My submission is not mindless. I accept that speed limits are necessary a) because I do not know (and cannot always identify quickly enough) every dangerous road segment and b) to keep the 25% of traffic participants who are complete and utter morons from killing themselves and, more importantly, me. I may not agree with every particular limit at a given place, but I would rather have to file a request to re-evaluate that limit with the respective authority (yes, that is possible, and in most areas it does happen quite timely) than allow everyone to go as fast as they please.
To qualify that position I am a medic with an emergency organisation. The vast majority of accidents I was called to so far was caused by someone being an idiot, not by technical malfunction or external factors. So I am willing to trade a bit of freedom for a bit of safety here, within reason.
Here in Canada, we have new, moronic laws which (in some Provinces) can cause an automatic suspension of a license, if you are doing more than 50km/hr (30mph) over the limit. [...] Now, this sort of law makes sense in a 30km/hr zone. [...] However, we also have roads where the speed limit is 100km/hr, and where the *normal* traffic flow is 130km/hr. So, that means if you deviate by 20km/hr over the flow of traffic, you get your car impounded, and lose your license for a week?!
You do not seriously argue that it is ok to drive at 150% the allowed speed? As far as I am concerned anyone who goes more than 20km/h or 20% over the limit - whichever is greater - should lose their license for a week for the first offence, a month for the second and permanently for the third, with no way of getting it back. The same goes for not keeping minimum safety distance, driving without lights in the dark and overtaking where it is forbidden. Such people are simply not fit to behave responsibly in public traffic and thus should be removed from it.
There are procedures for requesting changes to speed limits when they are put up without cause or are too strict. Not every limit makes sense. But giving people a carte blanche for breaking the law when they feel like it? Sorry, no.
I know, I know, in the foreseeable future Linux will not be an officially supported platform for Valve, but does this move have implications for (potential) Linux compatibility of Source games? OpenGL is readily available under any desktop oriented distro I have come across so far, and porting from OS X to Linux (or emulating needed parts of the former under the latter) should be easier and give much better results than dealing with Wine. Or am I missing something?
On the one hand a lot of functionality is moved rather hastily from dedicated, years old plugins into the browser itself, which opens the door for bugs, incorrect implementations and general fuck-ups. So in the first few browser iterations there certainly is a risk that someone, somewhere, has missed something critical. Though, as with all other bugs, this should be ironed out over time. The foundation for most of the vulnerable parts, JavaScript, has been around for quite some time now; the worst attack vectors should already be mitigated.
On the other hand we might see the day where Flash is banished from all computers, which would translate into an enormous decrease in security issues, resource consumption and general annoyance. So whatever the risk of all the new code in our browsers may be, I for one think it is worthwhile.
That has got to be the most nonsensical comment I have read on/. so far. Either that or I just do not get your kind of humour. What does the free market have to do with government transparency? And what has free (as in speech) software to do with socialism and holocausts?
not known to anyone who is not authorised to know it, and
sufficiently complex that it cannot be discovered by mere accident or a bit of common sense or guesswork.
If active attacks, ie. unintended uses of your infrastructure, are necessary to reveal the secret (brute forcing, breaking into your server, kidnapping and torturing you etc.), then I agree that the line has been crossed.
I am aware that this distinction is rather blurry. But while I do condemn brute forcing and comparable attacks I cannot subscribe to the opinion that seeing through obscurity is an evil hack. Intent alone does not constitute a security measure. There has to be a certain level of quality to an access control system.
Nevermind, got it wrong. The journalist knew exactly which bench to check. Dunno where those 3727 other attempts come from. Point still stands. No password was hacked, no security measure was defeated. Someone just found something in plain sight that simply had not been publicly announced.
To give you a (non-car) analogy: You have super-secret information which you write onto a sheet of paper. You hide that paper underneath a bench in a public park - simply by placing it on the ground there, without an envelope or any other cover. A journalist gets tipped off to check all benches in this park for secret information. He looks under 3727 benches without finding anything, but under the 3728. bench he discovers your sheet of paper.
Sixty-four-dollar question: Did the journalist "hack" your super-secret information?
Haven't you noticed? The desktop is irrelevant. It's been abstracted to an Internet access platform. [...]
Absolutely! Which is why I have two operating systems with about 30 applications (not counting games) each installed on a quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM, two video cards and a RAID0 array.
[...] If I were a provider, I might even insist upon the ability to access systems running on my network simply because of liability concerns as the provider. I as the provider can't be allowing untoward activity on my network. [...]
You do not need any access to a customer's box to stop any illegal behaviour other than a way to yank the network cable from it. Access equals liability.
Law enforcement has the discretion not to arrest and charge and prosecutors have the discretion not to prosecute.
Within certain constraints. Here in Germany afaik failure to act on a report about a crime (as opposed to misdemeanours) can be a criminal offence in itself, for both the police and the prosecution.
Please mod parent up. Many people in upper management have an astounding ability to completely disable what common sense they have when it comes to even relatively simple IT related issues, as if it was some kind of magic or devilry.
Netbooks make sense as (relatively) cheap, light, small mobile web browsing devices with a long battery run time for people who need to go online on the road and maybe type up a text, but who do not need the raw power and do not want to carry the size and weight of a full-size laptop. Students come to mind. Most netbooks are the size of a medium book, so they do not take up much space in your backpack, while a 15" laptop can be as unwieldy as a binder.
Netbooks will not replace laptops and PCs for the majority of people, but for certain groups they are useful as a secondary, portable device in place of a true laptop.
In a sense, yes. Police officers have a certain duty to perform. If a regulation hampers their ability to perform it, someone in the legislative will take a look at it and decide whether an exemption from this regulation can be justified (the effects of granting an exemption vs. the effects of not granting one). In this case it apparently was found to be justifiable. Ergo yes, with a good enough reason you may get exempted from the hand-held ban.
Here in Germany every patrol carries a mobile, and it is increasingly used alongside the radio for anything that is not covered by confidentiality regulations. So it is not unusual to see a police officer on a mobile behind the wheel.
[...] What is it that makes a copper less likely to be distracted by a hand held device than you or me?
Nothing. But the copper has a good reason to use a hand-held device, namely the fulfillment of their official duty to serve and protect the public, as opposed to Joe Dipshit's rather flimsy reason to text away while speeding down the highway to let Aunt Irma know he will arrive two nanoseconds later than expected. That is why, at least in most countries, police officers are also allowed to carry guns, battons, tasers and thelikes in public while civilian use of such items may be restricted.
My assumption is that none of these plugins are slipped into Firefox by an update to an unrelated software without informing the user or requiring their action beforehand, so users do not even know they might be vulnerable (though I cannot recall whether I was prompted to install the Google Update plugin), and that none of these plugins prevent the user from removing or disabling them from within Firefox.
The suggestion is not at all delusional. Limitations of personal freedom and liberty move on a scale between weak and small social dictates - you should not say x because it is inappropriate, you should not do y because it is not looked upon kindly -, more or less well founded legal threats - you must not say x because it is forbidden, you must not do y because you go to jail for it - and outright jeopardy of your own life and livelihood - you cannot say x because someone will send you to the hospital for doing this, you cannot do y because someone will shoot you for it.
The severity of the chilling effect such limitations have may vary by degree, but it is measured on the same scale. The former Soviet Bloc escalated the suppression of its subjects, but for quite some time now our Western countries have been steadily marching down the very same path.
When you cannot publish information about a corporate scandal that clearly is of interest to the general public for fear of legal repercussion, something is horribly wrong.
Letting the production servers run updates automatically at a fixed time and monitoring them for issues are not exclusive activities. You can combine them.
IANAL, but if I understand the issue correctly, AFPA sued not for copyright violation but for the rights they as the users would have been granted by the GPL which Edu4 chose to deny them.
Had they gotten VNC directly from the official developers, AFPA would have received certain rights, amongst them access to the source code.
Instead they got a derivative work of VNC from Edu4, but Edu4 did not give them those same rights as required by the GPL. And that is what they went to court for. This is not really about copyright law but about contract law, I would say.
Slashdot Mirror
My submission is not mindless. I accept that speed limits are necessary a) because I do not know (and cannot always identify quickly enough) every dangerous road segment and b) to keep the 25% of traffic participants who are complete and utter morons from killing themselves and, more importantly, me. I may not agree with every particular limit at a given place, but I would rather have to file a request to re-evaluate that limit with the respective authority (yes, that is possible, and in most areas it does happen quite timely) than allow everyone to go as fast as they please.
To qualify that position I am a medic with an emergency organisation. The vast majority of accidents I was called to so far was caused by someone being an idiot, not by technical malfunction or external factors. So I am willing to trade a bit of freedom for a bit of safety here, within reason.
Here in Canada, we have new, moronic laws which (in some Provinces) can cause an automatic suspension of a license, if you are doing more than 50km/hr (30mph) over the limit. [...] Now, this sort of law makes sense in a 30km/hr zone. [...] However, we also have roads where the speed limit is 100km/hr, and where the *normal* traffic flow is 130km/hr. So, that means if you deviate by 20km/hr over the flow of traffic, you get your car impounded, and lose your license for a week?!
You do not seriously argue that it is ok to drive at 150% the allowed speed? As far as I am concerned anyone who goes more than 20km/h or 20% over the limit - whichever is greater - should lose their license for a week for the first offence, a month for the second and permanently for the third, with no way of getting it back. The same goes for not keeping minimum safety distance, driving without lights in the dark and overtaking where it is forbidden. Such people are simply not fit to behave responsibly in public traffic and thus should be removed from it.
There are procedures for requesting changes to speed limits when they are put up without cause or are too strict. Not every limit makes sense. But giving people a carte blanche for breaking the law when they feel like it? Sorry, no.
That is what happens to you when you rush off to rescue your chocolate cake from burning while writing what you thought would be the first comment.
I know, I know, in the foreseeable future Linux will not be an officially supported platform for Valve, but does this move have implications for (potential) Linux compatibility of Source games? OpenGL is readily available under any desktop oriented distro I have come across so far, and porting from OS X to Linux (or emulating needed parts of the former under the latter) should be easier and give much better results than dealing with Wine. Or am I missing something?
On the one hand a lot of functionality is moved rather hastily from dedicated, years old plugins into the browser itself, which opens the door for bugs, incorrect implementations and general fuck-ups. So in the first few browser iterations there certainly is a risk that someone, somewhere, has missed something critical. Though, as with all other bugs, this should be ironed out over time. The foundation for most of the vulnerable parts, JavaScript, has been around for quite some time now; the worst attack vectors should already be mitigated.
On the other hand we might see the day where Flash is banished from all computers, which would translate into an enormous decrease in security issues, resource consumption and general annoyance. So whatever the risk of all the new code in our browsers may be, I for one think it is worthwhile.
That has got to be the most nonsensical comment I have read on /. so far. Either that or I just do not get your kind of humour. What does the free market have to do with government transparency? And what has free (as in speech) software to do with socialism and holocausts?
"Secret" for me implies that it is
If active attacks, ie. unintended uses of your infrastructure, are necessary to reveal the secret (brute forcing, breaking into your server, kidnapping and torturing you etc.), then I agree that the line has been crossed.
I am aware that this distinction is rather blurry. But while I do condemn brute forcing and comparable attacks I cannot subscribe to the opinion that seeing through obscurity is an evil hack. Intent alone does not constitute a security measure. There has to be a certain level of quality to an access control system.
Nevermind, got it wrong. The journalist knew exactly which bench to check. Dunno where those 3727 other attempts come from. Point still stands. No password was hacked, no security measure was defeated. Someone just found something in plain sight that simply had not been publicly announced.
To give you a (non-car) analogy: You have super-secret information which you write onto a sheet of paper. You hide that paper underneath a bench in a public park - simply by placing it on the ground there, without an envelope or any other cover. A journalist gets tipped off to check all benches in this park for secret information. He looks under 3727 benches without finding anything, but under the 3728. bench he discovers your sheet of paper.
Sixty-four-dollar question: Did the journalist "hack" your super-secret information?
Haven't you noticed? The desktop is irrelevant. It's been abstracted to an Internet access platform. [...]
Absolutely! Which is why I have two operating systems with about 30 applications (not counting games) each installed on a quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM, two video cards and a RAID0 array.
Oh, wait...
Groupthink isn't confused; It's just that it's not synchronised properly.
That has got to be the most sensible statement on the matter I have read so far.
[...] If I were a provider, I might even insist upon the ability to access systems running on my network simply because of liability concerns as the provider. I as the provider can't be allowing untoward activity on my network. [...]
You do not need any access to a customer's box to stop any illegal behaviour other than a way to yank the network cable from it. Access equals liability.
Law enforcement has the discretion not to arrest and charge and prosecutors have the discretion not to prosecute.
Within certain constraints. Here in Germany afaik failure to act on a report about a crime (as opposed to misdemeanours) can be a criminal offence in itself, for both the police and the prosecution.
Maybe those machines simply registered disrupted power or telco lines and sent a "Something's wrong!" message to the on-call tech slave.
Please mod parent up. Many people in upper management have an astounding ability to completely disable what common sense they have when it comes to even relatively simple IT related issues, as if it was some kind of magic or devilry.
Yes, it is.
There are people who have not yet been killed in a car crash.
Fixed that for you.
Netbooks make sense as (relatively) cheap, light, small mobile web browsing devices with a long battery run time for people who need to go online on the road and maybe type up a text, but who do not need the raw power and do not want to carry the size and weight of a full-size laptop. Students come to mind. Most netbooks are the size of a medium book, so they do not take up much space in your backpack, while a 15" laptop can be as unwieldy as a binder.
Netbooks will not replace laptops and PCs for the majority of people, but for certain groups they are useful as a secondary, portable device in place of a true laptop.
In a sense, yes. Police officers have a certain duty to perform. If a regulation hampers their ability to perform it, someone in the legislative will take a look at it and decide whether an exemption from this regulation can be justified (the effects of granting an exemption vs. the effects of not granting one). In this case it apparently was found to be justifiable. Ergo yes, with a good enough reason you may get exempted from the hand-held ban.
Here in Germany every patrol carries a mobile, and it is increasingly used alongside the radio for anything that is not covered by confidentiality regulations. So it is not unusual to see a police officer on a mobile behind the wheel.
[...] What is it that makes a copper less likely to be distracted by a hand held device than you or me?
Nothing. But the copper has a good reason to use a hand-held device, namely the fulfillment of their official duty to serve and protect the public, as opposed to Joe Dipshit's rather flimsy reason to text away while speeding down the highway to let Aunt Irma know he will arrive two nanoseconds later than expected. That is why, at least in most countries, police officers are also allowed to carry guns, battons, tasers and thelikes in public while civilian use of such items may be restricted.
My assumption is that none of these plugins are slipped into Firefox by an update to an unrelated software without informing the user or requiring their action beforehand, so users do not even know they might be vulnerable (though I cannot recall whether I was prompted to install the Google Update plugin), and that none of these plugins prevent the user from removing or disabling them from within Firefox.
The suggestion is not at all delusional. Limitations of personal freedom and liberty move on a scale between weak and small social dictates - you should not say x because it is inappropriate, you should not do y because it is not looked upon kindly -, more or less well founded legal threats - you must not say x because it is forbidden, you must not do y because you go to jail for it - and outright jeopardy of your own life and livelihood - you cannot say x because someone will send you to the hospital for doing this, you cannot do y because someone will shoot you for it.
The severity of the chilling effect such limitations have may vary by degree, but it is measured on the same scale. The former Soviet Bloc escalated the suppression of its subjects, but for quite some time now our Western countries have been steadily marching down the very same path.
When you cannot publish information about a corporate scandal that clearly is of interest to the general public for fear of legal repercussion, something is horribly wrong.
Letting the production servers run updates automatically at a fixed time and monitoring them for issues are not exclusive activities. You can combine them.
IANAL, but if I understand the issue correctly, AFPA sued not for copyright violation but for the rights they as the users would have been granted by the GPL which Edu4 chose to deny them.
Had they gotten VNC directly from the official developers, AFPA would have received certain rights, amongst them access to the source code.
Instead they got a derivative work of VNC from Edu4, but Edu4 did not give them those same rights as required by the GPL. And that is what they went to court for. This is not really about copyright law but about contract law, I would say.