Really exicited to see if they port this to Firefox. They have already ported the version 3 of the Unreal Engine to Firefox, using OpenGL for graphics and Asm.js for code. The speed difference compared to the native version should be very small to non-existent, since Asm.js is statically compiled.
I talk about SS parades and monuments in Latvia. Supported and mandated by the government.
I follow developments in the Baltics somewhat, and I have never heard of this. I found a story on RT about a Latvian Waffen SS veterans' march, which was accompanied by an anti-fascist counter-demonstration. I could imagine that some Latvians view the SS as heroes even though Nazi Germany occupied Latvia, because the Nazis fought the Soviets, and the Soviet occupation that followed was much more brutal than the Nazi occupation. I don't think the police or the government is taking sides here, even though RT (which is known for its propaganda stories) tries to spin it that way: in a democratic society, everyone has the right to assemble and express opinions, and one job of the police is guaranteeing that right – even if it means protecting someone paying tribute to Nazi history from an angry mob.
I talk about the discrimination of ethnic Russians who were refused the citizenship and were stripped of some rights there.
I understand some people of Russian ethnicity who moved or were moved to the Baltics during the Soviet occupation do not have a citizenship of the Baltic state that they reside in, among others because the Baltic states require a proficiency in the official state language – which is not Russian – and the state views those Russian-speakers as being citizens of the modern-day Russian federation. However, since these people have no Russian citizenship either, they are not citizens of any country. Living as a non-citizen can be difficult, but every day more and more ethnic Russian receive the citizenship through successful assimilation.
Lithuanian government pursuits the use of Soviet symbolic but does not do the same to the Nazi insignia. All of the above routinely ignored by the European Union.
I was not able to find a source, but I don't find this at all surprising. Displaying Nazi insignia is banned in Germany and Israel, because Germans and Jews suffered tremendously from Nazism. The people of the Baltics suffered tremendously from the Soviet occupation, so it is understandable that they in turn do not tolerate Soviet symbols.
The point is, there are no Nazis in power in those countries nowadays (some Baltic countries may be considered an exception though).
What on Earth are you talking about? There are definitely no Nazis in power in any Baltic country (Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia) – they are all lead by liberal-democratic, conservative, social-democratic or centrist governments.
Fidesz, the ruling party of Hungary, has links to Nazi-like groups, but it is still half a Europe away from the Baltics.
You would be surprised to hear that many democratic countries in present-day Europe apart from the Nazi-Germany itself fought alongside the Nazis in WWII, including Italians, Finns, Romanians, Bulgarians and Norwegians. And these were the real-deal WWII genociding, totalitarian, Führer-hailing Nazis – not some modern-day, nostalgic Neo-Nazis, who don't even know how to genocide. And apart from those countries that fought alongside them, in the 1930s Nazis had large amounts of supporters in every Western country, and their policies were widely regarded as progressive, modern and necessary. Nowadays we know that the Nazi policies led to ruin, but the masses of the 1930s did not and thought they were behaving rationally. Do you think human thinking has changed much in mere 80 years?
Russia has at least a superficially "legitimate" claim for Crimea, since some 60% of the population are ethnic Russians. Making claims for any other parts of Ukraine is a whole other deal, since every other region of Ukraine is ethnically mostly Ukrainian.
Why shouldn't Ukraine just give up Crimea for the sake of national unity? Ukraine as a whole seems to be flying from one crisis to another, and it is seems to be torn between the pro-Russia and pro-West factions. Maybe Ukraine should just focus building its future as a Western country, and give up those territories where the population wants to live under Russian rule. Maybe later those areas can then join Ukraine if they so wish, like happened with the unification of West and East Germany.
What Google has going for them with Android is the ecosystem. I guess they make some proper money from their share of Play store purchases and in-app advertisement revenues. Thinking of it, I am pretty surprised Microsoft did not come up with this earlier. Their product is dying and they should be building a similar ecosystem like Google, not clinging to the past where people pay quadzillions for the platform software.
I am just waiting for people to get hands on it, cripple all the Microsoft spyware/adware functions, crack the usage restrictions and publish it all on Internets as an application that you just install on your cost-free adware Windows. I mean, many people already use Windows only to run Win-only apps inside a virtual machine, so paying for the license feels like a total rip-off. This is excellent if Microsoft is rolling out a cost-free version, joke will be on them.
The editor can not be downloaded anywhere. They don't even tell you what platforms it supports – although someone on Reddit mentioned it only supports Macintosh. I am not signing up to their marketing e-mails before they actually tell me what I am even getting in return.
I mean, if you aren't including the OS on the phone as Nokia's responsibility, than what exactly are they responsible for?
This is indeed absolutely ridiculous and priceless statement.
To understand why they gave such a statement, we must know some background. The whole debacle started in 2012 when the Finnish government's IT department had a meeting with Nokia, where Nokia's management assured them that Nokia's Lumia phones had superior security and user privacy to both iPhone and Androids. Consequently, the government bought several Lumia phones for top officials who engage in sensitive communication, like the Prime Minister. Thanks to Snowden leaks, the government in 2013 then received contrary information: that Lumia phones were just as hackable as other smartphones through the inclusion of the Microsoft operating system.
Consequently, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) made an officially actionable inquiry to Nokia regarding whether the devices they sold indeed revealed the user's confidential communications, location information and other private information without the user's authorization. The authority warned that if the corporation had knowledge that the phone was leaking such data, and did not answer truthfully, it could be held liable under the criminal law for false statement in official proceedings and failing to report a serious offence.
The company then replied, that they were unable to officially give such an assurance (i.e. they probably knew that the device was leaking private data). Then, FICORA made another official inquiry, asking for even a smaller set of privacy assurances. Nokia was again unable to give an official assurance of privacy of its devices, so in August 2013 officials from FICORA and Nokia had an informal meeting where they tried to find common ground: what kind of privacy assurances Nokia could actually give about its devices. Turns out, Nokia could only go as far as to assure that it had not installed any additional spying modules – and only to those devices that it was selling in Finland, anyway.
So they delimited the official assurance that Nokia should give to only concern the hardware and software it had itself made and was selling in Finland, excluding actions of their subcontractors and business partners (like Microsoft). Well, Nokia was able to give such an assurance, even if it is obviously of no value to consumers. But the company had something to show for FICORA: at least Nokia itself takes Finnish and EU privacy regulations seriously, even if it is in partnerships with other corporations for which it can not make equal assurances.
You made the argument that Wikipedia is an "anarchy". Now you're saying they have too many rules. Which is it?
At what point do you think in a real-world anarchy would be overtaken by the power-hungry, nihilistic individuals seeking to establish an aristocracy of the competent, and be turned into a walled garden of the like-minded only? But wait.. did I just describe Wikipedia? No way...
ANYONE can delete unsourced or improperly sourced material.
"Yes, welcome to delete the false information that we're publishing about you/your company. Oh, you work for that company? Let the ban hammer sing!" COI (Conflict Of Interest), i.e. someone editing an article where they have a stake at play, often means in practice that the user is banned within microseconds, if there are any anonymous editors with differing opinions. The guideline page itself says "Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question". The admins have even set up a noticeboard, where anonymous editors can report people they suspect of having "COI".
In short, if people would _follow the fucking rules_ that Wikipedia has made fairly clear, they could edit their own articles as much as they pleased.
This is classical Wikipedia style arrogance. What you are essentially saying, is that Wikipedia will default to publishing blatant misinformation and propaganda added by anonymous and/or pseudonymous editors with impunity. If you happen to disagree with a mispresentation of your person, your company or your product published through Wikipedia, you must jump through numerous hoops and face the newcomer-hostile "Wikipedia community", who will first demand you read through several 10+ page guidelines, manuals and policy discussions. Then, you will need to contact an admin, who might live on a different timezone, to have the page actually modified. And you had better declare your COI on your user page, too. There might be other hoops to jump through as well – just for clearing lies and misrepresentations published on Wikipedia that happen to concern you. And if you at any point make even the slightest of a mistake, you and your whole company (under the "sockpuppet rules") are easily banned from Wikipedia forever.
Why would any sensible person who has better things in life than reading Wikipedia manuals and guidelines ever even try correcting the pages? The hostile and self-proclaimed meritocracy make Wikipedia a truly kafkaesque experience to all outsiders who don't happen to be wiki-nerds or willing to become one. Paid editing, exactly what Wiki-PR seems to have been doing, would be the easy way to make Wikipedia more neutral by allowing companies to hire editors to remove at least some of the blatant propaganda that Wikipedia is currently full of.
Just like with the Linux kernel, it's a high time the Wikipedia community gave up the futile resistance to paid editing. It's already happening, and denying it is only embarrassing with "revelations" like this IBM case. What goes to the whole Wiki-PR debacle, turns out all the company was doing was correcting errors, libel and defamation that anonymous Wikipedia editors hiding behind pseudonyms and IP addresses have been adding to Wikipedia.
As it stands, Wikipedia is essentially an anarchy where anyone can publish all sorts of lies and propaganda, and companies like Wiki-PR are needed so that those, who are damaged by misinformation that anonymous Wikipedia editors publish, can hire neutral editors to fight the anonymous hoaxers. Wikipedia's own volunteer community has been since long overwhelmed by the sheer amounts of vandalism and biased information added every minute, and only the most obvious cases of misinformation and fraud are ever caught. But instead of celebrating the work that Wiki-PR was doing for the people and companies who have fallen victim to the terror of Wikipedia misinformation, the company behind Wikipedia instead chose to demonized Wiki-PR to media and threatened to sue them.
What's really worrying, is that Google gives Wikipedia a "boost" in its search rankings. So for example, any hoaxer can easily use Wikipedia to publish misinformation about people, products and companies that they don't like. Then anyone searching Google for the name of the person, product or company are immediately served the Wikipedia page on the subject. This page is often full of misinformation and propaganda, while those concerned (like the employees of the said company or the person being defamed himself) are forbidden from correcting the article. Previously, Wikipedia admins were satisfied with just banning those fighting the misinformation under the "conflict of interest" doctrine. But now, the company behind Wikipedia has demonstrated that they are ready to sue you if you want to correct the lies that are being distributed through their platform.
As a Finnish taxpayer I am utterly frustrated by this. It seems like the work of an overly-enthusiastic police official. The Wikipedia fundraiser makes it very explicit that the funds are being collected by a non-profit organization incorporated in California, and subject only to their local laws. Although the fundraiser would be illegal in Finland as-is (Finnish law requires applying for a fundraising permit to discourage fraud), the police and the courts in Finland clearly lack jurisdiction against a U.S. non-profit. The police resources, which they claim to be very scarce due to recent cuts in public sector spending, would be much better spend investigating actual fraud and other crime, where the police and the courts actually have jurisdiction and means to prevent and stop the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice.
It is irrelevant what the British government or its courts think they can do, since this action is clearly against the legal precedent set by the European Court of Human Rights as a breach of the protections guaranteed under the Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. For example, in Marttinen v Finland the Court wrote:
The Court reiterates its case-law on the use of coercion to obtain information: although not specifically mentioned in Article 6 of the Convention, the rights relied on by the applicant, the right to silence and the right not to incriminate oneself, are generally recognised international standards which lie at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure under Article 6
The British courts should take in consideration the legal precedent on EU level and overturn this sentence, or any competent lawyer will take the defendant's case before the EU Human Rights court, who will stuff this sentence up the arsehole of the British government and the tax payer (i.e. the government will have to pay the defendant compensation for the inhumane treatment and legal costs.)
This goes directly against prior decisions by the European Court of Human Rights. There is very clear and unambiguous legal precedent, that a person under criminal investigation need not bear witness against himself. For example. in Marttinen v Finland the Court interpreted the article 6.1 that reads inter alia "In the determination of... any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair... hearing... by [a]... tribunal...". The Court wrote in its decision:
The Court reiterates its case-law on the use of coercion to obtain information: although not specifically mentioned in Article 6 of the Convention, the rights relied on by the applicant, the right to silence and the right not to incriminate oneself, are generally recognised international standards which lie at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure under Article 6
If the defendant is not able to have this sentence overturned in domestic courts, he should hire a lawyer who can bring this case before the European Court of Human Rights ASAP to obtain a decision against the Government of UK. The court will also award compensation for the inhumane treatment of the defendant by the Government, and obligate the government to compensate for the legal expenses.
That might be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the deal and the alteration to the software were done in 2004, but the first researcher analyses to hint of problems with this algorithm weren't published until 2006. When making the change, the developers were not necessarily told that NSA had paid RSA to use that algorithm. It might have passed as just another security improvement to the product.
I was also skeptical when I first saw the news articles (like this one) that said that RSA had published a statement where they supposedly refuted the existence of that NSA deal. The existence of the deal was originally broken by Reuters in this article, where they cite "two sources familiar with the contract" as their sources. But then, after more in-depth analysis of the RSA blog post where they supposedly "denied" the existence of the deal, it was revealed that actually RSA neither denied nor acknowledged that such deal existed in their statement. They are just using general wording to give an impression, that they would certainly never do such thing. But they are not directly denying the existence of the deal.
Now, thinking logically, it's pretty damn clear that they would have denied that such a deal was ever made, if they were in the position of making such a claim. But given they don't directly deny the claims presented by Reuters, it would seem a much more logical explanation that the deal indeed was made, and RSA just went into damage control mode after the publication of the Reuters article. Lying to the public would have meant more damage if Reuters would have later been able to present the actual paper of the deal, so I suppose we can take their lack of directly denying this deal's existence as an admission of sorts. This is also the reason why speakers are canceling their appearance in the conference ("Your company has issued a statement on the topic, but you have not denied this particular claim.")
So, I think we have grounds to believe that there is actually quite much truth to the original story by Reuters. As they say, the deal was "handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists". I am pretty sure that this is a yet-another example of a major manager-level f*ck up. Tech companies very often have all the expertise on the technical personnel level, while managers are a "necessary evil" who often have much fewer insight into the technical field where the company actually operates. Of course, anyone with even the slightest idea of how the IT security field functions, would never ever endanger their company's credibility (at least for such little reward as $10 million), because deals like this tend resurface in the public sphere sooner or later. All we can assume that someone in the management made a very major f*ck-up and made this secret deal with NSA without much consulting from the technical folks. But I am pretty sure that now that this deal has surfaced in the public sphere, it will end up costing RSA a great deal more in lost sales than what the "business leaders" anticipated they could gain in short term from making the deal with NSA.
The website where the story article is hosted is pretty terrible. It's apparently based entirely on some sort of JavaScript hacks. I can only zoom one photo before the JavaScript code crashes. Then, when I try to reload, it loses the position I was on the page. I also dislike those texts and images that change brightness and scroll in dis-syncronization with the rest of the page. Not to speak of those "Share" buttons jumping out from behind page elements when I move my mouse cursor around. This page, although apparently meant to be "artistic", is sadly just a staple of horrible and dysfunctional web design.
Err.. Well, let's just say I am sure he would have implemented as general of a solution as was possible within the constraints imposed by the rules, if that was the entrant's goal. Make no mistake, I have tremendous respect for this competition and the entrants. Sad to see there are such lamers on Slashdot showing an unreasonably hostile attitude for someone simply taking interest in someone else's work. You don't happen to be employed by the copyright mafia by any chance, do you?
Does the program include its own PNG format algorithms, or am I missing something?
Same goes for the web server: did he really write his own web server in mills.c?
Well in a way, yes for both. He only uses standard C libraries, so there is indeed no PNG library or an HTTP server #included. But due to the size limitations, the code can probably only produce one exact type of PNG image and the HTTP server can only serve one page, so those are not "proper" implementations by any means. For example, the HTTP server ignores the request path and the result of accessing http://localhost:8224/http://localhost:8224/foo and http://localhost:8224/foo/bar is alwyas the same – pretty useless for a "real" HTTP server. If you look up the.C file, it's typeset in an artistic manner, resembling one of the ball bearings in the rendered end result. So, the point, like with many other IOCCC entries, is to demonstrate how some seemingly very complex tasks can be achieved by short, obfuscated C files.
I found this one a pretty mind-blowing entry. When compiled and run, it creates a web server at http://localhost:8224, which can be opened in a browser to display a ray-traced 3D scene of steel ball bearings on a checker-pattern surface, arranged to display the current time. Quoting the description:
The program wears many hats (not literally). It is
* a web server
* a PNG encoder
* a ray tracer
* a clock
Unlike the PC emulator entry, it does not require a binary blob and all the code and data fit within the 4 kilobyte limit.
There might be more to that entry than meets the eye. Quoting its description:
CPU supports the full 8086/186 instruction set. Due to the complexities of the 8086’s arbitrary-length instruction decoding and flags, 8086 instructions are first converted to a simpler intermediate format before being executed. This conversion, along with instruction lengths and how each instruction modifies the flags, is assisted by some lookup tables which form part of the BIOS binary.
The BIOS binary is over 12 kilobytes, so it raises the question as to which extent the emulation might be actually achieved by the BIOS.
Is this finally it? The year of Linux on the desktop? Remember that Android is essentially just a Linux that runs the GUI on Dalvik (Java). It can be fairly easily rooted and the existing kernel and ABI interfaces employed to make X etc. run on the Android's Linux base. This could mean that people can fairly easily install a one-download "upgrade" on their off-the-shelf Windows PCs, and employ the full Linux ecosystem without loosing any of their pre-existing Windows features and applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Really exicited to see if they port this to Firefox. They have already ported the version 3 of the Unreal Engine to Firefox, using OpenGL for graphics and Asm.js for code. The speed difference compared to the native version should be very small to non-existent, since Asm.js is statically compiled.
I talk about SS parades and monuments in Latvia. Supported and mandated by the government.
I follow developments in the Baltics somewhat, and I have never heard of this. I found a story on RT about a Latvian Waffen SS veterans' march, which was accompanied by an anti-fascist counter-demonstration. I could imagine that some Latvians view the SS as heroes even though Nazi Germany occupied Latvia, because the Nazis fought the Soviets, and the Soviet occupation that followed was much more brutal than the Nazi occupation. I don't think the police or the government is taking sides here, even though RT (which is known for its propaganda stories) tries to spin it that way: in a democratic society, everyone has the right to assemble and express opinions, and one job of the police is guaranteeing that right – even if it means protecting someone paying tribute to Nazi history from an angry mob.
I talk about the discrimination of ethnic Russians who were refused the citizenship and were stripped of some rights there.
I understand some people of Russian ethnicity who moved or were moved to the Baltics during the Soviet occupation do not have a citizenship of the Baltic state that they reside in, among others because the Baltic states require a proficiency in the official state language – which is not Russian – and the state views those Russian-speakers as being citizens of the modern-day Russian federation. However, since these people have no Russian citizenship either, they are not citizens of any country. Living as a non-citizen can be difficult, but every day more and more ethnic Russian receive the citizenship through successful assimilation.
Lithuanian government pursuits the use of Soviet symbolic but does not do the same to the Nazi insignia. All of the above routinely ignored by the European Union.
I was not able to find a source, but I don't find this at all surprising. Displaying Nazi insignia is banned in Germany and Israel, because Germans and Jews suffered tremendously from Nazism. The people of the Baltics suffered tremendously from the Soviet occupation, so it is understandable that they in turn do not tolerate Soviet symbols.
The point is, there are no Nazis in power in those countries nowadays (some Baltic countries may be considered an exception though).
What on Earth are you talking about? There are definitely no Nazis in power in any Baltic country (Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia) – they are all lead by liberal-democratic, conservative, social-democratic or centrist governments.
Fidesz, the ruling party of Hungary, has links to Nazi-like groups, but it is still half a Europe away from the Baltics.
They. Fought. Side-by-side. With. Nazis.
You would be surprised to hear that many democratic countries in present-day Europe apart from the Nazi-Germany itself fought alongside the Nazis in WWII, including Italians, Finns, Romanians, Bulgarians and Norwegians. And these were the real-deal WWII genociding, totalitarian, Führer-hailing Nazis – not some modern-day, nostalgic Neo-Nazis, who don't even know how to genocide. And apart from those countries that fought alongside them, in the 1930s Nazis had large amounts of supporters in every Western country, and their policies were widely regarded as progressive, modern and necessary. Nowadays we know that the Nazi policies led to ruin, but the masses of the 1930s did not and thought they were behaving rationally. Do you think human thinking has changed much in mere 80 years?
Russia has at least a superficially "legitimate" claim for Crimea, since some 60% of the population are ethnic Russians. Making claims for any other parts of Ukraine is a whole other deal, since every other region of Ukraine is ethnically mostly Ukrainian.
Why shouldn't Ukraine just give up Crimea for the sake of national unity? Ukraine as a whole seems to be flying from one crisis to another, and it is seems to be torn between the pro-Russia and pro-West factions. Maybe Ukraine should just focus building its future as a Western country, and give up those territories where the population wants to live under Russian rule. Maybe later those areas can then join Ukraine if they so wish, like happened with the unification of West and East Germany.
What Google has going for them with Android is the ecosystem. I guess they make some proper money from their share of Play store purchases and in-app advertisement revenues. Thinking of it, I am pretty surprised Microsoft did not come up with this earlier. Their product is dying and they should be building a similar ecosystem like Google, not clinging to the past where people pay quadzillions for the platform software.
I am just waiting for people to get hands on it, cripple all the Microsoft spyware/adware functions, crack the usage restrictions and publish it all on Internets as an application that you just install on your cost-free adware Windows. I mean, many people already use Windows only to run Win-only apps inside a virtual machine, so paying for the license feels like a total rip-off. This is excellent if Microsoft is rolling out a cost-free version, joke will be on them.
The editor can not be downloaded anywhere. They don't even tell you what platforms it supports – although someone on Reddit mentioned it only supports Macintosh. I am not signing up to their marketing e-mails before they actually tell me what I am even getting in return.
I mean, if you aren't including the OS on the phone as Nokia's responsibility, than what exactly are they responsible for?
This is indeed absolutely ridiculous and priceless statement.
To understand why they gave such a statement, we must know some background. The whole debacle started in 2012 when the Finnish government's IT department had a meeting with Nokia, where Nokia's management assured them that Nokia's Lumia phones had superior security and user privacy to both iPhone and Androids. Consequently, the government bought several Lumia phones for top officials who engage in sensitive communication, like the Prime Minister. Thanks to Snowden leaks, the government in 2013 then received contrary information: that Lumia phones were just as hackable as other smartphones through the inclusion of the Microsoft operating system.
Consequently, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) made an officially actionable inquiry to Nokia regarding whether the devices they sold indeed revealed the user's confidential communications, location information and other private information without the user's authorization. The authority warned that if the corporation had knowledge that the phone was leaking such data, and did not answer truthfully, it could be held liable under the criminal law for false statement in official proceedings and failing to report a serious offence.
The company then replied, that they were unable to officially give such an assurance (i.e. they probably knew that the device was leaking private data). Then, FICORA made another official inquiry, asking for even a smaller set of privacy assurances. Nokia was again unable to give an official assurance of privacy of its devices, so in August 2013 officials from FICORA and Nokia had an informal meeting where they tried to find common ground: what kind of privacy assurances Nokia could actually give about its devices. Turns out, Nokia could only go as far as to assure that it had not installed any additional spying modules – and only to those devices that it was selling in Finland, anyway.
So they delimited the official assurance that Nokia should give to only concern the hardware and software it had itself made and was selling in Finland, excluding actions of their subcontractors and business partners (like Microsoft). Well, Nokia was able to give such an assurance, even if it is obviously of no value to consumers. But the company had something to show for FICORA: at least Nokia itself takes Finnish and EU privacy regulations seriously, even if it is in partnerships with other corporations for which it can not make equal assurances.
You made the argument that Wikipedia is an "anarchy". Now you're saying they have too many rules. Which is it?
At what point do you think in a real-world anarchy would be overtaken by the power-hungry, nihilistic individuals seeking to establish an aristocracy of the competent, and be turned into a walled garden of the like-minded only? But wait.. did I just describe Wikipedia? No way...
ANYONE can delete unsourced or improperly sourced material.
"Yes, welcome to delete the false information that we're publishing about you/your company. Oh, you work for that company? Let the ban hammer sing!" COI (Conflict Of Interest), i.e. someone editing an article where they have a stake at play, often means in practice that the user is banned within microseconds, if there are any anonymous editors with differing opinions. The guideline page itself says "Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question". The admins have even set up a noticeboard, where anonymous editors can report people they suspect of having "COI".
In short, if people would _follow the fucking rules_ that Wikipedia has made fairly clear, they could edit their own articles as much as they pleased.
This is classical Wikipedia style arrogance. What you are essentially saying, is that Wikipedia will default to publishing blatant misinformation and propaganda added by anonymous and/or pseudonymous editors with impunity. If you happen to disagree with a mispresentation of your person, your company or your product published through Wikipedia, you must jump through numerous hoops and face the newcomer-hostile "Wikipedia community", who will first demand you read through several 10+ page guidelines, manuals and policy discussions. Then, you will need to contact an admin, who might live on a different timezone, to have the page actually modified. And you had better declare your COI on your user page, too. There might be other hoops to jump through as well – just for clearing lies and misrepresentations published on Wikipedia that happen to concern you. And if you at any point make even the slightest of a mistake, you and your whole company (under the "sockpuppet rules") are easily banned from Wikipedia forever.
Why would any sensible person who has better things in life than reading Wikipedia manuals and guidelines ever even try correcting the pages? The hostile and self-proclaimed meritocracy make Wikipedia a truly kafkaesque experience to all outsiders who don't happen to be wiki-nerds or willing to become one. Paid editing, exactly what Wiki-PR seems to have been doing, would be the easy way to make Wikipedia more neutral by allowing companies to hire editors to remove at least some of the blatant propaganda that Wikipedia is currently full of.
Just like with the Linux kernel, it's a high time the Wikipedia community gave up the futile resistance to paid editing. It's already happening, and denying it is only embarrassing with "revelations" like this IBM case. What goes to the whole Wiki-PR debacle, turns out all the company was doing was correcting errors, libel and defamation that anonymous Wikipedia editors hiding behind pseudonyms and IP addresses have been adding to Wikipedia.
As it stands, Wikipedia is essentially an anarchy where anyone can publish all sorts of lies and propaganda, and companies like Wiki-PR are needed so that those, who are damaged by misinformation that anonymous Wikipedia editors publish, can hire neutral editors to fight the anonymous hoaxers. Wikipedia's own volunteer community has been since long overwhelmed by the sheer amounts of vandalism and biased information added every minute, and only the most obvious cases of misinformation and fraud are ever caught. But instead of celebrating the work that Wiki-PR was doing for the people and companies who have fallen victim to the terror of Wikipedia misinformation, the company behind Wikipedia instead chose to demonized Wiki-PR to media and threatened to sue them.
What's really worrying, is that Google gives Wikipedia a "boost" in its search rankings. So for example, any hoaxer can easily use Wikipedia to publish misinformation about people, products and companies that they don't like. Then anyone searching Google for the name of the person, product or company are immediately served the Wikipedia page on the subject. This page is often full of misinformation and propaganda, while those concerned (like the employees of the said company or the person being defamed himself) are forbidden from correcting the article. Previously, Wikipedia admins were satisfied with just banning those fighting the misinformation under the "conflict of interest" doctrine. But now, the company behind Wikipedia has demonstrated that they are ready to sue you if you want to correct the lies that are being distributed through their platform.
As a Finnish taxpayer I am utterly frustrated by this. It seems like the work of an overly-enthusiastic police official. The Wikipedia fundraiser makes it very explicit that the funds are being collected by a non-profit organization incorporated in California, and subject only to their local laws. Although the fundraiser would be illegal in Finland as-is (Finnish law requires applying for a fundraising permit to discourage fraud), the police and the courts in Finland clearly lack jurisdiction against a U.S. non-profit. The police resources, which they claim to be very scarce due to recent cuts in public sector spending, would be much better spend investigating actual fraud and other crime, where the police and the courts actually have jurisdiction and means to prevent and stop the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice.
.. maybe it would be fairest to just cancel this whole private gTLD expansion lunacy?
It is irrelevant what the British government or its courts think they can do, since this action is clearly against the legal precedent set by the European Court of Human Rights as a breach of the protections guaranteed under the Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. For example, in Marttinen v Finland the Court wrote:
The Court reiterates its case-law on the use of coercion to obtain information: although not specifically mentioned in Article 6 of the Convention, the rights relied on by the applicant, the right to silence and the right not to incriminate oneself, are generally recognised international standards which lie at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure under Article 6
The British courts should take in consideration the legal precedent on EU level and overturn this sentence, or any competent lawyer will take the defendant's case before the EU Human Rights court, who will stuff this sentence up the arsehole of the British government and the tax payer (i.e. the government will have to pay the defendant compensation for the inhumane treatment and legal costs.)
This goes directly against prior decisions by the European Court of Human Rights. There is very clear and unambiguous legal precedent, that a person under criminal investigation need not bear witness against himself. For example. in Marttinen v Finland the Court interpreted the article 6.1 that reads inter alia "In the determination of ... any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair ... hearing ... by [a] ... tribunal ...". The Court wrote in its decision:
The Court reiterates its case-law on the use of coercion to obtain information: although not specifically mentioned in Article 6 of the Convention, the rights relied on by the applicant, the right to silence and the right not to incriminate oneself, are generally recognised international standards which lie at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure under Article 6
If the defendant is not able to have this sentence overturned in domestic courts, he should hire a lawyer who can bring this case before the European Court of Human Rights ASAP to obtain a decision against the Government of UK. The court will also award compensation for the inhumane treatment of the defendant by the Government, and obligate the government to compensate for the legal expenses.
That might be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the deal and the alteration to the software were done in 2004, but the first researcher analyses to hint of problems with this algorithm weren't published until 2006. When making the change, the developers were not necessarily told that NSA had paid RSA to use that algorithm. It might have passed as just another security improvement to the product.
I was also skeptical when I first saw the news articles (like this one) that said that RSA had published a statement where they supposedly refuted the existence of that NSA deal. The existence of the deal was originally broken by Reuters in this article, where they cite "two sources familiar with the contract" as their sources. But then, after more in-depth analysis of the RSA blog post where they supposedly "denied" the existence of the deal, it was revealed that actually RSA neither denied nor acknowledged that such deal existed in their statement. They are just using general wording to give an impression, that they would certainly never do such thing. But they are not directly denying the existence of the deal.
Now, thinking logically, it's pretty damn clear that they would have denied that such a deal was ever made, if they were in the position of making such a claim. But given they don't directly deny the claims presented by Reuters, it would seem a much more logical explanation that the deal indeed was made, and RSA just went into damage control mode after the publication of the Reuters article. Lying to the public would have meant more damage if Reuters would have later been able to present the actual paper of the deal, so I suppose we can take their lack of directly denying this deal's existence as an admission of sorts. This is also the reason why speakers are canceling their appearance in the conference ("Your company has issued a statement on the topic, but you have not denied this particular claim.")
So, I think we have grounds to believe that there is actually quite much truth to the original story by Reuters. As they say, the deal was "handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists". I am pretty sure that this is a yet-another example of a major manager-level f*ck up. Tech companies very often have all the expertise on the technical personnel level, while managers are a "necessary evil" who often have much fewer insight into the technical field where the company actually operates. Of course, anyone with even the slightest idea of how the IT security field functions, would never ever endanger their company's credibility (at least for such little reward as $10 million), because deals like this tend resurface in the public sphere sooner or later. All we can assume that someone in the management made a very major f*ck-up and made this secret deal with NSA without much consulting from the technical folks. But I am pretty sure that now that this deal has surfaced in the public sphere, it will end up costing RSA a great deal more in lost sales than what the "business leaders" anticipated they could gain in short term from making the deal with NSA.
The website where the story article is hosted is pretty terrible. It's apparently based entirely on some sort of JavaScript hacks. I can only zoom one photo before the JavaScript code crashes. Then, when I try to reload, it loses the position I was on the page. I also dislike those texts and images that change brightness and scroll in dis-syncronization with the rest of the page. Not to speak of those "Share" buttons jumping out from behind page elements when I move my mouse cursor around. This page, although apparently meant to be "artistic", is sadly just a staple of horrible and dysfunctional web design.
Err.. Well, let's just say I am sure he would have implemented as general of a solution as was possible within the constraints imposed by the rules, if that was the entrant's goal. Make no mistake, I have tremendous respect for this competition and the entrants. Sad to see there are such lamers on Slashdot showing an unreasonably hostile attitude for someone simply taking interest in someone else's work. You don't happen to be employed by the copyright mafia by any chance, do you?
Does the program include its own PNG format algorithms, or am I missing something?
Same goes for the web server: did he really write his own web server in mills.c?
Well in a way, yes for both. He only uses standard C libraries, so there is indeed no PNG library or an HTTP server #included. But due to the size limitations, the code can probably only produce one exact type of PNG image and the HTTP server can only serve one page, so those are not "proper" implementations by any means. For example, the HTTP server ignores the request path and the result of accessing http://localhost:8224/ http://localhost:8224/foo and http://localhost:8224/foo/bar is alwyas the same – pretty useless for a "real" HTTP server. If you look up the .C file, it's typeset in an artistic manner, resembling one of the ball bearings in the rendered end result. So, the point, like with many other IOCCC entries, is to demonstrate how some seemingly very complex tasks can be achieved by short, obfuscated C files.
I found this one a pretty mind-blowing entry. When compiled and run, it creates a web server at http://localhost:8224, which can be opened in a browser to display a ray-traced 3D scene of steel ball bearings on a checker-pattern surface, arranged to display the current time. Quoting the description:
The program wears many hats (not literally). It is
* a web server
* a PNG encoder
* a ray tracer
* a clock
Unlike the PC emulator entry, it does not require a binary blob and all the code and data fit within the 4 kilobyte limit.
There might be more to that entry than meets the eye. Quoting its description:
CPU supports the full 8086/186 instruction set. Due to the complexities of the 8086’s arbitrary-length instruction decoding and flags, 8086 instructions are first converted to a simpler intermediate format before being executed. This conversion, along with instruction lengths and how each instruction modifies the flags, is assisted by some lookup tables which form part of the BIOS binary.
The BIOS binary is over 12 kilobytes, so it raises the question as to which extent the emulation might be actually achieved by the BIOS.
Is this finally it? The year of Linux on the desktop? Remember that Android is essentially just a Linux that runs the GUI on Dalvik (Java). It can be fairly easily rooted and the existing kernel and ABI interfaces employed to make X etc. run on the Android's Linux base. This could mean that people can fairly easily install a one-download "upgrade" on their off-the-shelf Windows PCs, and employ the full Linux ecosystem without loosing any of their pre-existing Windows features and applications.