Mark Shuttleworth is not a stupid guy, and it seems likely that he is engaging in a misrepresentation rather than a misunderstanding of what he was told by the SFLC. There are a couple of points worth making in this context.
First, the SFLC does not appear to sanction Shuttleworth's interpretation of Grub2 and its implications for UEFI. The SFLC is a signatory of the FSF's statement on UEFI, "Stand up for your freedom to install free software." It has also called out Microsoft's, er, flexible attitude toward its statements and representations about UEFI in the ARM context.
Second, Ubuntu has often shown this inclination to make a "separate peace" with Microsoft and the OEMs without really helping the larger community. The certified hardware deals with Dell and others don't really guarantee a system that will run any distro well without the help of binary blob drivers, and if that's not the point of the certification process, I'm not sure what is--other than to gain some positive cred and some market share in the corporate IT world.
Third, the scenario Shuttleworth is purportedly so worried about--an OEM "screwing up" and not shipping a PC in custom mode, making it impossible to replace its bootloader--is a pretty bad one to have to worry about in the first place. It sounds more like making a deal with a hostage taker than making a deal with the FSF does, because although the FSF does try to be litigious about its copyright, at least you know what its red lines are. Microsoft, as is shown by what they're doing with UEFI in the ARM space, is playing games here, trying to stay one step ahead of antitrust litigation in the Wintel world but no farther.
(works well in Linux or Linux-like systems, anyway)
Use a good email client that has the option to download your mailboxes locally, then use rsync or rdiff to make the backup wherever you like. The IMAP interface to Gmail works well enough that the only thing you'd lose is filters and such made in Gmail.
I won't ignore that the OpenBSD team actually gets things done, but both are more or less run on a dictatorial model and developers who disagree with that model quickly find themselves on the outside looking in.
Stopped reading at [insert buzzword here], but you are correct--presenting themselves as the most closed option available will not help Apple attract enterprise customers.
They receive subsidies for a variety of things, among them rural telephone and Internet access, which would not be worth their while to provide if it weren't subsidized.
Oh, I should have said they're legally unenforceable and they make no mention of the possibility of traffic management. You like Milton Friedman, right? Remember how he feels about fraudulent contracts?
It's not the legal basis of the restriction--the legal basis is a 2005 FCC policy and the fact that, as I mentioned, Comcast's terms of service and acceptable use policy are legally unenforceable.
... it's infrastructure heavily subsidized by the federal government, which finances the entities that manage the Internet itself (e.g. ICANN) and doles out billions to telecoms to create a "modern" broadband infrastructure. That money was squandered by some companies on nickel-and-dimed mobile data which causes congestion on the current Internet backbone rather than reinforcing it, and in Comcast's case, apparently on spurious legal fees.
Read Comcast's submission to the FCC in this case and you'll see what I mean. Their terms of service would make ANY use of their bandwidth a violation, by my reading--anything that causes even a marginal slowdown for another customer! They deserve to be punished for putting customers in the Kafkaesque situation of being punished for violating secret or nonexistent bandwidth limits.
I think you forgot your tin-foil hat at home. If you live in the US, YOU control what your children are taught--school boards are among the most low-level and direct forms of democracy in this country. Insurance rates are set by actuaries who work for insurance companies. The present banking crisis is in large part the result of DEregulation; the financial instruments used to package subprime mortgages into deceptively good-looking investments would have been illegal just twenty years ago.
If, on the other hand, the "they" you mean is international finance and corporations that don't operate in genuinely competitive environments, you're right.
This op-ed contains a large number of scary technical misunderstandings and a whole lot of free-market ideology acting as a poor substitute for evidence. It ignores the role government R&D--both directly in the form of agencies like DARPA, and indirectly through grants to research institutions--played in making the Internet a tool accessible to the general public. This role for the government in high-risk, pure research should continue if the US is to remain a leader in network technology.
It also ignores the impact of deregulation on the telecom industry in the pre-Internet era. Just because few Slashdot posters are old enough to remember the generic black phones that US companies had to rent from the monopolist Ma Bell for subpar phone service for most of the 20th century does not mean we should ignore this example. In cases like these, where telecoms can concoct sweetheart deals for local government for limited land and permission to lay lines in the ground, the potential for monopoly or oligopoly in a deregulated market is enormous.
Comcast is already part of an oligopoly system, and they've received an enormous amount of federal and local subsidies and kickbacks for what is by the standards of the industrialized world a third-rate service. They should be cut off from subsidies, and they deserve the full wrath of the regulatory system to prevent them from throwing their oligopolistic weight around and failing to invest in better infrastructure. That, by the way, those federal dollars are supposed to be used for, so where the heck is my last-mile fiber-optic network?
It's also cheaper per kilowatt-hour than anything else, so I don't think your argument flies. Pickens is, if anything, hoping for deregulation of the electrical industry, which would make him the dominant player in the Southwest United States, easily beating fossil-fuel-using electrical utilities.
Wind is already the cheapest power available per kilowatt-hour. Subsidies aren't necessary to bring this change in power generation about, just some continued high oil prices and some entrepreneurs like Pickens. The government could be of more help with pure, risky R&D into solar, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power generation--the sort of US government-funded risky research that has worked so well in the early years of the Internet or in giving the pharmaceutical industry its best ideas.
Meh. Foundations like his happen to be leading the world in funding of causes like the fight against AIDS in Africa, and shaming the world's governments, for whom contributing on a Gates-like level would certainly not be any sacrifice at all. Your post strikes me as an exercise in hurling sour grapes at sincere altruism.
DOS attacks really are a felony they're considered terrorist acts, and the antiterror division of the Justice Department is one that's actually gotten bigger in the Justice Department under this idiotic administration, unlike civil rights. Those lawyers need convictions!
Your own post reveals why this isn't really a terribly functional attack; every user-land process in a Linux system is actually a fork of init or scripts started by it, so although you might be able to gain root access that way, you probably wouldn't gain a functional system in terms of driver support, and possibly, you'd get one that wasn't able to mount many of its own file systems. This Vista attack replaces something Vista doesn't need to boot into a fairly functional state.
Of course not, but no security running at the operating system level will prevent that, so your admittedly very lame attack does not show Linux to be "horribly insecure" (unless that was kind of a joke). To stop theft and reuse of a laptop entirely, a BIOS boot password or something more serious would be necessary.
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Mark Shuttleworth is not a stupid guy, and it seems likely that he is engaging in a misrepresentation rather than a misunderstanding of what he was told by the SFLC. There are a couple of points worth making in this context.
First, the SFLC does not appear to sanction Shuttleworth's interpretation of Grub2 and its implications for UEFI. The SFLC is a signatory of the FSF's statement on UEFI, "Stand up for your freedom to install free software." It has also called out Microsoft's, er, flexible attitude toward its statements and representations about UEFI in the ARM context.
Second, Ubuntu has often shown this inclination to make a "separate peace" with Microsoft and the OEMs without really helping the larger community. The certified hardware deals with Dell and others don't really guarantee a system that will run any distro well without the help of binary blob drivers, and if that's not the point of the certification process, I'm not sure what is--other than to gain some positive cred and some market share in the corporate IT world.
Third, the scenario Shuttleworth is purportedly so worried about--an OEM "screwing up" and not shipping a PC in custom mode, making it impossible to replace its bootloader--is a pretty bad one to have to worry about in the first place. It sounds more like making a deal with a hostage taker than making a deal with the FSF does, because although the FSF does try to be litigious about its copyright, at least you know what its red lines are. Microsoft, as is shown by what they're doing with UEFI in the ARM space, is playing games here, trying to stay one step ahead of antitrust litigation in the Wintel world but no farther.
(works well in Linux or Linux-like systems, anyway) Use a good email client that has the option to download your mailboxes locally, then use rsync or rdiff to make the backup wherever you like. The IMAP interface to Gmail works well enough that the only thing you'd lose is filters and such made in Gmail.
I won't ignore that the OpenBSD team actually gets things done, but both are more or less run on a dictatorial model and developers who disagree with that model quickly find themselves on the outside looking in.
Stopped reading at [insert buzzword here], but you are correct--presenting themselves as the most closed option available will not help Apple attract enterprise customers.
I find it amusing that the Darwin kernel and MacOS X system software evolved from OpenBSD, another secretive project run by a paranoid lunatic.
They receive subsidies for a variety of things, among them rural telephone and Internet access, which would not be worth their while to provide if it weren't subsidized.
Oh, I should have said they're legally unenforceable and they make no mention of the possibility of traffic management. You like Milton Friedman, right? Remember how he feels about fraudulent contracts?
It's not the legal basis of the restriction--the legal basis is a 2005 FCC policy and the fact that, as I mentioned, Comcast's terms of service and acceptable use policy are legally unenforceable.
... it's infrastructure heavily subsidized by the federal government, which finances the entities that manage the Internet itself (e.g. ICANN) and doles out billions to telecoms to create a "modern" broadband infrastructure. That money was squandered by some companies on nickel-and-dimed mobile data which causes congestion on the current Internet backbone rather than reinforcing it, and in Comcast's case, apparently on spurious legal fees. Read Comcast's submission to the FCC in this case and you'll see what I mean. Their terms of service would make ANY use of their bandwidth a violation, by my reading--anything that causes even a marginal slowdown for another customer! They deserve to be punished for putting customers in the Kafkaesque situation of being punished for violating secret or nonexistent bandwidth limits.
I think you forgot your tin-foil hat at home. If you live in the US, YOU control what your children are taught--school boards are among the most low-level and direct forms of democracy in this country. Insurance rates are set by actuaries who work for insurance companies. The present banking crisis is in large part the result of DEregulation; the financial instruments used to package subprime mortgages into deceptively good-looking investments would have been illegal just twenty years ago. If, on the other hand, the "they" you mean is international finance and corporations that don't operate in genuinely competitive environments, you're right.
This op-ed contains a large number of scary technical misunderstandings and a whole lot of free-market ideology acting as a poor substitute for evidence. It ignores the role government R&D--both directly in the form of agencies like DARPA, and indirectly through grants to research institutions--played in making the Internet a tool accessible to the general public. This role for the government in high-risk, pure research should continue if the US is to remain a leader in network technology. It also ignores the impact of deregulation on the telecom industry in the pre-Internet era. Just because few Slashdot posters are old enough to remember the generic black phones that US companies had to rent from the monopolist Ma Bell for subpar phone service for most of the 20th century does not mean we should ignore this example. In cases like these, where telecoms can concoct sweetheart deals for local government for limited land and permission to lay lines in the ground, the potential for monopoly or oligopoly in a deregulated market is enormous. Comcast is already part of an oligopoly system, and they've received an enormous amount of federal and local subsidies and kickbacks for what is by the standards of the industrialized world a third-rate service. They should be cut off from subsidies, and they deserve the full wrath of the regulatory system to prevent them from throwing their oligopolistic weight around and failing to invest in better infrastructure. That, by the way, those federal dollars are supposed to be used for, so where the heck is my last-mile fiber-optic network?
It's also cheaper per kilowatt-hour than anything else, so I don't think your argument flies. Pickens is, if anything, hoping for deregulation of the electrical industry, which would make him the dominant player in the Southwest United States, easily beating fossil-fuel-using electrical utilities.
Wind is already the cheapest power available per kilowatt-hour. Subsidies aren't necessary to bring this change in power generation about, just some continued high oil prices and some entrepreneurs like Pickens. The government could be of more help with pure, risky R&D into solar, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power generation--the sort of US government-funded risky research that has worked so well in the early years of the Internet or in giving the pharmaceutical industry its best ideas.
Meh. Foundations like his happen to be leading the world in funding of causes like the fight against AIDS in Africa, and shaming the world's governments, for whom contributing on a Gates-like level would certainly not be any sacrifice at all. Your post strikes me as an exercise in hurling sour grapes at sincere altruism.
DOS attacks really are a felony they're considered terrorist acts, and the antiterror division of the Justice Department is one that's actually gotten bigger in the Justice Department under this idiotic administration, unlike civil rights. Those lawyers need convictions!
Your own post reveals why this isn't really a terribly functional attack; every user-land process in a Linux system is actually a fork of init or scripts started by it, so although you might be able to gain root access that way, you probably wouldn't gain a functional system in terms of driver support, and possibly, you'd get one that wasn't able to mount many of its own file systems. This Vista attack replaces something Vista doesn't need to boot into a fairly functional state.
Of course not, but no security running at the operating system level will prevent that, so your admittedly very lame attack does not show Linux to be "horribly insecure" (unless that was kind of a joke). To stop theft and reuse of a laptop entirely, a BIOS boot password or something more serious would be necessary.