Leaving aside the fact that OpenSSL is not a "BSD package that kindly ported to Linux", I suggest it's rather more arrogant to assume that the world will rush to replace OpenSSL with Theo De Raadt's LibreSSL when (if) it becomes available.
OpenSSL is not fundamentally broken. It had a bug, albeit one with big consequences. Lots of people depend on OpenSSL and it needs to properly maintained. Paying people to work on opensource projects is nothing new and if this funding supports developers with the necessary cryptographic skills devoting quality time to maintaining OpenSSL then that's a good thing.
I doubt it. In the UK (where there is a well established public health system) employers have been getting increasingly fond of zero-hours contracts over the last few years. If you want to talk "double whammy", these contracts not only do not guarantee you any hours in any given week (hence the name) but you are usually contractually forbidden from working for anybody else; you are supposed to be always "on call". So you aren't working many hours, and you're poor. Oh brave new world!
It also means fostering an environment where juvenile-minded males never grow up into reasonable, professional men, fostering a culture that eventually and surely will spawn a molester or sociopath.
And this doesn't just apply to the business world. You get similar issues in professional team sports, where guys come out of school/college straight into what is essentially a never-ending frat house environment.
Many eyeballs may make bugs shallower, but those many eyeballs don't really exist. Source availability does not translate to many people examining that source. People, myself included, may like to build to install packages but that's it.
It's not the quantity of eyes, it's the quality that counts. A million script kiddies can read the code and not spot a serious bug. This is particularly true of security/cryptography software.
What we need are intelligent bots to constantly trawl source repositories looking for bugs. People just don't have the time any more.
Before bots, what about unit tests? It seems to me that a decent test suite would have caught what is essentially a buffer overflow.
If you Google "Byte magazine covers", you'll see that the covers often took a certain amount of artistic license. They were designed to be eye-catching on news-stands. But the content was always very good. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was sorry to see it go.
There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe.
Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines. I'm pretty sure doctors check for this before sticking the needle in. These people are one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, because the only thing protecting them from certain diseases is the fact that the rest of the population can't act as carriers. Most of us won't be harmed if one of Jenny McCarthy's kids coughs on us, because we've had the shots - but the unlucky few who really can't get vaccinated are screwed.
Fair point. There's always the possibility of allergic reaction with any medication. What I had meant to say was that there was no credible evidence of a causal link between vaccination and, for example, conditions like autism as the anti-vaccine people claim.
Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.
The sad reality is that the "we just want safe vaccines" claim is a complete red herring. There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe. There is abundant evidence that not being vaccinated is highly unsafe; not just to you but also to others you might infect. Serious diseases that had been eradicated in the western world have come back, with disastrous consequences (including death) for people who have become infected.
I'm no fan of big-pharma but to claim that this is their fault is ridiculous. The responsibility lies with the anti-vaccine zealots, who persist in ignoring all the evidence in front of them.
For fear of being modded down into oblivion, I'll post anonymously.
"The very existence of cochlear implants wrongly presupposes that a deaf person is in need of fixing."
This just smacks of self-conscious defensiveness. It is wrong.
The BBC has a magazine program for deaf people called "See Hear". A few years ago they had a studio audience discussion about this very topic and one (very angry) young man said he was proud to be deaf, he wanted to marry a deaf girl, and have deaf kids. That's the kind of thinking that perpetuates these "cultures". My head still spins when I think about it.
I don't see myself as an old programmer. I started programming in 1978.
That was my thought too. I've been coding for 35 years, and earning my living from it for 30 of those years. There's always new things to learn. That's what makes it fun!
Note to the press: "Hackers" doesn't mean what you think is means.
That ship has sailed. Whether you like it or not, popular contemporary usage trumps historical meanings. You may as well say "gay" doesn't mean what you think it means.
According to this, Lessig was talking about a remix in one of this lectures, a music matcher downloaded his lecture, found it to contain the song 'owned' by this label, and the label sent out an automated harassment lawsuit threat to Larry.
You have to wonder, at what point did they realise they were taking a copyright case against one of the world's most famous legal authorities on copyright!
2 years from production and 10 years before the regulators first begin to think about permitting what will be essentially a drone with passengers.
Or perhaps never. Judging from my daily commute, most people struggle to drive safely and sensibly in two dimensions; three will be simply beyond them. And even if you introduce auto-pilot to remove the human driver, there's still things like the difference between keeping a roadworthy vehicle and an airworthy vehicle, and the potentially large volume of such cars compared to the number of aircraft today.
It will only take one of these cars to come down hard in a built-up area for their use to heavily restricted if not outright prohibited.
Mensch said that she is"proud" that Heathrow Border Force were "doing "their lawful job" by interrogating Radack. She has also insisted that Radack is not actually Snowden's lawyer but merely just a "legal advisor" trying to claim attorney-client privilege.
Louise Mensch was previously known as Louise Bagshawe (chic-lit author) before briefly dabbling in politics when she was elected as a Conservative MP in 2010. She resigned in 2012. Her term in office was marked by (a) her general clueless-ness about the big political/social issues and (b) a rabidly right-wing "law & order" stance; for example, in 2011 she publicly supported the idea of the UK police being able to turn off Facebook and Twitter at will to maintain public order.
So her comments here are not surprising and should be taken with the usual large pinch of NaCl.
The title calls us their "Audience". This is the core of the problem. They think they are running CNN. They do not understand that we are their contributors, their community, not their audience. Their articles are day-late dollar-short shit. We are the authors of the good part of the site, they are the chalkboard.
This is an attitude change that came with Dice, Malda never looked at Slashdot that way. And regardless of the beta, if they don't change that outlook Slashdot will die.
This is probably the single most insightful comment I've read this week. Yes, Slashdot is "News for Nerds". But we don't come here to passively "consume" news. We come here to actively debate the news. That's what makes Slashdot different. Take that away and the site will be "pining for the fjords".
"The category of 'obscene content', for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years. It looks as if that debate has just been bypassed entirely, by way of scare stories about five-year-olds and fisting videos. Whatever your opinion on downloading music and cartoons for free, doing so is neither obscene nor pornographic."
The personal computer is not a form factor, it is a philosophy.
No dependence on centralized service, computing done by the user, for the user.
Unless done properly, cloud and toys (smartphones, tablets) are a regression into the mainframe era. Give your toys enough control and you'll see.
Mod parent up! These days I use a laptop rather than a desktop; it's just more convenient. But it's still my personal computer. I'm not dependent cloud services, or even in some cases even a network connection, to do useful work; and I control the software and data on my device.
'U.S. Customs and Border Protection media spokeswoman Jenny Burke said that due to privacy laws, “the department is prohibited from discussing specific cases.’’'
If only they were always so scrupulous in observing privacy laws.
It's also a drop in the ocean when you consider the amount of other plastic item packagings and liters of fuel the average consumer uses per year. It's an imaginary problem.
Actually it's not an imaginary problem. Like an earlier poster, I currently live in Ireland. Before the levy, for most people, every trip to the shops meant more disposable plastic bags; just to carry your shopping home. Since the levy was introduced almost nobody uses the old-style disposable plastic bags; indeed many shops don't even offer them anymore. The massive drop in consumption of plastic bags, means a corresponding massive drop in manufacture of plastic bags; i.e. significantly less plastic entering the system in the first place.
That's like saying we shouldn't have had a Civil Rights movement because at least we weren't killing our minorities like Germany did; we were just oppressing them.
"Y is worse than X" does not mean that X is not also bad.
Very true. "We're not winning the race to the bottom" is no cause for celebration.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving aside the fact that OpenSSL is not a "BSD package that kindly ported to Linux", I suggest it's rather more arrogant to assume that the world will rush to replace OpenSSL with Theo De Raadt's LibreSSL when (if) it becomes available.
OpenSSL is not fundamentally broken. It had a bug, albeit one with big consequences. Lots of people depend on OpenSSL and it needs to properly maintained. Paying people to work on opensource projects is nothing new and if this funding supports developers with the necessary cryptographic skills devoting quality time to maintaining OpenSSL then that's a good thing.
I doubt it. In the UK (where there is a well established public health system) employers have been getting increasingly fond of zero-hours contracts over the last few years. If you want to talk "double whammy", these contracts not only do not guarantee you any hours in any given week (hence the name) but you are usually contractually forbidden from working for anybody else; you are supposed to be always "on call". So you aren't working many hours, and you're poor. Oh brave new world!
It also means fostering an environment where juvenile-minded males never grow up into reasonable, professional men, fostering a culture that eventually and surely will spawn a molester or sociopath.
And this doesn't just apply to the business world. You get similar issues in professional team sports, where guys come out of school/college straight into what is essentially a never-ending frat house environment.
Everyone should be armed. Assuming you're not a felon, a weapon should be in every single citizen's possession. Period. No loopholes.
Given that the rest of the western world manages just fine without everybody being tooled up all the time and has significantly lower rates of gunshot fatalities, the obvious question is - Why?
Many eyeballs may make bugs shallower, but those many eyeballs don't really exist. Source availability does not translate to many people examining that source. People, myself included, may like to build to install packages but that's it.
It's not the quantity of eyes, it's the quality that counts. A million script kiddies can read the code and not spot a serious bug. This is particularly true of security/cryptography software.
What we need are intelligent bots to constantly trawl source repositories looking for bugs. People just don't have the time any more.
Before bots, what about unit tests? It seems to me that a decent test suite would have caught what is essentially a buffer overflow.
If you Google "Byte magazine covers", you'll see that the covers often took a certain amount of artistic license. They were designed to be eye-catching on news-stands. But the content was always very good. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was sorry to see it go.
There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe.
Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines. I'm pretty sure doctors check for this before sticking the needle in. These people are one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, because the only thing protecting them from certain diseases is the fact that the rest of the population can't act as carriers. Most of us won't be harmed if one of Jenny McCarthy's kids coughs on us, because we've had the shots - but the unlucky few who really can't get vaccinated are screwed.
Fair point. There's always the possibility of allergic reaction with any medication. What I had meant to say was that there was no credible evidence of a causal link between vaccination and, for example, conditions like autism as the anti-vaccine people claim.
Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.
The sad reality is that the "we just want safe vaccines" claim is a complete red herring. There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe. There is abundant evidence that not being vaccinated is highly unsafe; not just to you but also to others you might infect. Serious diseases that had been eradicated in the western world have come back, with disastrous consequences (including death) for people who have become infected.
I'm no fan of big-pharma but to claim that this is their fault is ridiculous. The responsibility lies with the anti-vaccine zealots, who persist in ignoring all the evidence in front of them.
For fear of being modded down into oblivion, I'll post anonymously.
"The very existence of cochlear implants wrongly presupposes that a deaf person is in need of fixing."
This just smacks of self-conscious defensiveness. It is wrong.
The BBC has a magazine program for deaf people called "See Hear". A few years ago they had a studio audience discussion about this very topic and one (very angry) young man said he was proud to be deaf, he wanted to marry a deaf girl, and have deaf kids. That's the kind of thinking that perpetuates these "cultures". My head still spins when I think about it.
If you follow the principles and practices in Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship: Robert C. Martin you won't go far wrong. It also includes a worked through example of refactoring a piece of bad code into clean code.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
:-)
I don't see myself as an old programmer. I started programming in 1978.
That was my thought too. I've been coding for 35 years, and earning my living from it for 30 of those years. There's always new things to learn. That's what makes it fun!
Note to the press: "Hackers" doesn't mean what you think is means.
That ship has sailed. Whether you like it or not, popular contemporary usage trumps historical meanings. You may as well say "gay" doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Open Source Software is more secure because the code can be reviewed."
That's why this bug has existed since 2005. gg, guys. Thumbs up.
Especially when it comes to areas like cryptography, it's the quality of the eyes - not the quantity - that matters.
According to this, Lessig was talking about a remix in one of this lectures, a music matcher downloaded his lecture, found it to contain the song 'owned' by this label, and the label sent out an automated harassment lawsuit threat to Larry.
You have to wonder, at what point did they realise they were taking a copyright case against one of the world's most famous legal authorities on copyright!
2 years from production and 10 years before the regulators first begin to think about permitting what will be essentially a drone with passengers.
Or perhaps never. Judging from my daily commute, most people struggle to drive safely and sensibly in two dimensions; three will be simply beyond them. And even if you introduce auto-pilot to remove the human driver, there's still things like the difference between keeping a roadworthy vehicle and an airworthy vehicle, and the potentially large volume of such cars compared to the number of aircraft today.
It will only take one of these cars to come down hard in a built-up area for their use to heavily restricted if not outright prohibited.
Mensch said that she is"proud" that Heathrow Border Force were "doing "their lawful job" by interrogating Radack. She has also insisted that Radack is not actually Snowden's lawyer but merely just a "legal advisor" trying to claim attorney-client privilege.
Louise Mensch was previously known as Louise Bagshawe (chic-lit author) before briefly dabbling in politics when she was elected as a Conservative MP in 2010. She resigned in 2012. Her term in office was marked by (a) her general clueless-ness about the big political/social issues and (b) a rabidly right-wing "law & order" stance; for example, in 2011 she publicly supported the idea of the UK police being able to turn off Facebook and Twitter at will to maintain public order.
So her comments here are not surprising and should be taken with the usual large pinch of NaCl.
The title calls us their "Audience". This is the core of the problem. They think they are running CNN. They do not understand that we are their contributors, their community, not their audience. Their articles are day-late dollar-short shit. We are the authors of the good part of the site, they are the chalkboard.
This is an attitude change that came with Dice, Malda never looked at Slashdot that way. And regardless of the beta, if they don't change that outlook Slashdot will die.
This is probably the single most insightful comment I've read this week. Yes, Slashdot is "News for Nerds". But we don't come here to passively "consume" news. We come here to actively debate the news. That's what makes Slashdot different. Take that away and the site will be "pining for the fjords".
Another vote for LMMS here. It may not suit everybody, but it's still a capable music application.
Either Mr Cameron lied or the ISPs have radically over-reached in the level of national censorship.
Have a read of this article - David Cameron's internet porn filter is the start of censorship creep - and make your own mind up. For example this quote:
"The category of 'obscene content', for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years. It looks as if that debate has just been bypassed entirely, by way of scare stories about five-year-olds and fisting videos. Whatever your opinion on downloading music and cartoons for free, doing so is neither obscene nor pornographic."
The personal computer is not a form factor, it is a philosophy. No dependence on centralized service, computing done by the user, for the user. Unless done properly, cloud and toys (smartphones, tablets) are a regression into the mainframe era. Give your toys enough control and you'll see.
Mod parent up! These days I use a laptop rather than a desktop; it's just more convenient. But it's still my personal computer. I'm not dependent cloud services, or even in some cases even a network connection, to do useful work; and I control the software and data on my device.
There was a story at The Guardian some months ago about internal government documents that had labeled mainstream environmentalists as extremists.
I suspect that suppressing reports like that (and of course the Snowden coverage) is ultimately where this is heading.
From TFA:
'U.S. Customs and Border Protection media spokeswoman Jenny Burke said that due to privacy laws, “the department is prohibited from discussing specific cases.’’'
If only they were always so scrupulous in observing privacy laws.
It's also a drop in the ocean when you consider the amount of other plastic item packagings and liters of fuel the average consumer uses per year. It's an imaginary problem.
Actually it's not an imaginary problem. Like an earlier poster, I currently live in Ireland. Before the levy, for most people, every trip to the shops meant more disposable plastic bags; just to carry your shopping home. Since the levy was introduced almost nobody uses the old-style disposable plastic bags; indeed many shops don't even offer them anymore. The massive drop in consumption of plastic bags, means a corresponding massive drop in manufacture of plastic bags; i.e. significantly less plastic entering the system in the first place.
That's like saying we shouldn't have had a Civil Rights movement because at least we weren't killing our minorities like Germany did; we were just oppressing them.
"Y is worse than X" does not mean that X is not also bad.
Very true. "We're not winning the race to the bottom" is no cause for celebration.