While the reasons behind the indefinite postponement haven't really been clarified ("money... mumble etc mumble..."), it's worth thinking about what exactly Mind Candy were trying to do (or, at least, my impression - as an avid player of season 1 - of what direction they were heading in). Previous posts on the developer blog hint at the difficulties of getting the technology together, and when you consider what Mindcandy are trying to achieve with it, it's hard to blame them about the recent decision.
Season 1 was amazing for its creativity - the cards were great, but their integration with the storyline, along with the use of technology and off-line events to blur the boundaries of the game were something to look back at and marvel at. I don't think that the Perplex City bods wanted to lose any of that, while still being able to run and maintain a game that pretty much anyone could jump into at any point. The community that sprung up in season 1, for instance, was also amazing. But as the story rumbles on and more knowledge is needed to get into the game, there's increasingly more material to put people off catching up, and so the replayable side of things would be, I assume, a way for people to get into it in their own time. The tricky bit is tying that in with the community side of things as well - letting people collaborate and crack puzzles as a group.
I'm hoping they're still developing this technology and perfecting it - not just shelving it because it won't make a huge profit. IIRC, the technical team are still there - it's only the story writers that have been "let go", which makes sense as else they'll be sitting twiddling thumbs. But if the tech side can be pulled off well and in time (I'm thinking at latest before the next lot of cards is released) then there could be some really interesting ideas coming out of it. It's just a shame that much of the momentum built up over the last few years will have been lost.
"...the engineers who spent years designing this must be complete idiots, and would never think of these things on their own."
Ah, if only sarcasm were a form of proof. Unfortunately, history reveals that a bunch of people in lab conditions (or, indeed, even during controlled tests) may not actually think up everything. The ability be blinded by new science, to the detriment of old problems, is nothing new. Take Persil Power for instance - years of R&D, along with voluminous testing in particular countries didn't particularly stop it from being a complete shambles (in both technical and marekting terms) in the real world. ("Heavens, people want to wash old clothes? That's not in the spec!")
The race to solve a single problem, or to implement a new "discovery", often leads to a whole bunch of things that nobody would (or, perhaps could) ever think of. Of course, they'll probably be things that nobody on/. actually ever predicted too...
It doesn't need to be once they have your biometric data - they can just do an on-the-spot scan, as David Blunkett points out:
"Mr Blunkett said the technology would allow officials to double-check someone's identity simply by scanning, for example, an iris or a fingerprint."
Double-check? Why bother with the card if their biometric data is unfakeable?
What scares me is that there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way to stop this going through - it's happening far too quickly with far too much momentum and not enough thought or discussion to change the politicians' minds. Still, it's always worth trying.
Interestingly, and somewhat depressingly, the first thing I knew about it was about 3 e-mails from Google News Alert, each telling me of about 3 different news sites reporting the story. Some of the sites weren't even that techie (CXO Today seems a good example of the people SCO were intending to reach with their statement). The fact that SCO got their press release out so far, and so quickly might not say anything about the true nature of their server(s) downtime, but it does indicate where their operational motives lie.
Steve Ballmer seems almost impressive with his shouts of "Developers! Developers! Developers!". I like to think of Darl giving a rousing meeting, stomping around the stage yelling "Marketeers! Marketeers! Marketeers! Lawyers! Lawyers! Lawyers!"
"Many documents discuss the actual insertion of HTML into a vulnerable script, but stop short of explaining the full ramifications of what can be done with a successful XSS attack"
I was hoping for some enlightened progression into the interesting-for-some field of cross-siting, but am sorely disappointed at this basic-tut-in-PDF-clothing. Most people don't really discuss much when it comes to XSS as there isn't much to discuss. Well, maybe there is, but this paper doesn't highlight anything new or adventurous, just what any sentient techie could work out in 5 minutes of thought. Quite why it deserves so much attention (I've been meaning to check it out for a few days now...) is way beyond me. Pretty much everything in this "paper" was realised as soon as the first XSS attack was made. Ask Hotmail.
However, I suspect that there is some really interesting stuff that can be done involving cookies, plus I've also been trying to figure out site-wide ways to prevent cookie stealing (cookies across domains, progressive cookies, challenge-response methods...) but if anyone has any links to further research on this, I'd be grateful. There are some very interesting, more social, less technical ramifications as well as it begins to merge with ID theft and similar ilks.
If web services get big, really big, then such basic authentication for sessions may have to be addressed. At the moment, we're probably lucky to get away with just having our blogs taken over (though a few too many of them, and we may say differently...)
Or MAYBE it's because they're BEHIND all of this. Yeahhh, think about it - Unix sales falling, investment in a free OS.. If I were IBM, I'd be wanting to back a winner that I could make MORE money from, not some COMMIE SOFTWARE FREE LOVE MUSH. So maybe a quiet little word with Darl, a sly nod, the rest is about to become history - viva l'IBM!
[this post is purely conjecture and should not be taken as any kind of legal aggression or rumour spreading oh please don't kill me ibm please don't send the lawyers round.]
Is it just me that found the article more "sarcastic" than "windows-hating"? Sarcasm pointed towards those other writers that proclaim they won't move away from Windows because it's just not the same, or because the tiny things are different. Maybe it was too subtle, or perhaps I'm just imagining it...
Views subject to media-frenzied hype and/or misunderstanding, as pointed out in the article, but nevertheless...
"We are fairly clear that commercial success has to go with our development goals,"
I seem to remember, when the Simputer first hit the backpages of IT newspaper supplements, that the point of the simputer was to provide a set of designs that could be produced cheaply, the idea being that this production would then be available to anyone with the right resources/motivation, rather than just those who wanted to sell it for profit to geeky businessmen. When I signed onto the Simputer mailing list, there was a lot of talk about this, and the method in which a charge would only be entailed for mass-producers - everybody else, wanting to produce less than a certain number of units, was free to take the designs (and the software, IIRC) and use them.
Casting an eye over the Simputer site reveals an interesting addition - the SGPL, or Simputer General Public License. There are then TWO separate licenses (the SDML and the, uh, SDML to manufacture it. Alas, I have no time at the moment to work out precisely what the differences are, though judging by the title ("Simputer" versus "Simputerised"), this is something to do with which components you intend to use.
Nevertheless, it would seem that the original intention to roll out a technology for the common good has slipped a little, though the reasons for this I can only speculate on, and would be wrong to do so... Alas, I think that the most practical way to achieve the original goals, to promote the use of communication technologies (as this is the essential bit) in the same way that radio technology spread, is to make it truly owned by nobody, veritably public domain. To achieve it alongside commercial interests means something usually has to give on one side or the other.
On a different note, perhaps the EU could gleam some advice on patents from the SGPL too...
There's loads a link from the Kazaa Lite FAQ, but it *is* possible to run KL under wine - got it running at the weekend. You have to do a bunch of configuring DLLs to be native, and it's really not straight out of the installbox, but tis possible.
Unfortunately, I think the protocol is all encrypted by Sharman, so a completely separate client has been elusive. The Lite versions just remove the "extras" that Sharman put in.
"digital"? "Audio file"? Is that like an audiophile?
Bluetooth: a short-range technology which uses radio waves instead of wires
How short? What are "radio waves"? I suspect most people have no idea how a radio works, yet they still use them.
And so the crux...
It showed that many people are delaying buying products such as digital cameras because it is all seen as too complex and difficult to understand.
Instead nearly two-third said they "wish to have things work and not spend time setting up."
4 letters. RTFM. No, really. This is the kind of lazy, counter-productive public attitude that we're now supposed to expect? That people hand over their cash and get the latest whatever instantly, out of the box. Hell, they won't even want to have to plug them in soon.
Seriously. There's a difference between innaccessible products, and not using something because it doesn't respond instantaneously to thought patterns. Just as I read man pages because I *want* to know how to use *nix, so you shouldn't *expect* to just know how to use something you've never used before, and that's why you read the manual.
Perhaps the problem is that there are so many new terminologies emerging every day. Hell, that confuses me sometimes. So, do people not learn how to drive, just because there are all these controls new to them? "Clutch?" "Steering wheel? Is that like the spare wheel?" No. You use it, you get used to it. And most importantly, you spend time learning what's called what.
The problem is that everybody wants the technology to progress, but not the understanding that goes with it, nor the way in which they use it. It's going to be a hell of a lot more complex if we have to resort to calling different things by the same name. Imagine the confusion caused by the simple statement, "It's a song player." What saddens me is the kind of attitude that says you've learnt all you're ever going to know by the time you reach some semblance of adulthood. It's progress. It's always happened. It always will. Stop whinging.
As a follow up, and in the interests of archival recipts, I received the following e-mail from David Hill in response to my e-mail (politely) asking for further information. He refers repeatedly to the "mostly disgusting" feedback they have received, and while I certainly would like to see them changing their tune with regards to Linux distro copying, I have to agree with him when he says that "This does the Linux community no favours", and whilst I recognise the fact that people are free to post whatever they like to public e-mail addresses, far better results would be achieved through an air of vague professionalism and tolerance in such circumstances.
Here is the response we gave to the NZ Herald, sorry it is quite long, also thank you for an intelligent response, sadly the level of response from others has not been as professional.
Regards David Hill
General Manager Software Images Ltd Us http://www.softwareimages.com
The Editor NZ Herald
Over recent days our business has been inundated with feedback on a NZ Herald article that at best, was less than flattering and at worst vulgar and personally threatening. Sadly it reflects an inability to communicate the facts clearly and deadline pressures for your journalists to submit an article.
Your article is factually incorrect with respect to the reason we declined to replicate Mr McKee's CDs. We wrote to him to "withdraw our quotation and offer" citing that "Software Images is unwilling to be dragged into any public debate with your organisation or others". Also, it was "a commercial decision of Software Images, so that our team can retain focus on our business activities not public debates."
Personally I am unwilling to make a decision on behalf of a client under journalistic pressure.
The feedback that has since been directed to our staff and our business has been mostly disgusting and a sad reflection of the improper power of the press and the internet. Sadly, rather than altering the decision, it has in fact reinforced it.
A popular IT industry website today notes "... this is pretty much only going to help our cause. We couldn't ask for better advertising (both the NZ Herald, and Slashdot)." So it seems that the NZ Herald is prepared to damage the good reputation of our business to advertise the interests of others; rather than accurately report.
Therefore; I suggest the NZ Herald should print a correction and this letter.
Furthermore there are basically two commercial issue that any reputable replicator faces;
1. Respect for Intellectual Property (IP) Software Images places a high value on our clients IP, we have indeed turned down work in the past where ownership/copyright/IP, whatever term you want to use, is to our knowledge in question. This probably differs from many replicators who may just rest on their disclaimer, or just turn a blind eye. Software Images will always try to protect and respect others IP as we hope people will respect ours. In this case we were still gathering information about the SCO v IBM litigation, when being pressured for a story by the reporter concerned. However, the fact that we were aware of it, our company we will err heavily on the side of caution until we are presented with sufficient data to make a decision.
2. Existing relationships Software Images is a Microsoft Certified Partner, and has earned a quality relationship with Microsoft NZ. The relationship goes past the point of customer/supplier of CDs and packaging. We have developed and implemented systems that serve our clients at a strategic level. This involves the exchange of creativity, ideas, and of course Intellectual Property. We believe there can be a conflict of interest for us to supply the same kind of high level services to Eaden. We have a non-compete clause in our service level Agreement with Microsoft which we res
"Let's act like grown-ups here and realise that although the company's attitude may be somewhat lacking, they are within their legal right to do what they're doing whether others like it or not."
Legally true, but acting like "grown-ups" is clearly more than just letting laws trample all over you, as is becoming more and more evident every day. As an open-source, anarchic "sector", we have no great recourse to legal funding, so we need other channels to influence people to the same extent as those that do. One of these is peer pressure.
While "lunatic fringe" e-mails to the guy may certainly not help anything, if we can encourage people to send concerned, inquisitive, polite, but most importantly, a lot of e-mails to him, then it starts to become a bit more of a force than a bunch of people whinging about it on a discussion board.;)
I'm going to mail him and ask for more details, express my disappointment, et al. The more the better, I say.
It's not about laws, it's about whoever has the loudest voice.
Yes, I've always thought this was a confused issue too.
However, in some extreme-point-haired-management kind of way, trust and security have now become such cliched buzzwords that they have lost any significant meaning they once meant, at least in politics. Most staements involving trust or security are generally (ok, IMHO:) regarded as an excuse to carry out some action, without any real rationale being given.
My own personal paranoia aside though, paradoxically security as a social process has had completely the opposite effect. By promoting "security" as a product, or perhaps as an effect of pushing "fear" as one, those that choose to believe in the hype generated by its rolling machinations of fear tend to not feel any more "secure" in their new promised land. Rather, quite the opposite. Nor do they "trust" anyone or anything any more.
Furthermore, you cannot "buy trust". Anyone that believes they are secure because they have "bought" security and trustworthiness from elsewhere deserves all they get, when it does eventually come.
State of the Control of the State
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"This technology can make our country more secure and prevent the nightmare vision of George Orwell at the same time," Gates said.
Blah blah yes it can but Orwell wasn't questioning the technology, he was writing about its use by the state. Technology's just a tool, any visionary realises that in primary school. The technology doesn't prevent a tendency away from trust, towards control of a populace, that's the job of people. Maybe if Billy was ranting on about how he was setting up technology focus groups to teach misuse of data, then he might have a point, but he's not.
To be fair, it's a difficult position. On one hand, all the little government agencies need to be responsible for something nationwide, and the general populace is way too lazy to bother abut protecting themselves, so something needs to get a handle on it. On the other hand... well, there'd be a good bit of ol-fashioned choir-preaching going on if I went on about state mis-use of data. Fortunately, being the largest home-user software house and one of the largest corporate influences fits Microsoft into both camps at once - hey, if it gets them money, then it must be good.
Yes, there's a hell of a long way to go in terms of getting users to respect their own privacy, and to respect the importances and influences of the gargantuan amount of data that is accessible these days.
However, what we really need for this is more education, not more technology. The latter is useless without the former. People will still be vulnerable if they don't understand what the system's doing, and the new wave of privacy technology isn't designed to do that. Just as the only secure machine is an off one, so the most private individual is a dead one.
Networking is ubiquitous, it affects us all, and as such we all take responsibility, not place it into the hands of a few people out to cash in on it. The sooner we realise that as a society, the better.
OK, I'm going to try and steer away from the obvious/.-bashing and BTTF-inspired jokes at this point, and take a moment to look at it from a slightly different angle. Fact of the matter is yes, I heard about this a number of weeks ago, and did a quick browse to find other WWN stories such as "Fish as Human Face!", but for me, the really stunning bit was just how quickly it spread. Despite the local pier burning down at the time, I still received a link to this story about half a dozen times within the space of a working day. Some people *seemed* to believe it, whilst others apparently realised its jocular potential, and added a smiley or two. Which raises two points.
1. The speed at which it spread. Netmemes have been pretty established in the mainstream ever since hamsterdance, at least, but I'm always amazed at the number and diversity of people by which this kind of thing, a random link (i.e. no different to other WWN headlines) that catches the attention of the foward button, propagates. Not just that, but the implications this holds in a connected society. In fact, a surprising amount of local news is disseminated to me in this fashion. In a relatively small town such as here, degrees of separation are only one or two on average, and major local news spreads through email and SMS networks way faster than newspapers or websites.
2. The other thing I find interesting, slightly related to 1), is the "gullibility" of people that forward such things. The tiniest amount of research (i.e. click a link), beyond the nature of the subject itself, proves this to be of instantly dubious nature, and yet I think (perhaps just pessimistically) that many of the people that received it in their mailbox didn't necessarily *believe* it, per se, but didn't instantly discard it as pure hoax, simply because it was forwarded to them by someone they knew. Alongside some other true, but fantastic, stories and URLs that get circulated these days, if a linnk gets presented as "news", then I think a lot of people just go "uh?" and forward it on, without really considering the origins. This isn't so important in this case but, tying it back to the first point, what implications does this have on more "serious" news distributed through more "informal" networks? Would I have really believed that the local pier was on fire if I hadn't had access to webcams trained on it?
I'd like to see news become more independent, more distributed, and I think cases such as this highlight both the advantages and cautions that need to be considered in such a process.
I think it's actually a hell of a lot easier to argue against this "philosophically" rather than technically. Most of the people that this will affect, i.e. the mainstream populace of users that will have the technology forced upon them unknowingly, have no grasp at all on cryptography, and really don't care if the code they are running is secure or not, so long as it does what they want it to do. Sure, they'll be *sold* it as "trustworthy" by the MS marketing dept, and MS may well have more people buying it rather than just copying it, but consumers won't flock to it purel because they think they can trust it.
On the other hand, just as has always been so, much of the popularity of MS software *is* its (illegal) availability. If I had a meg of ram for each time I'd mentioned to someone the fact that Linux is free, and their retort has been along the lines of "Yeah, but I can just get a copy of a Windows CD"... MS, like the music and film industries, seems intent upon removing the "features" of their industry that make it so attractive.
Now, if you tell people that, rather than try to point out that someone else has control over their computer, then they're possibly more likely to sit up and take attention a little more.
Hopefully, by the time MS introduce infallible copy protection, the Linux distros will be ready for/usr/joe...
Despite my exceedingly limited scientific knowledge (A-level physics... nothing out of the ordinary), I've come to completely disbelieve in the idea of parralel universes where any possible outcome is played out.
Why? Mostly bccause the arguments provided for them, at least on a layperson's level, are arrogant sci-fi that tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they just "assume" that another path is possible, e.g. life never formed and Earth is barren now, or they assume that universes differ through human choice, e.g. you choose not to go to the cinema, or whatever.
The first suffers as it completely ignores why anything happens. This would mean that there are universes created at every moment of time as gravity switches, or elements gain different properties. Why limit what can or can't happen?
The second suffers as it suddenly places the human freedom of choice at the center of its reasoning. This would mean that the human mind/soul/id was somehow *above* physical properties. Would new universes be created if an animal decided to do something differently? How about plants? As the lifefor, gets less complex, this rapidly decends into a form of the first argument - that some things can change, but others can't.
Maybe there's another way to work infinite multiverses into life, but I'm not convinced by anything I've seen so far, even if blinded by science and big numbers.
Retinal scans are very hard (from what I've read) to fake, and would deter common criminal activity.
Yes, any system can be hacked. Yes, one could either modify that backend to accept an illegal scan or somehow get around the retinal scanner itself...but can that not be done now?
So, you're going with the idea of spending another 1.5 billion pounds (at least) on another system that's supposed to guarantee integrity, but that you admit can be (or rather, will be) worked around?
Hacker-tendencies aside, what gets me is the way governments, companies, societies opt for the complicated solution to what they think is a simple problem. A society isn't "simple" - it's a complex organism that takes people a lifetime to fathom out. Throwing cameras and retinal scans and money at it thinking that it'll somehow magically reverse a slipping footage is short-sighted. Think what could be done if this 1.5 billion was invested in hospitals, schools, etc... Giving people the infrastructure and support so they don't feel that the system is just screwing them over.
How long til the.mil and the.gov and the rest realise that spoofed sites like these could be a fantastic tool in capturing possible IPs of those stupid enough to actually try to use them. Even if you chained through a string of proxies to register the domain, it'd still be useless without somewhere to point it at.
Editing *.mil* domains through a *logged* cgi form on a *.mil* server. Hello, no, I don't think so, thankyouverymuch. Might as well just a T-Shirt saying "got root?" or something...;)
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me a little of Pierre Menard, Borges' character who set out to perfectly re-create (not just copy) Don Quixote...
It's a good (and short) read:
http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html
While the reasons behind the indefinite postponement haven't really been clarified ("money... mumble etc mumble..."), it's worth thinking about what exactly Mind Candy were trying to do (or, at least, my impression - as an avid player of season 1 - of what direction they were heading in). Previous posts on the developer blog hint at the difficulties of getting the technology together, and when you consider what Mindcandy are trying to achieve with it, it's hard to blame them about the recent decision.
Season 1 was amazing for its creativity - the cards were great, but their integration with the storyline, along with the use of technology and off-line events to blur the boundaries of the game were something to look back at and marvel at. I don't think that the Perplex City bods wanted to lose any of that, while still being able to run and maintain a game that pretty much anyone could jump into at any point. The community that sprung up in season 1, for instance, was also amazing. But as the story rumbles on and more knowledge is needed to get into the game, there's increasingly more material to put people off catching up, and so the replayable side of things would be, I assume, a way for people to get into it in their own time. The tricky bit is tying that in with the community side of things as well - letting people collaborate and crack puzzles as a group.
I'm hoping they're still developing this technology and perfecting it - not just shelving it because it won't make a huge profit. IIRC, the technical team are still there - it's only the story writers that have been "let go", which makes sense as else they'll be sitting twiddling thumbs. But if the tech side can be pulled off well and in time (I'm thinking at latest before the next lot of cards is released) then there could be some really interesting ideas coming out of it. It's just a shame that much of the momentum built up over the last few years will have been lost.
"...the engineers who spent years designing this must be complete idiots, and would never think of these things on their own."
/. actually ever predicted too...
Ah, if only sarcasm were a form of proof. Unfortunately, history reveals that a bunch of people in lab conditions (or, indeed, even during controlled tests) may not actually think up everything. The ability be blinded by new science, to the detriment of old problems, is nothing new. Take Persil Power for instance - years of R&D, along with voluminous testing in particular countries didn't particularly stop it from being a complete shambles (in both technical and marekting terms) in the real world. ("Heavens, people want to wash old clothes? That's not in the spec!")
The race to solve a single problem, or to implement a new "discovery", often leads to a whole bunch of things that nobody would (or, perhaps could) ever think of. Of course, they'll probably be things that nobody on
"If the carrying of ID cards will be compulsory"
It doesn't need to be once they have your biometric data - they can just do an on-the-spot scan, as David Blunkett points out:
"Mr Blunkett said the technology would allow officials to double-check someone's identity simply by scanning, for example, an iris or a fingerprint."
Double-check? Why bother with the card if their biometric data is unfakeable?
What scares me is that there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way to stop this going through - it's happening far too quickly with far too much momentum and not enough thought or discussion to change the politicians' minds. Still, it's always worth trying.
True. But "PR Officers! PR Officers! PR Officers!" is harder to remix...
Interestingly, and somewhat depressingly, the first thing I knew about it was about 3 e-mails from Google News Alert, each telling me of about 3 different news sites reporting the story. Some of the sites weren't even that techie (CXO Today seems a good example of the people SCO were intending to reach with their statement). The fact that SCO got their press release out so far, and so quickly might not say anything about the true nature of their server(s) downtime, but it does indicate where their operational motives lie.
Steve Ballmer seems almost impressive with his shouts of "Developers! Developers! Developers!". I like to think of Darl giving a rousing meeting, stomping around the stage yelling "Marketeers! Marketeers! Marketeers! Lawyers! Lawyers! Lawyers!"
I was hoping for some enlightened progression into the interesting-for-some field of cross-siting, but am sorely disappointed at this basic-tut-in-PDF-clothing. Most people don't really discuss much when it comes to XSS as there isn't much to discuss. Well, maybe there is, but this paper doesn't highlight anything new or adventurous, just what any sentient techie could work out in 5 minutes of thought. Quite why it deserves so much attention (I've been meaning to check it out for a few days now...) is way beyond me. Pretty much everything in this "paper" was realised as soon as the first XSS attack was made. Ask Hotmail.
However, I suspect that there is some really interesting stuff that can be done involving cookies, plus I've also been trying to figure out site-wide ways to prevent cookie stealing (cookies across domains, progressive cookies, challenge-response methods...) but if anyone has any links to further research on this, I'd be grateful. There are some very interesting, more social, less technical ramifications as well as it begins to merge with ID theft and similar ilks.
If web services get big, really big, then such basic authentication for sessions may have to be addressed. At the moment, we're probably lucky to get away with just having our blogs taken over (though a few too many of them, and we may say differently...)
Or MAYBE it's because they're BEHIND all of this. Yeahhh, think about it - Unix sales falling, investment in a free OS.. If I were IBM, I'd be wanting to back a winner that I could make MORE money from, not some COMMIE SOFTWARE FREE LOVE MUSH. So maybe a quiet little word with Darl, a sly nod, the rest is about to become history - viva l'IBM!
[this post is purely conjecture and should not be taken as any kind of legal aggression or rumour spreading oh please don't kill me ibm please don't send the lawyers round.]
Is it just me that found the article more "sarcastic" than "windows-hating"? Sarcasm pointed towards those other writers that proclaim they won't move away from Windows because it's just not the same, or because the tiny things are different. Maybe it was too subtle, or perhaps I'm just imagining it...
I seem to remember, when the Simputer first hit the backpages of IT newspaper supplements, that the point of the simputer was to provide a set of designs that could be produced cheaply, the idea being that this production would then be available to anyone with the right resources/motivation, rather than just those who wanted to sell it for profit to geeky businessmen. When I signed onto the Simputer mailing list, there was a lot of talk about this, and the method in which a charge would only be entailed for mass-producers - everybody else, wanting to produce less than a certain number of units, was free to take the designs (and the software, IIRC) and use them.
Casting an eye over the Simputer site reveals an interesting addition - the SGPL, or Simputer General Public License. There are then TWO separate licenses (the SDML and the, uh, SDML to manufacture it. Alas, I have no time at the moment to work out precisely what the differences are, though judging by the title ("Simputer" versus "Simputerised"), this is something to do with which components you intend to use.
Nevertheless, it would seem that the original intention to roll out a technology for the common good has slipped a little, though the reasons for this I can only speculate on, and would be wrong to do so... Alas, I think that the most practical way to achieve the original goals, to promote the use of communication technologies (as this is the essential bit) in the same way that radio technology spread, is to make it truly owned by nobody, veritably public domain. To achieve it alongside commercial interests means something usually has to give on one side or the other.
On a different note, perhaps the EU could gleam some advice on patents from the SGPL too...
# Latest News: microsoft
Microsoft warns of critical IE flaws (MSNBC - Aug. 21)
Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design (Washington Post - Aug. 24)
Microsoft finds security flaws (Boston Globe - Aug. 22)
There's loads a link from the Kazaa Lite FAQ, but it *is* possible to run KL under wine - got it running at the weekend. You have to do a bunch of configuring DLLs to be native, and it's really not straight out of the installbox, but tis possible.
Unfortunately, I think the protocol is all encrypted by Sharman, so a completely separate client has been elusive. The Lite versions just remove the "extras" that Sharman put in.
And so the BBC defines...
MP3: a digital audio file
"digital"? "Audio file"? Is that like an audiophile?
Bluetooth: a short-range technology which uses radio waves instead of wires
How short? What are "radio waves"? I suspect most people have no idea how a radio works, yet they still use them.
And so the crux...
It showed that many people are delaying buying products such as digital cameras because it is all seen as too complex and difficult to understand.
Instead nearly two-third said they "wish to have things work and not spend time setting up."
4 letters. RTFM. No, really. This is the kind of lazy, counter-productive public attitude that we're now supposed to expect? That people hand over their cash and get the latest whatever instantly, out of the box. Hell, they won't even want to have to plug them in soon.
Seriously. There's a difference between innaccessible products, and not using something because it doesn't respond instantaneously to thought patterns. Just as I read man pages because I *want* to know how to use *nix, so you shouldn't *expect* to just know how to use something you've never used before, and that's why you read the manual.
Perhaps the problem is that there are so many new terminologies emerging every day. Hell, that confuses me sometimes. So, do people not learn how to drive, just because there are all these controls new to them? "Clutch?" "Steering wheel? Is that like the spare wheel?" No. You use it, you get used to it. And most importantly, you spend time learning what's called what.
The problem is that everybody wants the technology to progress, but not the understanding that goes with it, nor the way in which they use it. It's going to be a hell of a lot more complex if we have to resort to calling different things by the same name. Imagine the confusion caused by the simple statement, "It's a song player." What saddens me is the kind of attitude that says you've learnt all you're ever going to know by the time you reach some semblance of adulthood. It's progress. It's always happened. It always will. Stop whinging.
"Let's act like grown-ups here and realise that although the company's attitude may be somewhat lacking, they are within their legal right to do what they're doing whether others like it or not."
;)
Legally true, but acting like "grown-ups" is clearly more than just letting laws trample all over you, as is becoming more and more evident every day. As an open-source, anarchic "sector", we have no great recourse to legal funding, so we need other channels to influence people to the same extent as those that do. One of these is peer pressure.
While "lunatic fringe" e-mails to the guy may certainly not help anything, if we can encourage people to send concerned, inquisitive, polite, but most importantly, a lot of e-mails to him, then it starts to become a bit more of a force than a bunch of people whinging about it on a discussion board.
I'm going to mail him and ask for more details, express my disappointment, et al. The more the better, I say.
It's not about laws, it's about whoever has the loudest voice.
Yes, I've always thought this was a confused issue too.
:) regarded as an excuse to carry out some action, without any real rationale being given.
However, in some extreme-point-haired-management kind of way, trust and security have now become such cliched buzzwords that they have lost any significant meaning they once meant, at least in politics. Most staements involving trust or security are generally (ok, IMHO
My own personal paranoia aside though, paradoxically security as a social process has had completely the opposite effect. By promoting "security" as a product, or perhaps as an effect of pushing "fear" as one, those that choose to believe in the hype generated by its rolling machinations of fear tend to not feel any more "secure" in their new promised land. Rather, quite the opposite. Nor do they "trust" anyone or anything any more.
Furthermore, you cannot "buy trust". Anyone that believes they are secure because they have "bought" security and trustworthiness from elsewhere deserves all they get, when it does eventually come.
"This technology can make our country more secure and prevent the nightmare vision of George Orwell at the same time," Gates said.
Blah blah yes it can but Orwell wasn't questioning the technology, he was writing about its use by the state. Technology's just a tool, any visionary realises that in primary school. The technology doesn't prevent a tendency away from trust, towards control of a populace, that's the job of people. Maybe if Billy was ranting on about how he was setting up technology focus groups to teach misuse of data, then he might have a point, but he's not.
To be fair, it's a difficult position. On one hand, all the little government agencies need to be responsible for something nationwide, and the general populace is way too lazy to bother abut protecting themselves, so something needs to get a handle on it. On the other hand... well, there'd be a good bit of ol-fashioned choir-preaching going on if I went on about state mis-use of data. Fortunately, being the largest home-user software house and one of the largest corporate influences fits Microsoft into both camps at once - hey, if it gets them money, then it must be good.
Yes, there's a hell of a long way to go in terms of getting users to respect their own privacy, and to respect the importances and influences of the gargantuan amount of data that is accessible these days.
However, what we really need for this is more education, not more technology. The latter is useless without the former. People will still be vulnerable if they don't understand what the system's doing, and the new wave of privacy technology isn't designed to do that. Just as the only secure machine is an off one, so the most private individual is a dead one.
Networking is ubiquitous, it affects us all, and as such we all take responsibility, not place it into the hands of a few people out to cash in on it. The sooner we realise that as a society, the better.
Ick, hate replying to my own post. But in the interests of accuracy (oh, the irony), I did of course mean this pier on fire...
D'oh.
OK, I'm going to try and steer away from the obvious /.-bashing and BTTF-inspired jokes at this point, and take a moment to look at it from a slightly different angle. Fact of the matter is yes, I heard about this a number of weeks ago, and did a quick browse to find other WWN stories such as "Fish as Human Face!", but for me, the really stunning bit was just how quickly it spread. Despite the local pier burning down at the time, I still received a link to this story about half a dozen times within the space of a working day. Some people *seemed* to believe it, whilst others apparently realised its jocular potential, and added a smiley or two. Which raises two points.
1. The speed at which it spread. Netmemes have been pretty established in the mainstream ever since hamsterdance, at least, but I'm always amazed at the number and diversity of people by which this kind of thing, a random link (i.e. no different to other WWN headlines) that catches the attention of the foward button, propagates. Not just that, but the implications this holds in a connected society. In fact, a surprising amount of local news is disseminated to me in this fashion. In a relatively small town such as here, degrees of separation are only one or two on average, and major local news spreads through email and SMS networks way faster than newspapers or websites.
2. The other thing I find interesting, slightly related to 1), is the "gullibility" of people that forward such things. The tiniest amount of research (i.e. click a link), beyond the nature of the subject itself, proves this to be of instantly dubious nature, and yet I think (perhaps just pessimistically) that many of the people that received it in their mailbox didn't necessarily *believe* it, per se, but didn't instantly discard it as pure hoax, simply because it was forwarded to them by someone they knew. Alongside some other true, but fantastic, stories and URLs that get circulated these days, if a linnk gets presented as "news", then I think a lot of people just go "uh?" and forward it on, without really considering the origins. This isn't so important in this case but, tying it back to the first point, what implications does this have on more "serious" news distributed through more "informal" networks? Would I have really believed that the local pier was on fire if I hadn't had access to webcams trained on it?
I'd like to see news become more independent, more distributed, and I think cases such as this highlight both the advantages and cautions that need to be considered in such a process.
I think it's actually a hell of a lot easier to argue against this "philosophically" rather than technically. Most of the people that this will affect, i.e. the mainstream populace of users that will have the technology forced upon them unknowingly, have no grasp at all on cryptography, and really don't care if the code they are running is secure or not, so long as it does what they want it to do. Sure, they'll be *sold* it as "trustworthy" by the MS marketing dept, and MS may well have more people buying it rather than just copying it, but consumers won't flock to it purel because they think they can trust it.
/usr/joe...
On the other hand, just as has always been so, much of the popularity of MS software *is* its (illegal) availability. If I had a meg of ram for each time I'd mentioned to someone the fact that Linux is free, and their retort has been along the lines of "Yeah, but I can just get a copy of a Windows CD"... MS, like the music and film industries, seems intent upon removing the "features" of their industry that make it so attractive.
Now, if you tell people that, rather than try to point out that someone else has control over their computer, then they're possibly more likely to sit up and take attention a little more.
Hopefully, by the time MS introduce infallible copy protection, the Linux distros will be ready for
Despite my exceedingly limited scientific knowledge (A-level physics... nothing out of the ordinary), I've come to completely disbelieve in the idea of parralel universes where any possible outcome is played out.
Why? Mostly bccause the arguments provided for them, at least on a layperson's level, are arrogant sci-fi that tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they just "assume" that another path is possible, e.g. life never formed and Earth is barren now, or they assume that universes differ through human choice, e.g. you choose not to go to the cinema, or whatever.
The first suffers as it completely ignores why anything happens. This would mean that there are universes created at every moment of time as gravity switches, or elements gain different properties. Why limit what can or can't happen?
The second suffers as it suddenly places the human freedom of choice at the center of its reasoning. This would mean that the human mind/soul/id was somehow *above* physical properties. Would new universes be created if an animal decided to do something differently? How about plants? As the lifefor, gets less complex, this rapidly decends into a form of the first argument - that some things can change, but others can't.
Maybe there's another way to work infinite multiverses into life, but I'm not convinced by anything I've seen so far, even if blinded by science and big numbers.
My 2-layman-pence, anyway.
So, you're going with the idea of spending another 1.5 billion pounds (at least) on another system that's supposed to guarantee integrity, but that you admit can be (or rather, will be) worked around?
Hacker-tendencies aside, what gets me is the way governments, companies, societies opt for the complicated solution to what they think is a simple problem. A society isn't "simple" - it's a complex organism that takes people a lifetime to fathom out. Throwing cameras and retinal scans and money at it thinking that it'll somehow magically reverse a slipping footage is short-sighted. Think what could be done if this 1.5 billion was invested in hospitals, schools, etc... Giving people the infrastructure and support so they don't feel that the system is just screwing them over.
My tuppence anyway.
All my own emphasisising...
"XML Specification Will Deliver Reliable Authentication and Auditing to Safeguard Privacy and Increase Effectiveness of Lawful Intercepts"
So they're coming up with a standard to protect your data and make it available? Nice.
Roll up, roll up, get yer snake oil!
How long til the .mil and the .gov and the rest realise that spoofed sites like these could be a fantastic tool in capturing possible IPs of those stupid enough to actually try to use them. Even if you chained through a string of proxies to register the domain, it'd still be useless without somewhere to point it at.
;)
Editing *.mil* domains through a *logged* cgi form on a *.mil* server. Hello, no, I don't think so, thankyouverymuch. Might as well just a T-Shirt saying "got root?" or something...
@stake's advisory release:0 10603-1.txt
t stake_etherleak_report.pdf
http://www.atstake.com/research/advisories/2003/a
And their etherleak report PDF:
http://www.atstake.com/research/advisories/2003/a