root gives them full control over your system, they can set daemons to run at startup, mess with system files, delete/modify every users files & any other file they want, run services on privileged ports (1024), install trojans, rootkits, delete/modify log files, and anything else they want.
Of course i will not dispute that. That's bad.
But on a computer used by a single person, hacking root or the user does not make a huge difference, at least from my perspective.
For example, on what port a spam bot or whatever malware runs is not very important. With UPnP it can open any port on routers anyway. It can move warez around with FTP or send spam through my mail account.
Or things could auto-run on "system start" for my user, coz it's the only user of the machine.
In fact i would prefer if my home computer would be cracked that only root gets the crap and not my user. Because then i wouldn't have to wade through all my user's files and could just re-install the system. Users data is much more valuable than these few config files root has to fiddle with.
And a user can usually do anything that a cracker might need.
I actually wonder why there is still this big iron thinking about root and "unprivileged users", especially around a desktop distro like Ubuntu. I am the only user of my system. If someone breaks into my normal user account and deletes all files there it is the worst possible scenario. If it is done from root, there is not much of a difference. And unprivileged users can also serve as spam bots, they have all the access to a heap of scripting languages and whatnot -- so really, what is the difference?
Just because it happens to be Unix, some people seem to have a sysadmin reflex that tells them root is more worthy than others.
Hiding small "frauds" and sometimes being an "asshole" is what privacy is mostly about. It is a thing to value, because nobody is perfect. The law is also not perfect. Because most laws and contract points were invented before the ultimate surveillance came along. Do you understand how much things are forbidden to do? Like crossing the street when the pedestrian light is red, to carve initials into a tree,...
And it is okay that these things are forbidden, but it is impossible to always follow the law to the last comma. People have to improvise all the time, they lie, ride the bus without a ticked coz they forgot their wallet, call someone without revealing their identity, pee into a bush, close the curtains only after they took off their undies, poke their noses, smoke a cigarette...
This all is nothing special, but with ultimate surveillance, such actions can become an embarrassment and suddenly you should not hide them anymore. Suddenly you should change your life, you should become somebody else, you should bend over to hardcore puritan values...
The possibility to escape this, for some moments, is one of privacy's best features, and i suppose it is a human need.
Apple doesn't force you to use the Music Store purchased songs to put them on your iPod.
With this approach it is indeed difficult to critisize any business practice, because almost all the time nobody ever forces you to do anything.
Maybe there is a difference in what people expect to get when they buy something and what they get in fact.
Also, business practices shape culture and law. If something is considered normal (although nobody is forced to do whatever), it will be an accepted way of doing things.
Many "digital products" transport politics by the way they work. So it is important to discuss the "defaults" these products are setting.
If you think that DRM suX0rz, then you have every right to say that the iPod is crap. Because it is an integral part of the product.
The problem with linux isn't installing the software that comes in whatever Distro's 'normal' list of applications.
It's when you want to install something that ISN'T in that official list. With windows, I can go onto the net and find a random utility or application that I think might be interesting or useful to try out, download it and install it without spending days on the task.
Try that with an application that is not available for Windows.
I made a web site where you can vote for your favorite spam image in "am i hot or not" style... http://www.winter2006.info/... the new winter collection arrived!
This spam waves are obviously not geared towards really changing something on the stock market. Who would follow tips in such trashy looking images? It looks already more like a sport or computer art. Maybe once the image generators running on botnets will generate really beautiful pictures.
LucasArts and Infocom hired "writers" do make their stories and still made very much computer games. (Tho Lucas fell from grace with boring only-story games like "The Dig".)
That Netscape and after that IE accepted "bad code" was just great!! In fact i think their versions of HTML were the first fault-tolerant computer language and everybody could hump some page together in notepad.
This made the web a medium for everybody, not just the c++ boys. Of course now, instead of making the web easier to author, web standards become more and more incomprehensible (XML stuff for "this is my dog"-pages??) and the web shall be ruled by "professionals" or by idiots who should swallow some stupid Dreamweaver or iWeb instead of getting a chance to learn something.
BTW: Spoken, human language is highly flexible in interpretation and expression. Computer languages are not. If you ask for "syntactically correct" human language, you should read "Computer Power and Human Reason" by Weizenbaum.
Generally it is a machine doing most of the listening, searching and catagorizing by whatever criteria it has. The machine itself won't do anything evil, and doesn't really care about any input you give it. The people you have to trust are the operators of said machine to not abuse the system.
Not really. The act alone that data is collected will raise the demands to do something with it. Even if that is not the first intention. And it is not about the operators alone, but about everybody who might be interested in the data. Today and in the future.
A last resort is always that a law will be changed for a government to be able to use data they do not own. Reasons can be many, fear of terrorists, tax fraud on large scale, etc etc. What not is happening right now may be happens next year, because data is forever. Google can never be so un-evil to destroy their data when the situation changes, because this data is all they have.
All this stuff is just about giving up responsibilty on the simplest things. Like storing your own files and making backups. Why should i want a "web app" that technically simply cannot compete with a desktop app?... so Google gives how many Gigabytes of Mail memory, and has database search and threading... well i have a 120 GB harrdrive here and Opera mail. Computing speed and storage was never cheaper, easier, more portable or saver than now, great free software in beer and speech is behind every corner and exactly at this very moment all these "web apps" are becoming a success. I think this is plain weird.
All you guys using the word "intuitive" or "counter-intuitive" are on the wrong track i think. There is nothing intuitive in computer interfaces like it is in the real world, where you learn how objects behave as a child and this never changes. In the computer, everything can change all the time. There are many reasons why.
For people growing up with command lines or ANSI-kind of menus, drag&drop was never very important. Windows, cascading menus and icons in this view are just a way to shortcut to commands.
The idea behind drag&drop is that of spatiality and objects that have behaviours embedded -- more like the so called "real word" a bit. Combinations of objects should trigger special actions or should just be possible.
With the ongoing movement of GUIs i found out drag&drop becomes more and more crippled. The potential was never really used and the few things that worked are disappearing. The GUIs are moving into the push-button direction that try to make everything single-click. Probably the idea behind it is that the web was so successfull and there are only single clicks there.
The outcome of this tactic are largely overblown menus, because for every action there needs to be a description and a button and a menu. Just look at all the "context"-menus that come up with the right mouse button...
Drag&drop and spaciality could save all this clutter and make the GUI worth its name. After all the idea behind the GUI is to introduce a two-dimensional space instead of one-dimensional text.
But it is more difficult to develop. People will drag and drop stuff from everywhere to anywhere and the software has to come up with a smart reaction to that. It is definitely more easy to put everything that is "allowed" into menus. This became the typical form to make interfaces now.
And if there is something else happening it is labelled counter-intuitive. I wish it would be much more "counter-intuitive" to really strike a difference and use the pixels i paid for, and not to go the way of MS Windows and X too far further...
As if computer usage would tell about thoughts of a person... Computers simply love everybody. Once i was on an Atari geek meeting, and suddenly two people had to leave to go to a demonstration against nuclear waste transports. One of them was a demonstrator trying to stop the transport, the other one was a police officer trying to stop demonstrants. This was like 10 years ago and now i came to the believe that computer nerd-dom can unite the whole world!
I don't know... back in the 90s shareware days i thought this was completely normal.
Rubberduck was freaky underground software, i used it from versions on that looked like Windows3.1. It was the software to produce the cheapest and best sounding bass; as a bedroom producer you could finally laugh about the people that rent studios or spend huge money on gear and think that is half of the music already done. It started just then.
Today even GNU stuff looks polished. I think this is boring. I want announcements like "KDE new release with bomb shit doorbending menus comin atcha like cleopatra" or "new version of gnumeric -- coded on bad LSD" or whatever... but nowadays it is all about konquering the (business) desktop and adapting the same makes-me-yawn language as corporations. Takes some fun out of computing.
Slashdot Mirror
So, people don't value their privacy?
Look at the topmost comment on the first page of the story! Some dude called
Alberto S. Lopez
Lawndale, CA
Email: albertoslopez@gmail.com
Cell: 310.686.1259
explains how he read this story on his iPhone!!!
AhAh AHaAhHAh HAhaHAAHahAHaaa!!
Of course i will not dispute that. That's bad.
But on a computer used by a single person, hacking root or the user does not make a huge difference, at least from my perspective.
For example, on what port a spam bot or whatever malware runs is not very important. With UPnP it can open any port on routers anyway. It can move warez around with FTP or send spam through my mail account.
Or things could auto-run on "system start" for my user, coz it's the only user of the machine.
In fact i would prefer if my home computer would be cracked that only root gets the crap and not my user. Because then i wouldn't have to wade through all my user's files and could just re-install the system. Users data is much more valuable than these few config files root has to fiddle with.
And a user can usually do anything that a cracker might need.
I actually wonder why there is still this big iron thinking about root and "unprivileged users", especially around a desktop distro like Ubuntu. I am the only user of my system. If someone breaks into my normal user account and deletes all files there it is the worst possible scenario. If it is done from root, there is not much of a difference. And unprivileged users can also serve as spam bots, they have all the access to a heap of scripting languages and whatnot -- so really, what is the difference?
Just because it happens to be Unix, some people seem to have a sysadmin reflex that tells them root is more worthy than others.
A picture of them together
http://www.bayimg.com/album/GaacoaAaA
Hiding small "frauds" and sometimes being an "asshole" is what privacy is mostly about. It is a thing to value, because nobody is perfect. The law is also not perfect. Because most laws and contract points were invented before the ultimate surveillance came along. Do you understand how much things are forbidden to do? Like crossing the street when the pedestrian light is red, to carve initials into a tree, ...
...
...
And it is okay that these things are forbidden, but it is impossible to always follow the law to the last comma. People have to improvise all the time, they lie, ride the bus without a ticked coz they forgot their wallet, call someone without revealing their identity, pee into a bush, close the curtains only after they took off their undies, poke their noses, smoke a cigarette
This all is nothing special, but with ultimate surveillance, such actions can become an embarrassment and suddenly you should not hide them anymore. Suddenly you should change your life, you should become somebody else, you should bend over to hardcore puritan values
The possibility to escape this, for some moments, is one of privacy's best features, and i suppose it is a human need.
I recommend the Cardgame of Belief. It's a quartet game, you can have GNU/Linux against Heaven's gate for example.
With this approach it is indeed difficult to critisize any business practice, because almost all the time nobody ever forces you to do anything.
Maybe there is a difference in what people expect to get when they buy something and what they get in fact.
Also, business practices shape culture and law. If something is considered normal (although nobody is forced to do whatever), it will be an accepted way of doing things.
Many "digital products" transport politics by the way they work. So it is important to discuss the "defaults" these products are setting.
If you think that DRM suX0rz, then you have every right to say that the iPod is crap. Because it is an integral part of the product.
Try that with an application that is not available for Windows.
http://www.winter2006.info/
Recently, jpeg images started to arrive. They are very very blurry, probably also in a try to fool OCR filters.
I made a web site where you can vote for your favorite spam image in "am i hot or not" style ... http://www.winter2006.info/ ... the new winter collection arrived!
This spam waves are obviously not geared towards really changing something on the stock market. Who would follow tips in such trashy looking images? It looks already more like a sport or computer art. Maybe once the image generators running on botnets will generate really beautiful pictures.
Aaaawww, this is one of the worst written TFAs i have ever read!!
LucasArts and Infocom hired "writers" do make their stories and still made very much computer games. (Tho Lucas fell from grace with boring only-story games like "The Dig".)
Coz nobody wanted to buy it.
I thought the Linux version of picture editing is called Krita.
Great plan, but why not just stop using Microsoft Word instead?
How often do i have to read that games need elaborate stories? Why are games always compared to movies? When will this ever stop?
A game is a game and a movie is a movie. That games started to look like movies only proofs how few imagination game designers have.
I mean, even "Tetris Worlds" has a story nowadays, because it is a must, because nobody can imagine that it would work without one.
YUCK!!!!!
That Netscape and after that IE accepted "bad code" was just great!! In fact i think their versions of HTML were the first fault-tolerant computer language and everybody could hump some page together in notepad.
This made the web a medium for everybody, not just the c++ boys. Of course now, instead of making the web easier to author, web standards become more and more incomprehensible (XML stuff for "this is my dog"-pages??) and the web shall be ruled by "professionals" or by idiots who should swallow some stupid Dreamweaver or iWeb instead of getting a chance to learn something.
BTW: Spoken, human language is highly flexible in interpretation and expression. Computer languages are not. If you ask for "syntactically correct" human language, you should read "Computer Power and Human Reason" by Weizenbaum.
Not really. The act alone that data is collected will raise the demands to do something with it. Even if that is not the first intention. And it is not about the operators alone, but about everybody who might be interested in the data. Today and in the future.
A last resort is always that a law will be changed for a government to be able to use data they do not own. Reasons can be many, fear of terrorists, tax fraud on large scale, etc etc. What not is happening right now may be happens next year, because data is forever. Google can never be so un-evil to destroy their data when the situation changes, because this data is all they have.
All this stuff is just about giving up responsibilty on the simplest things. Like storing your own files and making backups. Why should i want a "web app" that technically simply cannot compete with a desktop app? ... so Google gives how many Gigabytes of Mail memory, and has database search and threading ... well i have a 120 GB harrdrive here and Opera mail. Computing speed and storage was never cheaper, easier, more portable or saver than now, great free software in beer and speech is behind every corner and exactly at this very moment all these "web apps" are becoming a success. I think this is plain weird.
About the cat story:
http://www.bildblog.de/?p=791
(in german language)
All you guys using the word "intuitive" or "counter-intuitive" are on the wrong track i think. There is nothing intuitive in computer interfaces like it is in the real world, where you learn how objects behave as a child and this never changes. In the computer, everything can change all the time. There are many reasons why.
...
...
For people growing up with command lines or ANSI-kind of menus, drag&drop was never very important. Windows, cascading menus and icons in this view are just a way to shortcut to commands.
The idea behind drag&drop is that of spatiality and objects that have behaviours embedded -- more like the so called "real word" a bit. Combinations of objects should trigger special actions or should just be possible.
With the ongoing movement of GUIs i found out drag&drop becomes more and more crippled. The potential was never really used and the few things that worked are disappearing. The GUIs are moving into the push-button direction that try to make everything single-click. Probably the idea behind it is that the web was so successfull and there are only single clicks there.
The outcome of this tactic are largely overblown menus, because for every action there needs to be a description and a button and a menu. Just look at all the "context"-menus that come up with the right mouse button
Drag&drop and spaciality could save all this clutter and make the GUI worth its name. After all the idea behind the GUI is to introduce a two-dimensional space instead of one-dimensional text.
But it is more difficult to develop. People will drag and drop stuff from everywhere to anywhere and the software has to come up with a smart reaction to that. It is definitely more easy to put everything that is "allowed" into menus. This became the typical form to make interfaces now.
And if there is something else happening it is labelled counter-intuitive. I wish it would be much more "counter-intuitive" to really strike a difference and use the pixels i paid for, and not to go the way of MS Windows and X too far further
As if computer usage would tell about thoughts of a person ... Computers simply love everybody. Once i was on an Atari geek meeting, and suddenly two people had to leave to go to a demonstration against nuclear waste transports. One of them was a demonstrator trying to stop the transport, the other one was a police officer trying to stop demonstrants. This was like 10 years ago and now i came to the believe that computer nerd-dom can unite the whole world!
There could still be cool templates in spreadsheets. Like how many hoes Snoop Dogg had calculated from his record sales.
I don't know ... back in the 90s shareware days i thought this was completely normal.
... but nowadays it is all about konquering the (business) desktop and adapting the same makes-me-yawn language as corporations. Takes some fun out of computing.
Rubberduck was freaky underground software, i used it from versions on that looked like Windows3.1. It was the software to produce the cheapest and best sounding bass; as a bedroom producer you could finally laugh about the people that rent studios or spend huge money on gear and think that is half of the music already done. It started just then.
Today even GNU stuff looks polished. I think this is boring. I want announcements like "KDE new release with bomb shit doorbending menus comin atcha like cleopatra" or "new version of gnumeric -- coded on bad LSD" or whatever