). These packages are not free software, so please don't use "freeware" to refer to free software.
On a technically oriented computer website like this, the free software and freeware distinction is important. Mixing them up is just confusing.
Just to be completely sure, I would probably write a little program to dump the image into some raw format that I specified (knowing there was no metadata), then add (that is, xor) some noise generated from /dev/random to the least significant bits. I then write my own bitmap library (easy) to write the raw image out to a bitmap. Then use a very common, pre-compiled image conversion program/library (like MS Paint, or Photoshop, or a very popular GIMP build) to convert back into a JPEG or whatever. Or just submit the images as gzipped bitmaps, using a very common version/build of gzip.
Compiling, say, ImageMagick or GIMP myself might produce some unique images due to some specific tweak in the JPEG encoding, which is definitely what I don't want to do. I want the image to be as generic as possible.
I could try to maybe even be misleading by generating some fake EXIF metadata and attach it, but then we are starting to become unique again. Plus some innocent person with the same EXIF data may be put in danger.
By the way, as an extra touch, this is all done on an old laptop that I will carefully wipe, then discard far from my home. Actually, since this last step is somewhat expensive, I would probably skip the discarding it part. :-P
And, no, you cannot try on my tinfoil hat.
The goal of a lot of pirate web sites and such is to make it impossible to obtain revenue from music, movies, books, software and anything else that can be put in digital form. [...] Often, the pirate sites will come up first in Google before the publisher's web site.
[Citation Needed]. Do you have any examples of these "pirate" websites?
Likewise, whether or not you like the current state of copyright law, it is your responsibility as a citizen of country with said laws, to follow them
Not at all. If the law said you had to stand on your head at noon everyday, is it your responsibility to do so? Or, more seriously and realisticly, how about a law that says certain religions are not allowed? Laws are arbitrary. They provide an incentive to do or not do certain things.
I would argue that in some cases, it is your responsibility as a citizen to break laws, as a form of civil disobedience.
Please re-read what I said. You completely didn't understand it.
The only people that seem to be horribly affected by this is the people who seem to think it is ok to share copyrighted materials with as many people as want them
First of all, distributing copyrighted materials is not in itself illegal. It is only if it is not authorized. Those GNU/Linux ISOs are copyrighted, but everyone is authorized to share those, under a few conditions. Same goes for anything on which you yourself hold the copyright. So yes, it is "ok" or legal to share copyrighted materials.
Second, the law does not determine right and wrong. Just because some action is against the law doesn't make it wrong. This is especially true when the laws are so out of whack (as is copyright law) that a large part of the population breaks it on a regular basis (see Prohibition).
Theologists exist without a god existing. ;-) There is no reason a theologist should know any more about the supernatural than, say, a gardener.
Just like you don't need to consult a fairyologist to find out the size and shape of fairy wings.
Chris Hanson, anyone? I'm pretty convinced half of that is staged, if the police can't catch these guys but network TV can.
My guess is that the reason police can't/don't do it themselves is because it would be a form of entrapment.
i can understand if this were 1990 and the web was still mostly text-based.
Considering that the web didn't really exist until 1993, I would say it was based on nothing at that point. :-P
Sure, point-and-click GUIs may be really easy to use without having to spend much time at all learning it. But these are also the least efficient and least powerful interfaces. They're slow and the user does the same tedious work over and over: work a computer, perfectly suited for this, should be doing instead. The shell, along with all the basic tools you find on a Unix-like system, have a steep learning curve, but they are designed to be powerful. This is a trade-off between power and ease-of-use. More power means it's harder for a newbie to come along and use it, so more time needs to be invested to harness that power.
GUIs work for John Q. Public, who uses the computer mostly for e-mail and MySpace, because investing time learning something more powerful doesn't gain them much. It's not worth the effort. It is important that they get doing what they want to do quickly. This is a good situation for them.
However, if you use a computer professionally, from being a software developer all the way to being an accountant, investing time in learning the more powerful tools for your job pays off dramatically. You might suddenly find you can do your work 4-times faster than before. Unless you are a graphic designer, mouse input is the easiest, but slowest way to do things. Many programmers think of having to use the mouse while doing work as a cache miss.
This is precisely why we have text editor flamewars. The text editor, including the ones build into IDEs, is the primary tool for developers, so becoming as efficient as possible (meaning short, cryptic commands and keystrokes) is important. Things that are done often should be mapped to as little typing as possible (like Huffaman coding). The flamewars errupt when people don't agree on what is the most efficient way to do things.
With the shell, I can do almost any type of file system manipulation much faster than someone with some GUI file browser. When you don't have a powerful shell available, you end up with all kinds of weak specialty tools, like batch photo resizing software. On a Unix-like system, I can perform all the abilities of these tools with a quick one-liner, and this uses a simple set of generic powerful tools rather than calling some extremely specific program. Also without a shell around is when I see people at work spend an hour hand-editing giant CSV files in Excel, with potential human error involved, when a simple awk one-liner could do the same work flawlessly in seconds.
There is an excellent and famous essay by Neal Stephenson called In the Beginning... was the Command Line that goes into this subject (though it is not the overall focus) with some good metaphors. If you really think the shell is just "cryptic 2-4 letter commands" then you might learn something from the essay. It is a bit long, but its worth it. It's been on the front page of Slashdot a couple times: Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor and In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Updated.
Well, removing the cruft is nice, but then adding some nice lightweight tools would be nice. You know, for when us Unix-like guys are forced to use Windows.
Throw in a decent bourne shell, which doesn't even have to be bash, so make it ksh or zsh or something. Then some basics: diff, patch, make, perl (or any other interpreter, even Lua ... throw me a bone here), grep, find, ssh, etc. I guess what I am saying is drop BusyBox in there along with a usable, non-broken text editor (I'm an Emacs worshiper, but vi or nano would be fine since we want to be lightweight). I bet this will all together take up less disk space than Windows Movie Maker alone.
Then when they sit me down at once of these naked Windows stations with a single IDE installed, but no Internet access (so I can't install these tools myself), I can actually get some damn work done.
For anyone trying this at home, replace "EHLO" with "HELO".
I guess it goes along with that saying: The only way a book can be dangerous is by throwing it.
I cannot view your deleted article or any of its history. This is what GP was talking about. All I can see is that it was deleted once.
Not sure why this got modded up so, as the poster doesn't understand what DRM is. Don't take the term "Digital 'Rights' (or Restictions as we like to say) Management" absolutely literally, just as "Compact Disc" doesn't refer to squished donuts.
The cited examples are not DRM. These are tools a person can use to control access to their own stuff, their own property. It's exactly the same as locking your front door and is perfectly legitimate, no questions about it. Not DRM.
DRM is about someone else controlling access to your own stuff. It is analogous to someone else putting a lock on your door, and you have to ask him to unlock it for you when you want to use your own paid-for house. If he is too busy to unlock it, or even dies in a car accident (the company's DRM activation servers permanently shut down), you get to sleep on the sidewalk. Sure, you can break into your own house (circumvent the DRM), but it's against the law and the big guy with the key might call the cops on you.
You are mixing up privacy and copyright, two very unrelated things. And doing so just invalidates your argument.
In short.. If you do not like the iPhone, then dont buy one.
Uh, I think that's what he said himself with, "Certainly i would never use one."
What they are trying to do, however, is to provide the experience that they want and not yours.
I have a feeling that "they" aren't aware that it could be much better than it is now.
Naphthalene Found In Outer Space
Did they at least offer him a ride back home?
fully supports unpacking RAR archives out of the box without having to have unrar or WinRAR at all.
Eh, not quite. It ships with the official proprietary unrar.dll library, so there is a little piece of the actual WinRAR in it. However, it is still a huge improvement over WinRAR.
Who gets to determine what is Polka?
"Hey, Soundexchange, this Metallica album is POLKA damnit! You can make no claims here."
This solution tightly integrates with existing desktop Windows infrastructures, allowing users to extend desktop technology and skills to the realm of HPC computing.
High-performance computing computing. Hmmmm... like some sort of meta computing?