First off, PDF is of course misnamed, because there are of course no decent viewers for a text-only system.
That out of the way, let's talk about this "any web browser" thing.
Javascript? Yes, you can insert all the hate about Javascript and lack of security here if you like, but I don't need to worry about. You see, my browser is immune to such problems. It's lynx.
Lynx is no longer a browser? That's what your article seems to imply. The anti-lynx FUD is a little ridiculous these days. I've been told lynx doesn't support graphics, lynx doesn't support https urls, lynx doesn't this, lynx doesn't that. It gets old, certainly. But I hadn't yet heard that someone decided lynx was no longer a web browser.
"Learn to {cough} 'program' (or at least write Javascript) using *certain* web browsers, only *if* you happen to be on a machine that supports PDF."
It's nice to see how well your tax dollars are at work, as others have commented.
It's probably important to point out however, that is this by no means the SS's first foray into matters having very little to do with what we traditionally expect of them, nor into so-called "cyberspace."
Look here for the article entitled "STEVE JACKSON GAMES WINS LAWSUIT AGAINST U.S. SECRET SERVICE" on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Cases archive.
Alternatively, look at the summary on the Steve Jackson Games site itself, where the answer to "Why was SJ games raided?" is answered... "guilt by remote association".
How many of us know someone who would also fall under the "guilt by remote association" blanket? (Have you watched the evening news recently?)
Perhaps the moral is: Beware of men with dark clothes and sunglasses eating commercial potato chips these days. (Their initials may be more than just coincidental, eh?)
The only up side to this that I can see is that this incident led to the creation of the EFF itself.
I gather you have never bothered to look at either http://www.debian.org/support or http://www.debian.org/consultants/ , since your points are more than covered there. (Have you?)
Most maps have fake streets on them, for this
very purpose.
There is a street a very short distance from
my childhood home (walking distance as a kid)
that... Get this... NEVER existed. As in, my
grandmother recalled when the various streets in
the area were built, etc., and she swears there
was never a street there.
Apparently most mapmakers create similar, to see
if their handiwork is copied (since an actual
survey of the site would certainly not give
the phony mapmaker reason to put the "street"
there, thus proving it's a phony.)
Taking another approach, Harvard lawyer Dershowitz said he
believes having an ID card would reduce racial profiling at airports.
Well, if that were true, reducing racial profiling might be a nice
side-effect, but certainly wouldn't justify the card. But it's certainly
not established to be true.
Let's read on; what's the very next paragraph say?
``Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much
less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through
card readers,'' he said.
Arab-looking? Reading the Koran? Um, sure, yeah, I see. No hypocrisy
there, not at all.
Interestingly enough, the Yahoo article cited is blockedby Junkbuster
for some reason!
At least it's not one of those NYT or MSNBC articles that (lynx +
Junkbuster) users can't see. This time it's a Yahoo article that (lynx +
Junkbuster) users can't see.
"a few websites that make extensive use of javascript" are certainly no great loss. Any site excluding text-based clients (and blind users) don't deserve to be visited.
People are confusing physical and electronic identity.
My driver's license may prove that I'm John Q. Public, residing at 123
Cherry Tree Lane. Seeing it may be considered proof that I'm the person I
represent myself as, if in fact I'm representing myself as John Q. Public,
residing at 123 Cherry Tree Lane.
How would seeing that prove that I am the electronic identity I represent
myself as? How do you know that maps to johnqp@lameisp.com? Perhaps it
is jqpublic@otherisp.net. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither.
The reliance upon physical identity "proofs" to somehow certify electronic
identity is fundamentally flawed and can/will be exploited in subtle
manners to facilitate a Man in the Middle attack. (BTW, MitM attacks are
also part of the reason for self-signed keys, questioned in another post.)
Since people seem to unable (for some reason) to get their minds around
the difference between physical and electronic identities being unrelated,
think for a moment about how one would get one's gnupg key signed,
if one's email address was doglover@pets.org.
You say "presuming the cable wiring in their house isn't
ancient."
What cable wiring? I have no such wiring here, and the
installation would be scheduled for 2+ months in the future, or so they
told me when I called to inquire a few months back. It would also cost me
drastically more for that installation than the "self-install" option that
the local ADSL provider quoted me. (The cable provider stated there were
no self-install options, nor alternatives to that installation fee.)
As for ADSL, that wiring is already present (since yes, I have
telephone service) and all I need to do is stop by a brick-and-mortar
shop with my identification, pick up a box, bring it home, and plug in
a couple of items.
Additionally, ADSL costs significantly less in monthly fees than cable
would cost, and has no minimum service contract, also unlike cable.
(From what I understand now, they'll even refund your money if you
choose to discontinue service after a month, in a "risk-free" offer they
now make.)
One of the benefits of ADSL over cable is the fact that there are no
additional wires needed, if you already have copper-pair voice telephone
service (as most current dialup customers have. I know that VERY few
people in my area have POTS-over-cable-television service, and that
the cable company discontinued offering that except ro the few existing
customers they now have.)
Obviously someone will chime in with all of the cable risks associated
with being on someone else's subnet, and with the ADSL drawback of
distance from the CO, but the fact remains that those copper pairs for
voice are virtually ubiquitous, and the cable television wires are not.
(Cable television is not even available yet in many of the places I've
lived, with "no forseeable plans for the future," yet POTS has been
available to them for quite a while.)
Which do you think will reach more, the email mentioned in the article
or the Slashdot story that covers it?:-)
The article says this "is an experiment in the power of email" but if
Slashdot reaches even one more than the email, the experiment has been
poisoned. Somehow I doubt the reason was true anyway.
Will the Kiwi census have an equivalent to the US census' "long form"?
Are there corresponding complaints regarding privacy? Does NZ have
laws prohibiting the use of census data by other government agencies?
(I'm thinking of the assurances US census workers gave about the privacy
of the data given, and then the public admission months later that those
assurances were inaccurate.) Will there be or have there been objections
to the census by privacy groups in NZ?
For that matter, will potential creditors see your religion is Jedi if
you applly for a student or car loan?:-) Are the census recrods public
information there (as personal income tax figures are in Finland)?
Finally, the linked article closes by stating there could be legal
reprecussions from reporting your religion as Jedi. How exactly
would they prove you are not a Jedi? Trick/bully you into
"confessing"?
If you've been tracking the ac releases [0], and compile for more than
one machine (and yes, sleep occasionally, heh) you'll realize that it's
been an almost constant process of recompiling lately. 2.4.2-ac11 is out, and
possibly later revisions by the time you read this. (Alan has been prolific of late.)
I can't begin to think of the number of reboots I've done in the past
week, once you start counting testing various combinations of kernel
options and their interactions.
As for kernel upgrades without rebooting, no thank you.
I've been bitten by boot-time errors recently, things that would
not have been discovered until the next power failure mysteriously
caused hangs. At least this way there is a chance of catching the
error within a reasonable proximity of the time the cause was created.
There is more to good system administration than some penis-waving,
"my uptime is bigger than yours," mentality seen on some IRC channels
and web sites.
If you care about your system's reliability, you'll test its boot
sequence every so often, even if inadvertantly. (If all you care about
is penis-waving, please take your immaturity somewhere that it won't
harm my systems until you grow up.)
[0] because 2.4.x doesn't support your 2.0.x- and 2.2.x-supported
hardware
(Granted, it appears no less than three separate fixes for loop have
happened in the ac kernels in the past day, but...)
There have been no (that's right, no) entries under/pub/linux/kernel/crypto/v2.4/ since patch-int-2.4.0.3.bz2. Kernel 2.4.0,
and we're working on what now, kernel 2.4.2-ac9? (Perhaps later by the
time you read this.)
To neglect to mention this, in an article of this nature, seems
inappropriate. Kernel crypto support needs work presently, and unless
fact is mentioned, appropriate volunteers may not be aware their expertise
is needed.
The article mentions the importance of kernel crypto support. Those
who can help get it working again are encouraged (here) to contribute,
even if the article implied all was rosy in that regard.
(Is it off-topic to mention that Debian's support for kernel crypto
went away on November
23, 2000 when the util-linux maintainer moved from 2.10-p to 2.10q.
It appears Debian could use some
help with basic kernel crypto support as well. 99 days is bordering
on criminal.)
/pub/linux/kernel/crypto/2.4/ doesn't have anything usable yet, so it looks like no kernel 2.4.x for here yet.
It's rather hard to use something that's supposedly the current "stable" version without one of the key pieces being present. How can I mount most of my system, since I keep it encrypted?
Slashdot Mirror
First off, PDF is of course misnamed, because there are of course no decent viewers for a text-only system.
That out of the way, let's talk about this "any web browser" thing.
Javascript? Yes, you can insert all the hate about Javascript and lack of security here if you like, but I don't need to worry about. You see, my browser is immune to such problems. It's lynx.
Lynx is no longer a browser? That's what your article seems to imply. The anti-lynx FUD is a little ridiculous these days. I've been told lynx doesn't support graphics, lynx doesn't support https urls, lynx doesn't this, lynx doesn't that. It gets old, certainly. But I hadn't yet heard that someone decided lynx was no longer a web browser.
"Learn to {cough} 'program' (or at least write Javascript) using *certain* web browsers, only *if* you happen to be on a machine that supports PDF."
That one looks accurate.
It's nice to see how well your tax dollars are at work,
as others have commented.
It's probably important to point out however, that is this by no
means the SS's first foray into matters having very little to do with
what we traditionally expect of them, nor into so-called "cyberspace."
Look here
for the article entitled "STEVE JACKSON GAMES WINS LAWSUIT AGAINST
U.S. SECRET SERVICE" on the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Legal
Cases archive.
Alternatively, look at the summary
on the Steve Jackson Games site itself, where the answer to "Why was
SJ games raided?" is answered... "guilt by remote association".
How many of us know someone who would also fall under the "guilt
by remote association" blanket? (Have you watched the evening news
recently?)
Perhaps the moral is: Beware of men with dark clothes and sunglasses
eating commercial potato chips these days. (Their initials may be more
than just coincidental, eh?)
The only up side to this that I can see is that this incident led to
the creation of the
EFF itself.
I gather you have never bothered to look at either
http://www.debian.org/support
or
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
, since your points are more than covered there. (Have you?)
Most maps have fake streets on them, for this
very purpose.
There is a street a very short distance from ... Get this ... NEVER existed. As in, my
my childhood home (walking distance as a kid)
that
grandmother recalled when the various streets in
the area were built, etc., and she swears there
was never a street there.
Apparently most mapmakers create similar, to see
if their handiwork is copied (since an actual
survey of the site would certainly not give
the phony mapmaker reason to put the "street"
there, thus proving it's a phony.)
It appears that /dev/hdx* is created if the virus "achieves root."
Is this an adequate indicator, or are there occasions these files are absent but the system is affected?
I'm sorry but thats the stupidest decision she could have made, *especially* if she was an R.N.
You then go on to speak of markets.
Did it ever occur to you she may have chosen a career change for other reasons than mere money/markets?
I applaud her career change.
Press Ctrl-H for intelligence test ...
^H HISTORY display stack of currently-suspended documents
How topical! A .sig that presumes I'm not using lynx! You did this intentionally, as humour, right? ;-)
See article about AC's self-censorship and DMCA.
"Don't forget that there already two Debian distributions.
One for the US and one for the rest of the world."
You have that backwards.
It's not one FOR the rest of the world.
It's one that can be exported FROM the US, and another that can be
distributed FROM the rest of the world (including TO the US.)
Two consecutive paragraphs, from the article...
Taking another approach, Harvard lawyer Dershowitz said he
believes having an ID card would reduce racial profiling
at airports.
Well, if that were true, reducing racial profiling might be a nice
side-effect, but certainly wouldn't justify the card. But it's certainly
not established to be true.
Let's read on; what's the very next paragraph say?
``Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much
less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through
card readers,'' he said.
Arab-looking? Reading the Koran? Um, sure, yeah, I see. No hypocrisy
there, not at all.
Where do they get off thinking we are this dumb?
Sorry, the server load is too high to process your request.
Please try again later.
Interestingly enough, the Yahoo article cited is blockedby Junkbuster
for some reason!
At least it's not one of those NYT or MSNBC articles that (lynx +
Junkbuster) users can't see. This time it's a Yahoo article that (lynx +
Junkbuster) users can't see.
"a few websites that make extensive use of javascript" are certainly no great loss. Any site excluding text-based clients (and blind users) don't deserve to be visited.
CLI users are immune to this, right?
People are confusing physical and electronic identity.
My driver's license may prove that I'm John Q. Public, residing at 123 Cherry Tree Lane. Seeing it may be considered proof that I'm the person I represent myself as, if in fact I'm representing myself as John Q. Public, residing at 123 Cherry Tree Lane.
How would seeing that prove that I am the electronic identity I represent myself as? How do you know that maps to johnqp@lameisp.com? Perhaps it is jqpublic@otherisp.net. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither.
The reliance upon physical identity "proofs" to somehow certify electronic identity is fundamentally flawed and can/will be exploited in subtle manners to facilitate a Man in the Middle attack. (BTW, MitM attacks are also part of the reason for self-signed keys, questioned in another post.)
Since people seem to unable (for some reason) to get their minds around the difference between physical and electronic identities being unrelated, think for a moment about how one would get one's gnupg key signed, if one's email address was doglover@pets.org.
You say "presuming the cable wiring in their house isn't ancient."
What cable wiring? I have no such wiring here, and the installation would be scheduled for 2+ months in the future, or so they told me when I called to inquire a few months back. It would also cost me drastically more for that installation than the "self-install" option that the local ADSL provider quoted me. (The cable provider stated there were no self-install options, nor alternatives to that installation fee.)
As for ADSL, that wiring is already present (since yes, I have telephone service) and all I need to do is stop by a brick-and-mortar shop with my identification, pick up a box, bring it home, and plug in a couple of items.
Additionally, ADSL costs significantly less in monthly fees than cable would cost, and has no minimum service contract, also unlike cable. (From what I understand now, they'll even refund your money if you choose to discontinue service after a month, in a "risk-free" offer they now make.)
One of the benefits of ADSL over cable is the fact that there are no additional wires needed, if you already have copper-pair voice telephone service (as most current dialup customers have. I know that VERY few people in my area have POTS-over-cable-television service, and that the cable company discontinued offering that except ro the few existing customers they now have.)
Obviously someone will chime in with all of the cable risks associated with being on someone else's subnet, and with the ADSL drawback of distance from the CO, but the fact remains that those copper pairs for voice are virtually ubiquitous, and the cable television wires are not. (Cable television is not even available yet in many of the places I've lived, with "no forseeable plans for the future," yet POTS has been available to them for quite a while.)
Which do you think will reach more, the email mentioned in the article or the Slashdot story that covers it? :-)
The article says this "is an experiment in the power of email" but if Slashdot reaches even one more than the email, the experiment has been poisoned. Somehow I doubt the reason was true anyway.
Will the Kiwi census have an equivalent to the US census' "long form"? Are there corresponding complaints regarding privacy? Does NZ have laws prohibiting the use of census data by other government agencies? (I'm thinking of the assurances US census workers gave about the privacy of the data given, and then the public admission months later that those assurances were inaccurate.) Will there be or have there been objections to the census by privacy groups in NZ?
For that matter, will potential creditors see your religion is Jedi if you applly for a student or car loan? :-) Are the census recrods public
information there (as personal income tax figures are in Finland)?
Finally, the linked article closes by stating there could be legal reprecussions from reporting your religion as Jedi. How exactly would they prove you are not a Jedi? Trick/bully you into "confessing"?
Rebooting upon kernel upgrade is ... HOW often?
If you've been tracking the ac releases [0], and compile for more than one machine (and yes, sleep occasionally, heh) you'll realize that it's been an almost constant process of recompiling lately. 2.4.2-ac11 is out, and possibly later revisions by the time you read this. (Alan has been prolific of late.)
I can't begin to think of the number of reboots I've done in the past week, once you start counting testing various combinations of kernel options and their interactions.
As for kernel upgrades without rebooting, no thank you.
I've been bitten by boot-time errors recently, things that would not have been discovered until the next power failure mysteriously caused hangs. At least this way there is a chance of catching the error within a reasonable proximity of the time the cause was created. There is more to good system administration than some penis-waving, "my uptime is bigger than yours," mentality seen on some IRC channels and web sites.
If you care about your system's reliability, you'll test its boot sequence every so often, even if inadvertantly. (If all you care about is penis-waving, please take your immaturity somewhere that it won't harm my systems until you grow up.)
[0] because 2.4.x doesn't support your 2.0.x- and 2.2.x-supported hardware
I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet.
(Granted, it appears no less than three separate fixes for loop have happened in the ac kernels in the past day, but ...)
There have been no (that's right, no) entries under /pub/linux/kernel/crypto/v2.4/ since patch-int-2.4.0.3.bz2. Kernel 2.4.0,
and we're working on what now, kernel 2.4.2-ac9? (Perhaps later by the
time you read this.)
To neglect to mention this, in an article of this nature, seems inappropriate. Kernel crypto support needs work presently, and unless fact is mentioned, appropriate volunteers may not be aware their expertise is needed.
The article mentions the importance of kernel crypto support. Those who can help get it working again are encouraged (here) to contribute, even if the article implied all was rosy in that regard.
(Is it off-topic to mention that Debian's support for kernel crypto went away on November 23, 2000 when the util-linux maintainer moved from 2.10-p to 2.10q. It appears Debian could use some help with basic kernel crypto support as well. 99 days is bordering on criminal.)
"Coders wanted; apply ..."
"One of the marks of a mature OS" This is a troll, right? Why was it modded up as informative?
By the time woody actually freezes (unlike /. saying it is frozen) ... most likely!
Woody is most definitely NOT frozen, and /. shouldn't proclaim lies as headlines.
It's rather hard to use something that's supposedly the current "stable" version without one of the key pieces being present. How can I mount most of my system, since I keep it encrypted?
Color me shocked and disappointed.
Maybe some day....
"Things not yet mentioned (but still important): USB support - it is here in full: no "backporting"."
Regular USB support was in 2.2.18 with no backporting either.
I keep hearing about this FreeBSD splash screen. I don't have it on 4.2-RELEASE. What gives?