No need to worry about ink: even the cheapest and nastiest laser printers use toner, and a mixture of thermoplastic and carbon black thermally fused to your paper isn't going anywhere(in fact, if you use lousy enough paper, some lucky future archeology intern may have the... unmixed pleasure... of picking the little plastic character glyphs out of the pile of dust, trying to keep them in their original order!).
His data-restore needs probably don't extend to truly epic lengths in any case, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Is it possible with any arbitrary smartphone to buy a prepaid anonymous SIM card and use that so that there is no direct tie between the card and a personal identity? Obviously one would still have to be careful not to disclose that in other ways, but it would make their job harder.
Any phone that isn't SIM-locked and takes SIMs should theoretically work. It isn't exactly news that all contemporary smartphones dedicate their existence to getting you and your credit card locked into their maker's walled garden, and tend to bleed device-unique data like stuck pigs; but at least you'll be able to pay for the line over which your phone phones home in cash!
In addition to being one of those things that is harder than it looks(which would at least be theoretically solvable with a sufficient supply of comp sci talent), there's the more obvious conflict-of-interest problem: If I'm in the business of selling data, I'm not exactly going to work any harder than strictly required to make my product less valuable to my customers. "Anonymized" is a good word for me to throw in, because it's comforting, legally meaningless, and keeps people off my back; but I have no actual incentive to munge the data in ways that resist re-identifying attacks. In fact, my customers are very likely to prefer that I don't do that.
Inconveniently, AT&T has metastasized to sites all over the place, many of them rather solidly built. You'll need an atypically good arm to more than add a few scorch marks to the masonry shell.
My point exactly: There's a nice mature standard, cheap and/or free software that's fairly easy to use, and look at how wonderful the uptake is! Just imagine how good adoption will be for technologies that are more annoying, or less mature, or much trickier to use...
With an actual conclusion eventually reached. An ambiguous war on terror doesn't really have any sort of end date, unless we can somehow wipe out terror on Earth.
Let's check with Strategic Air Command... they aren't what they were in their heyday; but they might still be up to the task.
Fort Sumter surrendered in 1861. Washington DC borders on Virgina facing off against the Confederate capital a bare 100 miles away. You are an idiot if you don't secure the only means of communication in the world that moves reliably at speeds greater than a normal walking pace,
That is, of course, the other pernicious implication of any civil war comparisons: from the perspective of the US Government, the civil war actually was most of the emergencies and exigencies that people like to invoke when demanding expanded powers. At no time since the revolutionary war(which actually might have ended fairly quietly, had the rebels lost, with a bunch of executions of notable rebels, followed by pragmatic write-off of the rest and a canada-like trajectory) had things looked nearly so dire. Even the world wars were basically Europe's problem, with us intervening at arm's length as our interests dictated, and the Cold War could have gone hot and really fucked up everybody's day; but unless it actually did, things were mostly quiet.
Anybody who, implicitly or explicitly, asserts anything even close to contemporary threats of Civil War gravity needs a smack with the cluebat.
It was just as wrong then as this is now. Of course, people back then couldn't even dream of having such advanced surveillance technology.
It was also barely comparable: 'total control of the telegraph lines', even the legal right to steam open and inspect all the mail you can handle, was complete chickenshit with the material culture of 1862, compared to access to internet, telephone, and mail-stream access along with the computers to actually make sense of it all.
That's the thing, while abuses-in-law are never good, the kicker is always what you can do, not what you are allowed to do. Hell, God-King-Pharoh-Somebody-Who-Makes-The-Nile-Flood probably had the legal right to unlimited surveillance and rewriting of his subjects' thoughts, since only by his divinity did they exist; but so what? His actual capabilities were only slightly greater than "Go to highest window in palace, look out and squint."
It takes two to trade, no? As the one currently holding the object, he can decide whether or not he is willing to trade. If he isn't, it doesn't much matter if you are...
Arguably, people are entirely correct when they throw up their hands and profess ignorance. The fishing-expedition style attacks that have been revealed so far appear to concentrate on a combination of sniffing out activity between nodes on the network(which are also the data required to route traffic between those nodes, which makes hiding it difficult) and getting wholesale dumps from collaborating companies(which you pretty much have to assume is all of them unless specifically proven otherwise on jurisdictional or architectural grounds).
The problem trying to counter that sort of network based attack is that you can't really 'just install security software' and have done with it. Everyone you wish to interact with has to as well. There is no software, however much expertise I am willing to bring to bear, that will allow me to send a message to user@gmail.com without showing up in the monitoring of his account. Same deal for phone calls, and others.
The really ugly 'gotcha', with any attempt at encrypted/obfuscated/steganographic communication, cryptocat included but hardly alone, is storage.
If your adversary is just drinking from the firehose, and lacks the ability to do more than a cursory inspection, all you have to do is be better than their cryptoanalysts today. If they have sufficient storage to archive a nontrivial percentage of what passes by(or their cursory inspection is good enough to classify suspicious encrypted traffic for storage) you have to be better, today, than their cryptoanalysts for however long what you are saying is relevant. The former is hard, the latter is downright scary.
this will not stop a gang of rapists cutting their way in from the side raping everyone stealing and what they like probably better than a white sheet over a couple of wires though
If you are reduced to relying on fortified architecture for that, you arguably have bigger problems(as well as problems that should be solvable at lower cost and weight by some flavor of law enforcement, rather than fortress architecture). Tents are, naturally, pitifully insecure; but you have to go a substantial distance up the food chain before there isn't a fairly obvious flaw that a few reasonably strong guys(bonus points for users) can crack in a couple of minutes.
While any incremental advances in design are a good thing, it seems like the timescales we are talking about here are starting to get into 'perhaps you need to re-think your approach to the problem...' territory.
12 years is really pushing the idea of 'temporary' to the limit. How long do you go before you stop trying to incrementally decrease the squalor in a given refugee camp and start to admit that either you need to get your shit together on whatever is keeping your refugee camp full, or you need to admit that you have no resolution in sight on that one, and admit that your refugee camp is now a town.
Why would (most) of the bacteria in our bodies want to disrupt the sweet gig they've got?
We work our fool polycellular asses off trying to maintain nice, stable, internal conditions, complete with nutrients and an immune system with a vested interest in kicking out the troublemakers...
You aren't going to find a better deal clinging to a rock somewhere.
I have met a lot of those recuriters, they are great people. They are only doing their job. I love how you are mad at the NSA for spying, you should go to the top of the food chain, Congress is the one who authorized it/allowed it. Even after what has been released there are few congressmen who are against it. So that's where you should turn your anger.
And the reason that I should be unfailingly polite to every hatchetman I meet while I futilely attempt to even get noticed by the top of the food chain is what exactly?
I'd be more conflicted about it if they were a bunch of conscripts, or had been stop-lossed into participation that they stopped actually believing in N tours ago; but the further you get from those scenarios, the less 'just doing my job' buys you.
This started with a thread on Debian. There are dozens of projects on Debian that use BerkleyDB. Should they be configured to 5.3 forever? If so what if there are security problems how will Debian even know? If not they go over to 6. Which means dozens of libraries switch over to AGPL....
I suspect that that depends on who actually does the work to keep those packages in Debian. As a distribution(considering their positions on firmware blobs, what you have to do to qualify as 'debian' rather than 'debian-unfree', etc.), Debian doesn't seem like a terribly obviously candidate for being hugely worried about the AGPL.
Given that Debian is also the basis of about a zillion other distros, as well as in-house quasi-distros, though, I suspect that they have a reasonable number of users, probably including some genuinely useful ones, who have purposes for which an AGPL BerkleyDB is Not Going To Fly. We'll have to see how that shakes out.
I'd be shocked to see anything useful at a legal level; but I'd encourage everyone to do their part by heaping scorn and vitriol upon the people who help make advertising possible.
There are real people(and a lot of them) who work on churning out ads, 'concepts' like this, various social media flimflam, etc, etc. If admitting that you were one of them were treated more like admitting that you have a thing for puppy sodomy, it might help, and it would, at least, decrease their quality of life and increase their turnover rate.
Eh, people saying mean things on the internet are a dime a dozen, I doubt Oracle cares very much. And(not that there's anything requiring them to) the fact that Oracle tends to get religion on the GPL only when they either wish to sell commercial licenses for a product, or to push people onto a commercial product, tends to make people rather mistrustful of their altruism.
Using the AGPL is being "greedy"? Isn't that the very license the FSF recommends for software run over a network? MongoDB is also AGPL and there was none of this drama directed at 10gen over it.
LOL hypocritical freetards.
I'm going to make the optimistic assumption that you aren't merely trolling: AGPL is, indeed, what the FSF recommends for software likely to be used primarily on backend-type stuff(where conventional GPL, even v3, does nothing to stop the formation of an in-house mostly proprietary setup).
Oracle, however, is in the business of selling database software, not of being the FSF. So, when they take an existing database and re-license it in ways that are calculated to force existing users of that database to either leave or stump up for a proprietary license from Oracle, they get called 'greedy'.
Even as the copyright holder, Oracle can't do jack about existing versions released under other licenses(even if they went full nuclear, and actually terminated all downloads/media purchases under any prior license, there are still third party mirrors. So, Version X-1 is Sleepycat forever.
Is BerkeleyDB a project where Big New Features or Much Needed Upgrades are something that happens frequently, meaning that if you aren't running Version X, you might as well go home? If so, Oracle has actual leverage. If not, it seems likely that a maintained-if-not-terribly-active version can exist in perpetuity, with Oracle having to offer serious advantages in order to retain their status as the standard against which 3rd party development is done.
Thorn already exists as an obsolete form of "th". I don't think it will work it I try to enter it here, but here goes..
Ah, but his version is trademarked, and probably has considerably fewer fonts-not-designed-by-people-who-should-really-stick-to-managing-restaurants available, so why would you want to use Thorn?
I wouldn't be too surprised if that has something to do with the fact that 'filming'(whether to actual...chemical film... like some kind of barbarian, or to digital) requires nontrivially different(and not inexpensive) hardware, and you have to decide that you are shooting 3d before you start shooting, while re-rendering an existing set of CG models is mostly a computational problem.
3D or implementation? I want to see Wimbledon in a hologram, played on my coffee table.
Some of both: A lot of techniques that work well in 2d, and have a lot of TV and film people well versed in them, don't look nearly as good in 'true' 3d as opposed to 2d-with-some-perspective-tricks, so the quality of what was on tap really didn't sell the medium(doubly so if the bean counters decreed that the same 'content' must have both a 2d and a 3d release, so all the '3d' stuff was essentially required to be pure window dressing so that the 2d theater release, DVD sales, and cable licenses would still work).
And implementation certainly didn't help. "Animated holograms on your table"(even at the Star Wars level of flickery, insubstantial, probably not actually all that pleasing compared to just a normal screen of substantial size) are basically sci-fi, and the various goofy-glasses flavors don't work terribly well, at all for some people, require goofy glasses, and tend to eat some brightness and image quality compared to 2d gear of equivalent price. The fact that most of the vendors were gouging or half-assing, sometimes both, didn't help.
And a common standard... otherwise it is VHS vs. Beta again.
That sounds dangerously like an opening for commodification of television hardware. And pushback against that was pretty much the only impetus behind the desperate effort of the home entertainment industry to get us to give a fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to worry about ink: even the cheapest and nastiest laser printers use toner, and a mixture of thermoplastic and carbon black thermally fused to your paper isn't going anywhere(in fact, if you use lousy enough paper, some lucky future archeology intern may have the... unmixed pleasure... of picking the little plastic character glyphs out of the pile of dust, trying to keep them in their original order!).
His data-restore needs probably don't extend to truly epic lengths in any case, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Is it possible with any arbitrary smartphone to buy a prepaid anonymous SIM card and use that so that there is no direct tie between the card and a personal identity? Obviously one would still have to be careful not to disclose that in other ways, but it would make their job harder.
Any phone that isn't SIM-locked and takes SIMs should theoretically work. It isn't exactly news that all contemporary smartphones dedicate their existence to getting you and your credit card locked into their maker's walled garden, and tend to bleed device-unique data like stuck pigs; but at least you'll be able to pay for the line over which your phone phones home in cash!
In addition to being one of those things that is harder than it looks(which would at least be theoretically solvable with a sufficient supply of comp sci talent), there's the more obvious conflict-of-interest problem: If I'm in the business of selling data, I'm not exactly going to work any harder than strictly required to make my product less valuable to my customers. "Anonymized" is a good word for me to throw in, because it's comforting, legally meaningless, and keeps people off my back; but I have no actual incentive to munge the data in ways that resist re-identifying attacks. In fact, my customers are very likely to prefer that I don't do that.
Molotov cocktails.
Inconveniently, AT&T has metastasized to sites all over the place, many of them rather solidly built. You'll need an atypically good arm to more than add a few scorch marks to the masonry shell.
My point exactly: There's a nice mature standard, cheap and/or free software that's fairly easy to use, and look at how wonderful the uptake is! Just imagine how good adoption will be for technologies that are more annoying, or less mature, or much trickier to use...
With an actual conclusion eventually reached. An ambiguous war on terror doesn't really have any sort of end date, unless we can somehow wipe out terror on Earth.
Let's check with Strategic Air Command... they aren't what they were in their heyday; but they might still be up to the task.
It was just as wrong then as this is now.
It is 1862.
Fort Sumter surrendered in 1861. Washington DC borders on Virgina facing off against the Confederate capital a bare 100 miles away. You are an idiot if you don't secure the only means of communication in the world that moves reliably at speeds greater than a normal walking pace,
That is, of course, the other pernicious implication of any civil war comparisons: from the perspective of the US Government, the civil war actually was most of the emergencies and exigencies that people like to invoke when demanding expanded powers. At no time since the revolutionary war(which actually might have ended fairly quietly, had the rebels lost, with a bunch of executions of notable rebels, followed by pragmatic write-off of the rest and a canada-like trajectory) had things looked nearly so dire. Even the world wars were basically Europe's problem, with us intervening at arm's length as our interests dictated, and the Cold War could have gone hot and really fucked up everybody's day; but unless it actually did, things were mostly quiet.
Anybody who, implicitly or explicitly, asserts anything even close to contemporary threats of Civil War gravity needs a smack with the cluebat.
It was just as wrong then as this is now. Of course, people back then couldn't even dream of having such advanced surveillance technology.
It was also barely comparable: 'total control of the telegraph lines', even the legal right to steam open and inspect all the mail you can handle, was complete chickenshit with the material culture of 1862, compared to access to internet, telephone, and mail-stream access along with the computers to actually make sense of it all.
That's the thing, while abuses-in-law are never good, the kicker is always what you can do, not what you are allowed to do. Hell, God-King-Pharoh-Somebody-Who-Makes-The-Nile-Flood probably had the legal right to unlimited surveillance and rewriting of his subjects' thoughts, since only by his divinity did they exist; but so what? His actual capabilities were only slightly greater than "Go to highest window in palace, look out and squint."
"one is willing to trade for it"
It takes two to trade, no? As the one currently holding the object, he can decide whether or not he is willing to trade. If he isn't, it doesn't much matter if you are...
Arguably, people are entirely correct when they throw up their hands and profess ignorance. The fishing-expedition style attacks that have been revealed so far appear to concentrate on a combination of sniffing out activity between nodes on the network(which are also the data required to route traffic between those nodes, which makes hiding it difficult) and getting wholesale dumps from collaborating companies(which you pretty much have to assume is all of them unless specifically proven otherwise on jurisdictional or architectural grounds).
The problem trying to counter that sort of network based attack is that you can't really 'just install security software' and have done with it. Everyone you wish to interact with has to as well. There is no software, however much expertise I am willing to bring to bear, that will allow me to send a message to user@gmail.com without showing up in the monitoring of his account. Same deal for phone calls, and others.
The really ugly 'gotcha', with any attempt at encrypted/obfuscated/steganographic communication, cryptocat included but hardly alone, is storage.
If your adversary is just drinking from the firehose, and lacks the ability to do more than a cursory inspection, all you have to do is be better than their cryptoanalysts today. If they have sufficient storage to archive a nontrivial percentage of what passes by(or their cursory inspection is good enough to classify suspicious encrypted traffic for storage) you have to be better, today, than their cryptoanalysts for however long what you are saying is relevant. The former is hard, the latter is downright scary.
this will not stop a gang of rapists cutting their way in from the side raping everyone stealing and what they like
probably better than a white sheet over a couple of wires though
If you are reduced to relying on fortified architecture for that, you arguably have bigger problems(as well as problems that should be solvable at lower cost and weight by some flavor of law enforcement, rather than fortress architecture). Tents are, naturally, pitifully insecure; but you have to go a substantial distance up the food chain before there isn't a fairly obvious flaw that a few reasonably strong guys(bonus points for users) can crack in a couple of minutes.
While any incremental advances in design are a good thing, it seems like the timescales we are talking about here are starting to get into 'perhaps you need to re-think your approach to the problem...' territory.
12 years is really pushing the idea of 'temporary' to the limit. How long do you go before you stop trying to incrementally decrease the squalor in a given refugee camp and start to admit that either you need to get your shit together on whatever is keeping your refugee camp full, or you need to admit that you have no resolution in sight on that one, and admit that your refugee camp is now a town.
Why would (most) of the bacteria in our bodies want to disrupt the sweet gig they've got?
We work our fool polycellular asses off trying to maintain nice, stable, internal conditions, complete with nutrients and an immune system with a vested interest in kicking out the troublemakers...
You aren't going to find a better deal clinging to a rock somewhere.
Can't we just sum it up by admitting that we are waiting for Nintendo to release a sequel to themselves that isn't as much of a fuckup?
I have met a lot of those recuriters, they are great people. They are only doing their job. I love how you are mad at the NSA for spying, you should go to the top of the food chain, Congress is the one who authorized it/allowed it. Even after what has been released there are few congressmen who are against it. So that's where you should turn your anger.
And the reason that I should be unfailingly polite to every hatchetman I meet while I futilely attempt to even get noticed by the top of the food chain is what exactly?
I'd be more conflicted about it if they were a bunch of conscripts, or had been stop-lossed into participation that they stopped actually believing in N tours ago; but the further you get from those scenarios, the less 'just doing my job' buys you.
This started with a thread on Debian. There are dozens of projects on Debian that use BerkleyDB. Should they be configured to 5.3 forever? If so what if there are security problems how will Debian even know? If not they go over to 6. Which means dozens of libraries switch over to AGPL....
I suspect that that depends on who actually does the work to keep those packages in Debian. As a distribution(considering their positions on firmware blobs, what you have to do to qualify as 'debian' rather than 'debian-unfree', etc.), Debian doesn't seem like a terribly obviously candidate for being hugely worried about the AGPL.
Given that Debian is also the basis of about a zillion other distros, as well as in-house quasi-distros, though, I suspect that they have a reasonable number of users, probably including some genuinely useful ones, who have purposes for which an AGPL BerkleyDB is Not Going To Fly. We'll have to see how that shakes out.
I'd be shocked to see anything useful at a legal level; but I'd encourage everyone to do their part by heaping scorn and vitriol upon the people who help make advertising possible.
There are real people(and a lot of them) who work on churning out ads, 'concepts' like this, various social media flimflam, etc, etc. If admitting that you were one of them were treated more like admitting that you have a thing for puppy sodomy, it might help, and it would, at least, decrease their quality of life and increase their turnover rate.
Eh, people saying mean things on the internet are a dime a dozen, I doubt Oracle cares very much. And(not that there's anything requiring them to) the fact that Oracle tends to get religion on the GPL only when they either wish to sell commercial licenses for a product, or to push people onto a commercial product, tends to make people rather mistrustful of their altruism.
Using the AGPL is being "greedy"? Isn't that the very license the FSF recommends for software run over a network? MongoDB is also AGPL and there was none of this drama directed at 10gen over it.
LOL hypocritical freetards.
I'm going to make the optimistic assumption that you aren't merely trolling: AGPL is, indeed, what the FSF recommends for software likely to be used primarily on backend-type stuff(where conventional GPL, even v3, does nothing to stop the formation of an in-house mostly proprietary setup).
Oracle, however, is in the business of selling database software, not of being the FSF. So, when they take an existing database and re-license it in ways that are calculated to force existing users of that database to either leave or stump up for a proprietary license from Oracle, they get called 'greedy'.
This really isn't all that difficult.
Even as the copyright holder, Oracle can't do jack about existing versions released under other licenses(even if they went full nuclear, and actually terminated all downloads/media purchases under any prior license, there are still third party mirrors. So, Version X-1 is Sleepycat forever.
Is BerkeleyDB a project where Big New Features or Much Needed Upgrades are something that happens frequently, meaning that if you aren't running Version X, you might as well go home? If so, Oracle has actual leverage. If not, it seems likely that a maintained-if-not-terribly-active version can exist in perpetuity, with Oracle having to offer serious advantages in order to retain their status as the standard against which 3rd party development is done.
Thorn already exists as an obsolete form of "th". I don't think it will work it I try to enter it here, but here goes..
Ah, but his version is trademarked, and probably has considerably fewer fonts-not-designed-by-people-who-should-really-stick-to-managing-restaurants available, so why would you want to use Thorn?
I wouldn't be too surprised if that has something to do with the fact that 'filming'(whether to actual...chemical film... like some kind of barbarian, or to digital) requires nontrivially different(and not inexpensive) hardware, and you have to decide that you are shooting 3d before you start shooting, while re-rendering an existing set of CG models is mostly a computational problem.
3D or implementation? I want to see Wimbledon in a hologram, played on my coffee table.
Some of both: A lot of techniques that work well in 2d, and have a lot of TV and film people well versed in them, don't look nearly as good in 'true' 3d as opposed to 2d-with-some-perspective-tricks, so the quality of what was on tap really didn't sell the medium(doubly so if the bean counters decreed that the same 'content' must have both a 2d and a 3d release, so all the '3d' stuff was essentially required to be pure window dressing so that the 2d theater release, DVD sales, and cable licenses would still work).
And implementation certainly didn't help. "Animated holograms on your table"(even at the Star Wars level of flickery, insubstantial, probably not actually all that pleasing compared to just a normal screen of substantial size) are basically sci-fi, and the various goofy-glasses flavors don't work terribly well, at all for some people, require goofy glasses, and tend to eat some brightness and image quality compared to 2d gear of equivalent price. The fact that most of the vendors were gouging or half-assing, sometimes both, didn't help.
And a common standard... otherwise it is VHS vs. Beta again.
That sounds dangerously like an opening for commodification of television hardware. And pushback against that was pretty much the only impetus behind the desperate effort of the home entertainment industry to get us to give a fuck.