I'd argue a more nuanced position: relative to his value system, which he is quite upfront about, Stallman is actually extremely accurate, sometimes verging on "prescient"("The Right To Read" written a fair few years vs. Amazon's remote kindle wipes or Apple's 'cryptographically blessed software only' smash hit... for instance).
However, his expressions of concern are basically never of the form "Technological development X won't work", which would be disprovable simply by making it work. Rather, his expressions are of the form "Technological development X will reduce the freedom of users and/or developers and/or both, which is bad". That isn't a statement about the possibility of Technological development X(indeed, he basically doesn't bother issuing statements of concern about stuff he thinks won't happen), and is almost always true for the various Xs he has warned people about.
Unless there is some rule addressing this problem, the distinction is basically academic. Any programmer good enough to work on this project could trivially just go to wikipedia's database dump download page and wget the latest before the show. Unless it has expanded hugely of late, all the text of wikipedia, including version data, should fit on just a few HDDs, so being disconnected from the live version during the show barely matters.
Same goes for pretty much any other online database, excluding the truly titanic and/or proprietary ones(like "all of Google"). All of wikipedia, all digitized back issues of major newspapers, and the archives of, say, the top 10,000 journals in the sciences and the humanities should, if you are willing to risk not having truly ironclad redundancy, fit on a man-portable disk array. Most can be(with the right subscriptions paid) downloaded swiftly and algorithmically.
Writing the code that lets this sucker "learn"(or at least parse plaintext and give useful responses to questions) will be the hard part; but "teaching" it more general knowledge than any human could hope to possess will just require wget and a fast pipe...
There is another potential solution that bears experimenting with, given the dangers of regulatory capture, which makes regulated monopolies a potentially unstable position over time:
Treat last-mile connectivity as a utility-style natural monopoly(which it essentially is, economically speaking). Have the municipality build out either fiber, or tubes for running fiber, to a peering point accessible under RAND conditions. Their responsibility would be to ensure that the pipe between you and the peering point is maintained(ie. this isn't a 'gummint internet'). At this point, anybody who wished to do so could set up shop at the peering point and offer services over the pipe, whether they be straight internet access, IP TV, VOIP, whatever.
Once you get beyond the last-mile, there is a much stronger case to be made that competition is both possible and actual; but the last mile is an oligopoly at best, monopoly at worst, and(like water, power, and roads) tends toward being a natural monopoly in the economic sense...
While I am also (slightly) doubtful of the "drive service providers to comcast colo"(though Backdoor Santa probably knows more than I do, if he has access to these data, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt) there is one major reason to suspect Comcast of perfidity rather than merely penny-pinching:
Comcast is a cable company. Their pre-internet business was realtime video delivery. This remains one of their more lucrative segments. As such, they have a built in conflict of interest when it comes to providing high quality internet service. They sure don't mind if you pay them to get your email really fast, or play video games with low ping, or download "linux ISOs"; but if youtube+netflix means that you cut the cord on your cable video, that is Bad News from their perspective. Thus, anything they do that would impact the reasonable performance of streaming video, online video downloads/rentals, etc. should be viewed as malice first and incompetence second.
Am utterly shocked that anybody could be so cruel as to suspect a poor innocent cable company of trying to protect their cash-cow video delivery business by deliberately sucking at being an ISP(harder than they do simply by nature, that is) and using their oligopolistic incumbent position to shake down nimbler and more responsive competitors.
It may or may not be officially illegal; but I suspect that simple economics makes it virtually irrelevant. Sat phones are so expensive to operate that you either need a serious commercial reason(shipping, petrochemical prospecting, etc.), a giant pile of play money obtained by some other means, or some sort of state subsidy.
Iranian university students just aren't in that market. Nor are upset Chinese factory workers(never mind the fact that sneaky telecommunications over local internet are probably cheaper than a $5/megabyte sat service...) CIA puppet militias are, indeed, an important market; but there is no way that the technology would support a "censorship free" version of the conventional cell phone.
While their cost in strict $/km^2 terms might actually be pretty reasonable, satellites are a pretty horrid form of infrastructure in most other respects. Maintenance is difficult, launches are costly and don't always go well, latency is inherently bad, capacity is low, signal strength can be an issue and so forth.
Therefore, anywhere with more than a relatively low density of people who aren't penniless and living in their own filth and an absence of militias blowing up cell towers with impunity already likely has a superior GSM network of some sort.
Satellite has its niches, they just aren't big enough to spread the fixed costs, thus making calls extremely expensive, which doesn't make the niche any bigger. At present, the only reason they exist at all is that foolish investors took a huge bath on the project and then the corpse was snapped up for pennies on the dollar(almost certainly just so that the CIA could continue to chat with their BFFs in assorted hellholes without interruption).
I would rather hope that on any network calling itself "military secure" areas writable by users and areas from which the system will execute code would be disjoint sets...
I would also hope that they would have the absolute bare minimum of tools that might be useful to somebody attempting to turn a series of keystrokes into a program. Keyboard lights are a fun side channel; but they, again, rely on having something running system side. Subtler than USB MSC; but still something that a quality security setup should block simply as a matter of course.
Arguably, it goes a lot further back than that: all that research and science on analog control was done by organisms who would be dead before they hit the ground were it not for evolved analog control/feedback systems by the thousand...
The port may be universal; but the drivers aren't. Nor is automatically mounting a volume as r/w on insertion. Physical disabling is crude and only for the most absolutely paranoid of situations; but software based disabling of all but the really clever covert channel stuff should be relatively simple...
Concealing USB mass storage devices is trivial. They come in virtually any shapes and sizes(at the small end, limited largely by the smallest thing that falls reasonably close to the spec for a USB connector) and not too infrequently bundled with other devices(ie. "powerpoint presenter" widget that has an RF remote that is also a flash drive to store the presentation, various novelty crap, etc.) Further, all sorts of common, innocuous devices act as USB MSC devices when plugged in.
Using them covertly is an entirely different matter, though. Unless the OS recognizes the device, reads the device IDs, loads the appropriate driver, and mounts the volume r/w, your device is a paperweight. That is the obvious area that the military should be focusing on. In pretty much any modern OS, a system that logs all devices connected/disconnected from any bus, with timestamp and present user, if any, and refuses to mount MSC devices/unexpected volumes without authentication shouldn't be all that difficult. Even a defense contractor could probably get something going, given 3-5 years and $100 million...
The difference(at least according to design docs, we'll see what happens on release when we come to that) is that ChromeOS devices give one the (advanced; but non-hack) option to tell the command and control system to shove it. Their shipping image, and the one you get if you restore, is built on a no trust model; but if you wish to put a different one on there(including a modified build of the open portions of ChromeOS) that is your call.
With Apple, by contrast, their portables are their OS or nothing, barring hacks that depend on mistakes they did not intend to make, and do tend to correct over time. What you see is what you are stuck with.
It is eminently possible that really widespread 3d printing(unlike novelty prototype stuff where the copies are worse and more expensive than the real thing) would simply lead to a change in the law to "address the problem".
In this case, for instance, the proposal was advanced to create an entirely new form of "intellectual property" consisting of the shape of boat hulls, because it was trivial for company B to copy company A's design just by buying one, taking an impression, and then producing as many fiberglass copies as they could sell.
If memory serves, something similar was done for IC masks, and in the EU certain geographic regions now have a novel form of quasi-trademark status, not belonging to a company or person; but to a place(ie. Heinz inc. or licensees are the only ones who can see 'Heinz brand catsup'; but anybody can market sparkling wine as 'champagne' IFF it was produced in Champagne, and under no circumstances otherwise.)
I would assume that truly practical 3D printing would draw the fire of incumbents, much the same way that VCRs, MP3s, etc. did, as soon as they become economically viable. It will also be interesting to see if there is some "hardware DMCA" blocking the reproduction of parts that incorporate 'anti-reproduction-technology like microdots or GUID RFIDs or the like'...
"Revenge is a dish best served cold." (or by Anonymous, on your behalf...). A massive grudge-hack spree 4 days after your termination suggests that A) IT didn't have its shit together and B) You are now suspect #1.
Unless you are very good, you aren't going to avoid leaving enough of a trail that wriggling out of the "#1 suspect" spot will be easy or comfortable...
Organisms whose relatively high efficiency oxygen transport system critically depends on iron-bearing biological molecules gather to express surprise at an organism that could metabolize iron!
While Slashdot certainly has its share of ignorant blowhards, there is something to be said for distance as an analytical tool...
Until androids replace humans in management, the people with the most intimate knowledge will also be the people with the greatest emotional investment. Sometimes somebody with less detailed knowledge; but less personal investment, can be useful...
Even Intel(in their IA64 division, mostly sold by HP in end-user-product form) is having a hard time competing with linux and intel(in their AMD64 iWhatever/Xeon form, as sold by basically everybody) and Intel's doomed architecture even has the advantage of Intel's incredible manufacturing prowess...
Obviously I'm not Sun's ex-CEO; but in watching Sun over time, their problem seemed to be less with OSS and more with a complete lack of any clue as to how OSS fit in with their strategy.
Clearly, you can't run a business with expenses and shareholders and stuff on puppies and altruism; but there are a good number of circumstances where investments in OSS fit within a larger profit-making strategy(generally when your core business is hardware or consulting, or where you are trying to spike a competitor's profitable software business so that they can't use the profits from it to crush you in your profit center).
Sun, on the other hand, kind of tacked back and forth with no clear direction. One day, it'd be "Java will be open, to encourage even more mass adoption, and pricey SPARC gear will be the premiere architecture upon which to run JVMs!" The next day, "Thanks to OpenSolaris, our superior Solaris technology will roxxor your linux, even on commodity intel silicon, thus totally gutting our SPARC line that we were enthusiastic about yesterday!".
It could also be that, when you come right down to it, OSS is mostly a nonissue in Sun's declining fortunes. The moment AMD introduced 64-bit X86 extensions to save themselves from Intel's IA64 squeeze plan, most of the remaining "custom UNIX on fancy architecture" vendors cried out in terror and were slowly suffocated. SGI was gutted and sold, Sun twisted around for a while and was gutted and sold, IBM remains strong in mainframes and consulting; but their x86s are nothing special and POWER is pretty niche(the workstations are dead, some servers still survive).
Had Sun been less OSS friendly, they quite possibly could have wound down their operations into a smallish but profitable legacy/consulting/niche hardware outfit, rather than being sold off; but their real problem(and that of companies in a similar position) seems to have been Intel's massive capacity to fab cheap AMD64 chips on a very aggressive schedule, along with the existence of a "good enough and really cheap, unixlike OS". Even Chipzilla's own precious IA64 has been largely murdered by this development, and that is Intel's own baby...
Sun might have extracted a bit more value had they realized earlier that marketshare may not be worth the price and done some gouging while they still could; but I'm not sure that minor changes vs. OSS could really have saved them...
For the "high octane nightmare fuel"/"judgement day" effect, I recommend a collaboration between this automated gun turret and the slightly creepy "Bigdog" robot...
Unless South Korea has suddenly taken a turn for the almost-cartoonishly-evil, I'm fairly sure that, by the time North Koreans are seeing these things in any quantity, there isn't a propaganda war going on anymore... Robotic sniper turrents installed right at the edge of the DMZ, picking off North Korean peasantry would, indeed, be pretty tasteless; but so long as they confine any shooting to within the DMZ, the fact that you'll be facing robots one way and conscripts the other is just a matter of economics and cultural style...
Slashdot Mirror
I'd argue a more nuanced position: relative to his value system, which he is quite upfront about, Stallman is actually extremely accurate, sometimes verging on "prescient"("The Right To Read" written a fair few years vs. Amazon's remote kindle wipes or Apple's 'cryptographically blessed software only' smash hit... for instance).
However, his expressions of concern are basically never of the form "Technological development X won't work", which would be disprovable simply by making it work. Rather, his expressions are of the form "Technological development X will reduce the freedom of users and/or developers and/or both, which is bad". That isn't a statement about the possibility of Technological development X(indeed, he basically doesn't bother issuing statements of concern about stuff he thinks won't happen), and is almost always true for the various Xs he has warned people about.
Unless there is some rule addressing this problem, the distinction is basically academic. Any programmer good enough to work on this project could trivially just go to wikipedia's database dump download page and wget the latest before the show. Unless it has expanded hugely of late, all the text of wikipedia, including version data, should fit on just a few HDDs, so being disconnected from the live version during the show barely matters.
Same goes for pretty much any other online database, excluding the truly titanic and/or proprietary ones(like "all of Google"). All of wikipedia, all digitized back issues of major newspapers, and the archives of, say, the top 10,000 journals in the sciences and the humanities should, if you are willing to risk not having truly ironclad redundancy, fit on a man-portable disk array. Most can be(with the right subscriptions paid) downloaded swiftly and algorithmically.
Writing the code that lets this sucker "learn"(or at least parse plaintext and give useful responses to questions) will be the hard part; but "teaching" it more general knowledge than any human could hope to possess will just require wget and a fast pipe...
There is another potential solution that bears experimenting with, given the dangers of regulatory capture, which makes regulated monopolies a potentially unstable position over time:
Treat last-mile connectivity as a utility-style natural monopoly(which it essentially is, economically speaking). Have the municipality build out either fiber, or tubes for running fiber, to a peering point accessible under RAND conditions. Their responsibility would be to ensure that the pipe between you and the peering point is maintained(ie. this isn't a 'gummint internet'). At this point, anybody who wished to do so could set up shop at the peering point and offer services over the pipe, whether they be straight internet access, IP TV, VOIP, whatever.
Once you get beyond the last-mile, there is a much stronger case to be made that competition is both possible and actual; but the last mile is an oligopoly at best, monopoly at worst, and(like water, power, and roads) tends toward being a natural monopoly in the economic sense...
I figured that this new turret could handle that role...
We don't have to care. We're the phone company.
XOXOXO Ma Bell
While I am also (slightly) doubtful of the "drive service providers to comcast colo"(though Backdoor Santa probably knows more than I do, if he has access to these data, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt) there is one major reason to suspect Comcast of perfidity rather than merely penny-pinching:
Comcast is a cable company. Their pre-internet business was realtime video delivery. This remains one of their more lucrative segments. As such, they have a built in conflict of interest when it comes to providing high quality internet service. They sure don't mind if you pay them to get your email really fast, or play video games with low ping, or download "linux ISOs"; but if youtube+netflix means that you cut the cord on your cable video, that is Bad News from their perspective. Thus, anything they do that would impact the reasonable performance of streaming video, online video downloads/rentals, etc. should be viewed as malice first and incompetence second.
Am utterly shocked that anybody could be so cruel as to suspect a poor innocent cable company of trying to protect their cash-cow video delivery business by deliberately sucking at being an ISP(harder than they do simply by nature, that is) and using their oligopolistic incumbent position to shake down nimbler and more responsive competitors.
If police IT were as responsible about security as police are about weapons, we'd be seeing these sorts of stories a lot more often...
It may or may not be officially illegal; but I suspect that simple economics makes it virtually irrelevant. Sat phones are so expensive to operate that you either need a serious commercial reason(shipping, petrochemical prospecting, etc.), a giant pile of play money obtained by some other means, or some sort of state subsidy.
Iranian university students just aren't in that market. Nor are upset Chinese factory workers(never mind the fact that sneaky telecommunications over local internet are probably cheaper than a $5/megabyte sat service...) CIA puppet militias are, indeed, an important market; but there is no way that the technology would support a "censorship free" version of the conventional cell phone.
While their cost in strict $/km^2 terms might actually be pretty reasonable, satellites are a pretty horrid form of infrastructure in most other respects. Maintenance is difficult, launches are costly and don't always go well, latency is inherently bad, capacity is low, signal strength can be an issue and so forth.
Therefore, anywhere with more than a relatively low density of people who aren't penniless and living in their own filth and an absence of militias blowing up cell towers with impunity already likely has a superior GSM network of some sort.
Satellite has its niches, they just aren't big enough to spread the fixed costs, thus making calls extremely expensive, which doesn't make the niche any bigger. At present, the only reason they exist at all is that foolish investors took a huge bath on the project and then the corpse was snapped up for pennies on the dollar(almost certainly just so that the CIA could continue to chat with their BFFs in assorted hellholes without interruption).
I would rather hope that on any network calling itself "military secure" areas writable by users and areas from which the system will execute code would be disjoint sets...
I would also hope that they would have the absolute bare minimum of tools that might be useful to somebody attempting to turn a series of keystrokes into a program. Keyboard lights are a fun side channel; but they, again, rely on having something running system side. Subtler than USB MSC; but still something that a quality security setup should block simply as a matter of course.
Arguably, it goes a lot further back than that: all that research and science on analog control was done by organisms who would be dead before they hit the ground were it not for evolved analog control/feedback systems by the thousand...
But only he is capable of using it for lossless compression...
The port may be universal; but the drivers aren't. Nor is automatically mounting a volume as r/w on insertion. Physical disabling is crude and only for the most absolutely paranoid of situations; but software based disabling of all but the really clever covert channel stuff should be relatively simple...
Concealing USB mass storage devices is trivial. They come in virtually any shapes and sizes(at the small end, limited largely by the smallest thing that falls reasonably close to the spec for a USB connector) and not too infrequently bundled with other devices(ie. "powerpoint presenter" widget that has an RF remote that is also a flash drive to store the presentation, various novelty crap, etc.) Further, all sorts of common, innocuous devices act as USB MSC devices when plugged in.
Using them covertly is an entirely different matter, though. Unless the OS recognizes the device, reads the device IDs, loads the appropriate driver, and mounts the volume r/w, your device is a paperweight. That is the obvious area that the military should be focusing on. In pretty much any modern OS, a system that logs all devices connected/disconnected from any bus, with timestamp and present user, if any, and refuses to mount MSC devices/unexpected volumes without authentication shouldn't be all that difficult. Even a defense contractor could probably get something going, given 3-5 years and $100 million...
The difference(at least according to design docs, we'll see what happens on release when we come to that) is that ChromeOS devices give one the (advanced; but non-hack) option to tell the command and control system to shove it. Their shipping image, and the one you get if you restore, is built on a no trust model; but if you wish to put a different one on there(including a modified build of the open portions of ChromeOS) that is your call.
With Apple, by contrast, their portables are their OS or nothing, barring hacks that depend on mistakes they did not intend to make, and do tend to correct over time. What you see is what you are stuck with.
It is eminently possible that really widespread 3d printing(unlike novelty prototype stuff where the copies are worse and more expensive than the real thing) would simply lead to a change in the law to "address the problem". In this case, for instance, the proposal was advanced to create an entirely new form of "intellectual property" consisting of the shape of boat hulls, because it was trivial for company B to copy company A's design just by buying one, taking an impression, and then producing as many fiberglass copies as they could sell.
If memory serves, something similar was done for IC masks, and in the EU certain geographic regions now have a novel form of quasi-trademark status, not belonging to a company or person; but to a place(ie. Heinz inc. or licensees are the only ones who can see 'Heinz brand catsup'; but anybody can market sparkling wine as 'champagne' IFF it was produced in Champagne, and under no circumstances otherwise.)
I would assume that truly practical 3D printing would draw the fire of incumbents, much the same way that VCRs, MP3s, etc. did, as soon as they become economically viable. It will also be interesting to see if there is some "hardware DMCA" blocking the reproduction of parts that incorporate 'anti-reproduction-technology like microdots or GUID RFIDs or the like'...
Does taking a fire-axe to the SAN count as "using a computer"?
"Revenge is a dish best served cold." (or by Anonymous, on your behalf...). A massive grudge-hack spree 4 days after your termination suggests that A) IT didn't have its shit together and B) You are now suspect #1.
Unless you are very good, you aren't going to avoid leaving enough of a trail that wriggling out of the "#1 suspect" spot will be easy or comfortable...
Organisms whose relatively high efficiency oxygen transport system critically depends on iron-bearing biological molecules gather to express surprise at an organism that could metabolize iron!
While Slashdot certainly has its share of ignorant blowhards, there is something to be said for distance as an analytical tool...
Until androids replace humans in management, the people with the most intimate knowledge will also be the people with the greatest emotional investment. Sometimes somebody with less detailed knowledge; but less personal investment, can be useful...
Even Intel(in their IA64 division, mostly sold by HP in end-user-product form) is having a hard time competing with linux and intel(in their AMD64 iWhatever/Xeon form, as sold by basically everybody) and Intel's doomed architecture even has the advantage of Intel's incredible manufacturing prowess...
Obviously I'm not Sun's ex-CEO; but in watching Sun over time, their problem seemed to be less with OSS and more with a complete lack of any clue as to how OSS fit in with their strategy.
Clearly, you can't run a business with expenses and shareholders and stuff on puppies and altruism; but there are a good number of circumstances where investments in OSS fit within a larger profit-making strategy(generally when your core business is hardware or consulting, or where you are trying to spike a competitor's profitable software business so that they can't use the profits from it to crush you in your profit center).
Sun, on the other hand, kind of tacked back and forth with no clear direction. One day, it'd be "Java will be open, to encourage even more mass adoption, and pricey SPARC gear will be the premiere architecture upon which to run JVMs!" The next day, "Thanks to OpenSolaris, our superior Solaris technology will roxxor your linux, even on commodity intel silicon, thus totally gutting our SPARC line that we were enthusiastic about yesterday!".
It could also be that, when you come right down to it, OSS is mostly a nonissue in Sun's declining fortunes. The moment AMD introduced 64-bit X86 extensions to save themselves from Intel's IA64 squeeze plan, most of the remaining "custom UNIX on fancy architecture" vendors cried out in terror and were slowly suffocated. SGI was gutted and sold, Sun twisted around for a while and was gutted and sold, IBM remains strong in mainframes and consulting; but their x86s are nothing special and POWER is pretty niche(the workstations are dead, some servers still survive).
Had Sun been less OSS friendly, they quite possibly could have wound down their operations into a smallish but profitable legacy/consulting/niche hardware outfit, rather than being sold off; but their real problem(and that of companies in a similar position) seems to have been Intel's massive capacity to fab cheap AMD64 chips on a very aggressive schedule, along with the existence of a "good enough and really cheap, unixlike OS". Even Chipzilla's own precious IA64 has been largely murdered by this development, and that is Intel's own baby...
Sun might have extracted a bit more value had they realized earlier that marketshare may not be worth the price and done some gouging while they still could; but I'm not sure that minor changes vs. OSS could really have saved them...
For the "high octane nightmare fuel"/"judgement day" effect, I recommend a collaboration between this automated gun turret and the slightly creepy "Bigdog" robot...
Unless South Korea has suddenly taken a turn for the almost-cartoonishly-evil, I'm fairly sure that, by the time North Koreans are seeing these things in any quantity, there isn't a propaganda war going on anymore... Robotic sniper turrents installed right at the edge of the DMZ, picking off North Korean peasantry would, indeed, be pretty tasteless; but so long as they confine any shooting to within the DMZ, the fact that you'll be facing robots one way and conscripts the other is just a matter of economics and cultural style...