> The basic point is that in the status quo there is no double check and no > accountability," Schoen said. "So if Certificate Authorities are doing things > that they shouldn't, no one would know, no one would observe it. We think at > the very least there needs to be a double check."
And the tragic thing is, we pay A LOT of money for this nonsense. As far as I am concerned, the entire CA industry was from the get-go one of the biggest money-making scams ever. That TLA's etc. could get perfectly acceptable MITM-certificates was always clear because the implemented CA/SSL model purposefully twisted the notion of trust on both human and technological levels into absurdity. Hell, I am waiting for the revelation, that (some of) the CA-mega-cash-cows are actually NSA and/or Mossad and/or [a few more] front-ends and we have paid for the massive build-up and extension of Big Brother under the guise of security and protection, from, well...among other things...Big Brother!
> it doesn't even make sense arguing _against_ document standardization, > nor it makes sense to even immagine a proposal of not having document > not using an open standard
When your company uses 95% *.doc(x), 4.9% *.pdf and 0.1% oddball formats, then arguing for open standards and OpenDocument in particular, elicits as much as a lookin-at-you-weird-smile.. Then they'll go right back to work, consisting of debating how to best implement Windows 7. As much as it sucks and I personally hate it: DOC *IS* the standard. Microsoft has done exceedingly well in tying up companies in their spiderweb. But hey...at least the EU now bumped up Opera's usage points by a couple percent which really matters so it's all good!
> the constant disruption of my C&C4 SP game makes this unplayable
So how is the producer of the game get the message via free market tools, when EULA's as well as store policies prohibit the return of 'opened' games? From what I can tell for at least this user above the product is clearly defective. It relies on the non-defectiveness of things outside the package, such as his ISP etc.. Yet I am sure they will not give him a return/refund because they'll disagree about the defectiveness of the game. But is this even enforcible? I'd say, something like this needs to go to court eventually!
> Why is it phrased "Clear History on Exit?" That implies it was written to disk.
Well, Cache, Cookies etc. WERE written to disk already. The clearing of those files on closing the browser is what I was referring to. Firefox in the past had the option of popping up a window with your preset to-be-deleted items already checked, but with the option of manual override at that time. Now they've done away with that and do the deletion invisibly to the user (with the presets somewhere in the Preferences). I know, there's a plug-in to restore it, but I don't get why this great option was removed in the first place. Several friends on trying Firefox the first time (I had already set it up accordingly) LOVED that option and may have been the first time they ever realized, that their browsing does leave traces. Lots of them. So they enjoyed removing them too.
> Why not Store No History? Safer and (marginally) faster.
That'd be the Private Browsing Option. Similar End-Result (no locally stored data), just up-front. Two slightly different approaches though. I like having the history (blue links I visited already, suggestions in the location bar based on previous URL's etc.), when I use my own private computer where nobody else has access to. I don't need, don't want complete private browsing (from whom?) that moment. Removing cookies on browser exit is enough for me, whereas on some other machine (friends, Internet Cafe) I always remove everything on close.
> That's true, as long as you turn off Google as the default search, disable cookies
And don't forget about LSO cookies (Flash directory), that do NOT get deleted by FF's cookie deletion on exit. Extra add-on is needed (BetterPrivacy) to do so.
Oh...and MozDevs...please restore the 'Clear History on Exit' window on browser exit. Thanx!
> Just being through with your on-duty days neither gets you out of the reserve (i.e. you keep a huge garbage bag full of, well, army garbage) > nor does it get you out of owning an fully-automatic assault rifle.
First part is correct, the second isn't. While you might still be the technical owner of the gun, you do NOT have to keep it anywhere near you. You can, as of recently, deposit it in an armory (Zeughaus), though not all of them are as of yet equipped to handle this.
> Because it's comparing apples (people who wanted a gun and so bought one) vs oranges (people who may or may not have wanted one but are legally required to have one anyway).
Well, to be correct, you are NOT required to keep your gun (Sturmgewehr) after your compulsory military service. It's up to you to say you wanna keep it or not.
> learning Schwytzerduutsch is notoriously difficult, spoken in dialects by 60% of the population, and NEVER in written form (satirical poems for Fassnacht notwithstanding)
Swiss-German is being used in written form. You can bet, that most SMS, Facebook posts, e-mail's etc. are being written not in proper high-german but in swiss-german dialect by the majority of people, especially the younger generation(s). It does look funny and yes, is certainly not officially recognized, but then, Ebonics wasn't either at some point;-)
> Yes, use flash cards, but not the dead tree type.
I still much prefer the dead-tree type. Have not yet found a nice flashcard-maker program, that'll let you let you create the cards front and back and then print them out double-sided on a sheet of paper (several cards on one page so you'll cut it up into individual cards with scissors). Searching through the already entered vocabulary would be nice too. Suggestions anyone (pref. Linux)?
> So instead of looking for intelligence, why not look for life? Call it SETL. The search would consist of looking for things that only life produces. (Certain chemicals are one example).
Headlines:
"Secretions, Emanations, Totally, Life!"
"E.T. wanna call home (but don't know the numbers)!"
> If we discovered life close enough that we would interact with it beyond sending multi-year radio postcards, then perhaps. But the likeliest scenario is that we'll pick up some stray signals from a civilization so far away that at best we'll be able to send messages and hope our children can read their responses.
Why does it have to be postcard-style back-and-forth communication with, as you seem to imply, little actual content? It could be a continuous stream which, after the first initial contact/delay, would provide more than enough material and information to work with...
> Dolphins can barely recognize themselves in a mirror. I'm not sure we're going to get a lot of eloquent communication out of them.
The dolphin to the other: "Look, now they have reached the stage where they start to discover and test their environment. That's quite an advanced skill given their limited mental abilities! Interesting..."
> Whatever it is ETs would use, current SETI is like indians from the 1500s trying to eavesdrop our current communications by looking for smoke signals.
Well, as cute as it sounds in regards to communication...if the middle-age indians were looking today for smoke signals don't you think they'd find PLENTY of evidence of life based on smoke-emanations (they just happen to be industrial etc.)? That's perhaps exactly what was meant in TFA: look for life in all its possible ramifications and consequences. Using all sciences, not just radio et all.. I mean, if the martian rovers would send us a picture of footprints in the red sand tomorrow, we wouldn't need radio signals either to form a pretty strong belief that something's up (there).
This will soft-wrap the lines. The written text will still go to the end of the editor/display though. Haven't yet found a way to limit the line length (say, 70 characters) for easy reading, yet still have it only soft-wrapped for final posting to/..
> I'm never happy with the way my browser handles line-breaking, so I'm > eternally grateful to you for taking the initiative and doing it yourself.
More a result of using an external editor. And even though I have a feeling you were being ironic, I DO find it easier to read with a normal line-length, as opposed to reading across the whole damn (wide)screen.;-)
> cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their > counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for > 20 years, but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication > of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt.
Nevermind the intellectual "my code's better than yours" games between arguably otherwise brilliant researchers.
Where the NSA certainly has 'maintained the upper hand' is in real life versus ordinary people. The technology of surveillance has gotten orders of a magnitude better and surrounding laws have been adapted to make it fully legal to use that technology to the max against The People (whereever they may be). Who in this discussion encrypts their e-mails or uses 'sophisticated crypto schemes' as a matter of course? At best it's maybe SSH here and there and the occasional SSL site. The vast majority of traffic is plain-text, as it's been since the days of papyrus. Hell, back in those days at least only a few people could read it and thus had better privacy than we mostly have today. Nevermind the ramifications of Facebook and similar tools.
Mr. Shamir can engage in discussions of who developed Public Key Cryptography first or not. It's all nonsense, because as brilliant as the concept is, the PUBLIC has no part in it to 99.99% and therefore we can consider it a complete FAILURE on grounds of lack of acceptance and widespread use. Meanwhile the NSA sits back and laughs, as their electronic tentacles filter through PUBLIC('s) traffic...any traffic...and mostly doesn't have to bother with breaking anything. Cuz we 'oh-so-clever' geeks have failed miserably. If the NSA has any problem, then it's to store and process/search through the data they get...not the acquisition.
Slashdot Mirror
> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/packet-forensics/
> The basic point is that in the status quo there is no double check and no
> accountability," Schoen said. "So if Certificate Authorities are doing things
> that they shouldn't, no one would know, no one would observe it. We think at
> the very least there needs to be a double check."
And the tragic thing is, we pay A LOT of money for this nonsense. As far as I am concerned, the entire CA industry was from the get-go one of the biggest money-making scams ever. That TLA's etc. could get perfectly acceptable MITM-certificates was always clear because the implemented CA/SSL model purposefully twisted the notion of trust on both human and technological levels into absurdity. Hell, I am waiting for the revelation, that (some of) the CA-mega-cash-cows are actually NSA and/or Mossad and/or [a few more] front-ends and we have paid for the massive build-up and extension of Big Brother under the guise of security and protection, from, well...among other things...Big Brother!
> IT bought Microsoft's soul a long time ago.
No...quite the opposite!
> it doesn't even make sense arguing _against_ document standardization,
> nor it makes sense to even immagine a proposal of not having document
> not using an open standard
When your company uses 95% *.doc(x), 4.9% *.pdf and 0.1% oddball formats, then arguing for open standards and OpenDocument in particular, elicits as much as a lookin-at-you-weird-smile.. Then they'll go right back to work, consisting of debating how to best implement Windows 7. As much as it sucks and I personally hate it: DOC *IS* the standard. Microsoft has done exceedingly well in tying up companies in their spiderweb. But hey...at least the EU now bumped up Opera's usage points by a couple percent which really matters so it's all good!
> the constant disruption of my C&C4 SP game makes this unplayable
So how is the producer of the game get the message via free market tools, when EULA's as well as store policies prohibit the return of 'opened' games? From what I can tell for at least this user above the product is clearly defective. It relies on the non-defectiveness of things outside the package, such as his ISP etc.. Yet I am sure they will not give him a return/refund because they'll disagree about the defectiveness of the game. But is this even enforcible? I'd say, something like this needs to go to court eventually!
"OK, Harwell, we've had a problem here!..."
"This is Harwell. Say again please?"
> You can still set it up to clear it all automatically when you exit
I know...thanx. I am unhappy about having this wonderful feature demoted to invisible background status and out of user's awareness!
> Why is it phrased "Clear History on Exit?" That implies it was written to disk.
Well, Cache, Cookies etc. WERE written to disk already. The clearing of those files on closing the browser is what I was referring to. Firefox in the past had the option of popping up a window with your preset to-be-deleted items already checked, but with the option of manual override at that time. Now they've done away with that and do the deletion invisibly to the user (with the presets somewhere in the Preferences).
I know, there's a plug-in to restore it, but I don't get why this great option was removed in the first place. Several friends on trying Firefox the first time (I had already set it up accordingly) LOVED that option and may have been the first time they ever realized, that their browsing does leave traces. Lots of them. So they enjoyed removing them too.
> Why not Store No History? Safer and (marginally) faster.
That'd be the Private Browsing Option. Similar End-Result (no locally stored data), just up-front. Two slightly different approaches though. I like having the history (blue links I visited already, suggestions in the location bar based on previous URL's etc.), when I use my own private computer where nobody else has access to. I don't need, don't want complete private browsing (from whom?) that moment. Removing cookies on browser exit is enough for me, whereas on some other machine (friends, Internet Cafe) I always remove everything on close.
> Apparently he doesn't know how to use the three seashells.
LOL! He doesn't know how to use the three seashells!!! :-D
> He's talking about "Washlets" in Japan, which are indeed paperless toilets.
From your linked Wikipedia stub:
"In order to determine the anal position, 300 male and female employees of Toto were surveyed during development."
I don't know who's got the shittier job here...the surveyors or the surveyed employees...LOL!
"Toto...I don't think we're in Kansas anymore..."
> > If you think that's what a bidet is designed for
> Well it's not a drinking fountain... ... I mean... is it?
Depends entirely on your species.
> That's true, as long as you turn off Google as the default search, disable cookies
And don't forget about LSO cookies (Flash directory), that do NOT get deleted by FF's cookie deletion on exit. Extra add-on is needed (BetterPrivacy) to do so.
Oh...and MozDevs...please restore the 'Clear History on Exit' window on browser exit. Thanx!
> Just being through with your on-duty days neither gets you out of the reserve (i.e. you keep a huge garbage bag full of, well, army garbage)
> nor does it get you out of owning an fully-automatic assault rifle.
First part is correct, the second isn't. While you might still be the technical owner of the gun, you do NOT have to keep it anywhere near you. You can, as of recently, deposit it in an armory (Zeughaus), though not all of them are as of yet equipped to handle this.
> Because it's comparing apples (people who wanted a gun and so bought one) vs oranges (people who may or may not have wanted one but are legally required to have one anyway).
Well, to be correct, you are NOT required to keep your gun (Sturmgewehr) after your compulsory military service. It's up to you to say you wanna keep it or not.
> learning Schwytzerduutsch is notoriously difficult, spoken in dialects by 60% of the population, and NEVER in written form (satirical poems for Fassnacht notwithstanding)
Swiss-German is being used in written form. You can bet, that most SMS, Facebook posts, e-mail's etc. are being written not in proper high-german but in swiss-german dialect by the majority of people, especially the younger generation(s). It does look funny and yes, is certainly not officially recognized, but then, Ebonics wasn't either at some point ;-)
> Yes, use flash cards, but not the dead tree type.
I still much prefer the dead-tree type. Have not yet found a nice flashcard-maker program, that'll let you let you create the cards front and back and then print them out double-sided on a sheet of paper (several cards on one page so you'll cut it up into individual cards with scissors). Searching through the already entered vocabulary would be nice too. Suggestions anyone (pref. Linux)?
> So instead of looking for intelligence, why not look for life? Call it SETL. The search would consist of looking for things that only life produces. (Certain chemicals are one example).
Headlines:
"Secretions, Emanations, Totally, Life!"
"E.T. wanna call home (but don't know the numbers)!"
"SETI SETLes for Less!"
Join the Army! Meet interesting aliens! Kill them...
> If we discovered life close enough that we would interact with it beyond sending multi-year radio postcards, then perhaps. But the likeliest scenario is that we'll pick up some stray signals from a civilization so far away that at best we'll be able to send messages and hope our children can read their responses.
Why does it have to be postcard-style back-and-forth communication with, as you seem to imply, little actual content? It could be a continuous stream which, after the first initial contact/delay, would provide more than enough material and information to work with...
> Given that humans have only been in existence on earth for 200K Years, why is it that no aliens have colonised Earth *before* we got here?
Who says they didn't? Maybe we are the aliens we keep lookin' for. Bummer! :-P
> Dolphins can barely recognize themselves in a mirror. I'm not sure we're going to get a lot of eloquent communication out of them.
The dolphin to the other:
"Look, now they have reached the stage where they start to discover and test their environment. That's quite an advanced skill given their limited mental abilities! Interesting..."
> Whatever it is ETs would use, current SETI is like indians from the 1500s trying to eavesdrop our current communications by looking for smoke signals.
Well, as cute as it sounds in regards to communication...if the middle-age indians were looking today for smoke signals don't you think they'd find PLENTY of evidence of life based on smoke-emanations (they just happen to be industrial etc.)? That's perhaps exactly what was meant in TFA: look for life in all its possible ramifications and consequences. Using all sciences, not just radio et all.. I mean, if the martian rovers would send us a picture of footprints in the red sand tomorrow, we wouldn't need radio signals either to form a pretty strong belief that something's up (there).
OK, thanx for the tip. Shall now use:
":set wrap linebreak textwidth=0"
This will soft-wrap the lines. /..
The written text will still go to the end of the editor/display though. Haven't yet found a way to limit the line length (say, 70 characters) for easy reading, yet still have it only soft-wrapped for final posting to
> I type perfect touch type style.
> At my best, I do about 90-120 WPM
Can you SAY the first sentence a few times at that speed? :-)
> I'm never happy with the way my browser handles line-breaking, so I'm
> eternally grateful to you for taking the initiative and doing it yourself.
More a result of using an external editor. And even though I have a feeling you ;-)
were being ironic, I DO find it easier to read with a normal line-length, as
opposed to reading across the whole damn (wide)screen.
> cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their
> counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for
> 20 years, but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication
> of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt.
Nevermind the intellectual "my code's better than yours" games
between arguably otherwise brilliant researchers.
Where the NSA certainly has 'maintained the upper hand' is in real
life versus ordinary people. The technology of surveillance has
gotten orders of a magnitude better and surrounding laws have been
adapted to make it fully legal to use that technology to the max
against The People (whereever they may be). Who in this discussion
encrypts their e-mails or uses 'sophisticated crypto schemes' as a
matter of course? At best it's maybe SSH here and there and the
occasional SSL site. The vast majority of traffic is plain-text, as
it's been since the days of papyrus. Hell, back in those days at
least only a few people could read it and thus had better privacy
than we mostly have today. Nevermind the ramifications of Facebook
and similar tools.
Mr. Shamir can engage in discussions of who developed Public Key
Cryptography first or not. It's all nonsense, because as brilliant
as the concept is, the PUBLIC has no part in it to 99.99% and
therefore we can consider it a complete FAILURE on grounds of lack
of acceptance and widespread use. Meanwhile the NSA sits back and
laughs, as their electronic tentacles filter through PUBLIC('s)
traffic...any traffic...and mostly doesn't have to bother with
breaking anything. Cuz we 'oh-so-clever' geeks have failed
miserably. If the NSA has any problem, then it's to store and
process/search through the data they get...not the acquisition.