Point taken. I could look at the code for any given program, and fail to see the most glaringly obvious security flaws. What sets me (and, presumably, most slashdotters) apart from the herd is, we are willing to read, willing to investigate, willing to make decisions, and we decide who to trust, and who not to trust. I don't need to understand the flaws in Java or IRC to understand articles published all over the web stating something to the effect, "ApplicationX versions prior to 1.6 have been found to be insecure due to a buffer overrun, please update to version 1.7"
The average windows home user implicity trusts everything he sees on the net. "Your computer could be infected with viruses, please run our free scanner". He never even looks to see who is offering the scanner, he doesn't search for that company, he just clicks it, runs it, then downloads the trojan offered when viruses are found.
I've clicked a couple of those things to see what they might find on my Linux boxes. Amazingly, they found all sorts of stuff on my C: Imagine that.....
*sigh* I lack sympathy. Let me get this straight. I know jack about aircraft, but I'd like to own one. So, I trot my happy ass down to the airport, find a pretty plane (with PONIES even!) and hand over my hard earned cash. Climb in, fire it up, and drive it into the trees at the end of the runway. This is whose fault, exactly? Is it the guy who sold me a plane? Was it his responsibility to investigate my background, to find out whether I even had a pilot's license? Was it his job to teach me about planes? Was it his job to inform me that the little single seater wouldn't lift off with all those ponies in the cargo bay?
If people are going to be on the web, they should at least have a clue about what the web is.
Mod parent up some more, 5 points isn't nearly enough.
Personally, I give less info to my "freinds" than is commonly available as public information on Facebook. I don't use apps - most of them are to silly to bother with, and the rest are vectors for dataminers and/or malware. Who needs them?
Perhaps I'll restate the case, from a more military perspective. China has it's "Assasin's Mace" program, which is meant to make them equal to, or superior to, the United States, militarily, economically, politically, and scientifically. Assymetric warfare.
Red Flag Linux is a part of the mace. A small part, but an important part. While lazy westerners are busy relying on Microsoft to run their desktops, laptops, servers, and whatever else, China is moving ahead with Linux. The average Chinese will have, by default, a much more secure computer, which encourages mucking about under the hood, and figuring out how things work. The average American will have by default an insecure and secretive operating system which he can't fix even if he IS smart, because he could be imprisoned for decompiling, reverse engineering and patching the damned thing.
China's export market? Of course they want to sell us MS-centric stuff. If you've read the headlines in the past few years, China has a habit of producing and selling poisoned products to the west. They are happy to take our money, in exchange for trash. And, we are just as happy to buy anything that is shiny and pretty.
Cloud? What about the cloud? Isn't it going to depend on scalable servers and scalable software? I can't see a push toward smaller systems, myself. Every Tom, Dick, and Dilrod on the planet is pushing the advantages of cloud computing. Seems to me that the core expertise of both Sun and Oracle are going to be in demand if everyone goes to the cloud.
Note, I'm not one of those people who places their faith in the cloud - I'm just pointing things out here.
To simplify the issue, somewhat: The cartels exist because the population of the US wants those drugs, but the government of the US insists that anyone who wants drugs is a criminal.
In any sane arrangement, the government would permit people to deal in these drugs, but tax the living hell out of them. The drugs would be grown, processed, and distributed under controlled conditions. The government should protect the lives of it's people, rather than warring on it's own people.
We have done nothing more than to encourage criminals to take over a multi-billion dollar business that our government won't regulate. After encouraging the existence of these cartels, we pressure governments to battle those cartels. In short, we created the situation that we are reading about.
Isn't that just a little bit narrow minded? Prisons don't rehabilitate people. Prisons actually provide a training center for criminals to learn new techniques, and to build social circles among criminals.
Before you assume that I'm some kind of liberal fruitcake, I believe in capital punishment and corporal punishment. A flogging will cure a lot of would-be petty criminals. A death sentence will cure murderers, rapists, and child molesters of their problems. Petty criminals, though? People locked up for smoking a joint?
Our prison system is totally screwed up. We have more people per capita in prison than nations that routinely violate human rights standards.
Think outside the box. No leader ever gives an order which he knows will be disobeyed. No law maker makes laws which he knows can't be enforced.
It's time to end the drug war. The drug war costs more American casualties than the Iraq war and Afghanistan war combined.
(Just who appointed you the arbiter of who should have how much wealth, anyway? Isn't that arrogant and rather selfish?)
Uhhhhmmmm, yes. Exactly. That is PRECISELY what people are saying - the same people who are tired of parasitic corporations. You know, the corporations that want top dollar for products made in undeveloped third world countries, by uneducated desperate people who don't demand any more than a bowl of rice in exchange for a day's work. The same corporations that see no point in protecting the health of employees, or customers. Not to worry, though, because when the employees die of one cause or another, there are plenty of other starving nobodies in Africa, Micronesia, and Asia to fill their spots in the assembly line.
Who DID appoint them as the final arbiters of who should have how much wealth?
There is a lot of truth in that post. Look at taxes. I learned the first year after high school that working to hard was foolish. My boss built custom homes - high quality homes, short of extravagent. We worked hard all summer long, to have shells up to finish off throughout the winter. If I worked 53 hours, I got a real nice paycheck thanks to overtime. If I worked 54 to 59 hours, I broke even - meaning, I saw only a few cents or a couple dollars increase in my paycheck. Working over 60 hours meant that I lost money. Yes, my take home check was SMALLER than it would have been working 50 hours. And, thanks to being single, I got squat back at the end of the year.
Right. Globalization, outsourcing, and relocation all started just this year, under Obama. This is really a new phenomena, never seen before January 2009. Uh-huh. Anyone who buys into that probably believes in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the kindness found only in a Republican's heart.
"We are not near the poverty levels of the Great Depression,"
Nothing says the we have seen the worst of our current recession. Nothing says we won't see the desperation of the '30's again. The only thing that happened in the '30's that isn't likely to happen again, is the dust bowl. On the other hand, family farms are barely hanging in there because they can't compete with factory farms. If a few of those conglomerations go belly up, we could be in serious trouble. How much of our population are we willing to see die of starvation?
Nothing to worry about, really. This is just Mother Nature's way of enforcing population control. If we think it's bad here, just wait for Mother to get serious in China. The earth's carrying capacity of humankind is being severely tested, so we can expect more of this sort of thing.
(turn on sarcasm here) Health care? Why fight the inevitable? Only the rich are truly fit to survive anyway.
Gender is largely determined by our genes. But there are a number of articles on the web which demonstrate that hormones present in the womb can alter the initial determination of gender. Short of outright hermaphroditism, a female may have a lot of masculine characteristics, and a male can have a lot of feminine characteristics. Actually, it didn't require a lot of research to figure this out - people everywhere exhibit varying degrees of both masculine and feminine characteristics.
"Prove you're a girl"??? WTF??? PROVE IT??? Give us all a break. Are we going to start demanding DNA and ultrasound analysis of every little leaguer? The kid either grows up thinking that he's a he, or that she's a she. That's good enough for almost anything. And, it should be good enough for the olympics. One shouldn't have to submit to what amounts to sexual molestation. Maybe a blood test. But, the blood test will be little more conclusive than looking at a person. He/she has hormone levels that are outside the norm? Big fucking deal.
This world is getting to damned demanding. No one has a right to demand that I prove my sexuality - NO ONE. Not even if I'm competing on the world stage. This young lady has been researched to death. Her Mama and her Daddy vouch for her, and her birth certificate says "Female".
Drop it, everyone.
The only people who will ever have a legitimate interest in her genitalia are those who find her attractive enough to want to share her bed. And, those people will keep those details private unless they are total jerks.
You kinda miss the point, though. A number of ISP's throttle P2P, and I guess some actually block it. The excuse given is, it's unimportant, and legality is always mentioned. P2P in general, and torrents specifically, shouldn't even be questioned at the ISP level - it is a legitimate protocol with legitimate uses, as you point out.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Apparently, those of us who recognize society's failings, and society's failures, are bad guys. Fine, I can live with that. If I can't, I guess I could get a twitter account, and find people who agree with me.
All those apps should make a stalker's job much easier. I mean, think about it. You stumble over some hottie's pic on the net, so you start checking her out. You've got her twitter nickname, her myspace nickname, and you've got her phone number, her high school, names and phone numbers of all her family and freinds. But, how do you figure out exactly where she IS?
Overall, pretty good post. But, you kinda screwed it up with "Of course, it isn't Google's job to fight these kind of fights. That's what newspapers are for,"
We are all aware that the world is changing. If it weren't TFA wouldn't even be a postable story.
The traditional newspapers are losing ground. They are losing readership, and they are losing revenues. (You might argue the "losing readership" - that's really subject for another discussion) Newspapers are still pretty powerful, but they are losing power.
Google is part of the system that is making newspapers irrelevant. So - we can argue, and maybe we SHOULD argue, that it really IS Google's job to fight these kind of fights.
Disclaimer: I'm not real sure that Google really IS the right company to fight these fights, I'm just pointing out that they might have an obligation to help solve problems created by their use of technology.
"They're buying the name in hopes of turning it into a legit operation. Umm.. good luck with that."
Actually, I'm sort of cheering for them. I don't hold out much hope, but I'm cheering all the same. Go ahead, ask me "WHY?" Well, since you asked, I'll tell you!
Bit Torrent is nothing more, and nothing less, than a protocol. It shouldn't have a legal status, or an illegal status, any more than verbally enunciating ideas should have a legal status. No form of communication should be make illegal.
If these people can actually make torrents work for a legal, reputable company, then we have less to fear from ISP's throttling or even stopping torrents. We, the WWW of internet users, NEED someone to adopt this technological protocol to lend it credibility. More generally, P2P needs to be recognized as an acceptable means of communications. As things stand right now, if you and your family & freinds are amateur photographers, and you have extensive libraries that you like to share between your households, the ISP can claim that you are all pirates, and shut you down.
What you say is perfectly true. But, if/when the courts get fed up with refereeing the "corporate wars", then the courts may well strike down the whole software patent idea. (Yes, lawyers can find a way to do that, and courts are POPULATED with lawyers)
Whether that scenario ever happened or not, corporations will lose tons of money to the corporate wars. MS knows that, as well as every other company out there that holds patents. They don't WANT a corporate patent war, which is made obvious by all the out of court settlements that have been made over the years.
These few millions may well be chump change to MS, but when the real shooting starts, they may be nickle and dimed to death. How many other places are they liable? For instance - I've never really chased down their 32 bit disk access. I know that Digital Research managed to develop 32 bit access before MS. Maybe MS infringes on DR's patent? Did DR file a patent?
See, it's one huge can of worms!
Everyone would benefit in the long run if software patents were outlawed, and pushed into the realm of copyright.
If Google diddles your page rank, you're probably just totally Bing-ed!
Ya know, I don't recall ever seeing an advertisement on television for Google products. Google is just so good, people talk about them, and everyone starts using them. I've not even seen an advert for their out of print books - it's just viral on the net.
Bing? Why do I need 127 commercials on my television to tell me how good Bing is? Hmmmmm.
Anyway - back on subject. Let them form their little alliance. People won't notice anyway.
An alternative conclusion could be, since Opera rules the market share in countries that use the cyrillic alphabet, most criminals are from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Still dubious logic, but hey, it's as good as the author's dubious logic!
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. I could look at the code for any given program, and fail to see the most glaringly obvious security flaws. What sets me (and, presumably, most slashdotters) apart from the herd is, we are willing to read, willing to investigate, willing to make decisions, and we decide who to trust, and who not to trust. I don't need to understand the flaws in Java or IRC to understand articles published all over the web stating something to the effect, "ApplicationX versions prior to 1.6 have been found to be insecure due to a buffer overrun, please update to version 1.7"
The average windows home user implicity trusts everything he sees on the net. "Your computer could be infected with viruses, please run our free scanner". He never even looks to see who is offering the scanner, he doesn't search for that company, he just clicks it, runs it, then downloads the trojan offered when viruses are found.
I've clicked a couple of those things to see what they might find on my Linux boxes. Amazingly, they found all sorts of stuff on my C: Imagine that.....
*sigh* I lack sympathy. Let me get this straight. I know jack about aircraft, but I'd like to own one. So, I trot my happy ass down to the airport, find a pretty plane (with PONIES even!) and hand over my hard earned cash. Climb in, fire it up, and drive it into the trees at the end of the runway. This is whose fault, exactly? Is it the guy who sold me a plane? Was it his responsibility to investigate my background, to find out whether I even had a pilot's license? Was it his job to teach me about planes? Was it his job to inform me that the little single seater wouldn't lift off with all those ponies in the cargo bay?
If people are going to be on the web, they should at least have a clue about what the web is.
Mod parent up some more, 5 points isn't nearly enough.
Personally, I give less info to my "freinds" than is commonly available as public information on Facebook. I don't use apps - most of them are to silly to bother with, and the rest are vectors for dataminers and/or malware. Who needs them?
Perhaps I'll restate the case, from a more military perspective. China has it's "Assasin's Mace" program, which is meant to make them equal to, or superior to, the United States, militarily, economically, politically, and scientifically. Assymetric warfare.
Red Flag Linux is a part of the mace. A small part, but an important part. While lazy westerners are busy relying on Microsoft to run their desktops, laptops, servers, and whatever else, China is moving ahead with Linux. The average Chinese will have, by default, a much more secure computer, which encourages mucking about under the hood, and figuring out how things work. The average American will have by default an insecure and secretive operating system which he can't fix even if he IS smart, because he could be imprisoned for decompiling, reverse engineering and patching the damned thing.
China's export market? Of course they want to sell us MS-centric stuff. If you've read the headlines in the past few years, China has a habit of producing and selling poisoned products to the west. They are happy to take our money, in exchange for trash. And, we are just as happy to buy anything that is shiny and pretty.
Who is smarter?
Cloud? What about the cloud? Isn't it going to depend on scalable servers and scalable software? I can't see a push toward smaller systems, myself. Every Tom, Dick, and Dilrod on the planet is pushing the advantages of cloud computing. Seems to me that the core expertise of both Sun and Oracle are going to be in demand if everyone goes to the cloud.
Note, I'm not one of those people who places their faith in the cloud - I'm just pointing things out here.
To simplify the issue, somewhat: The cartels exist because the population of the US wants those drugs, but the government of the US insists that anyone who wants drugs is a criminal.
In any sane arrangement, the government would permit people to deal in these drugs, but tax the living hell out of them. The drugs would be grown, processed, and distributed under controlled conditions. The government should protect the lives of it's people, rather than warring on it's own people.
We have done nothing more than to encourage criminals to take over a multi-billion dollar business that our government won't regulate. After encouraging the existence of these cartels, we pressure governments to battle those cartels. In short, we created the situation that we are reading about.
Isn't that just a little bit narrow minded? Prisons don't rehabilitate people. Prisons actually provide a training center for criminals to learn new techniques, and to build social circles among criminals.
Before you assume that I'm some kind of liberal fruitcake, I believe in capital punishment and corporal punishment. A flogging will cure a lot of would-be petty criminals. A death sentence will cure murderers, rapists, and child molesters of their problems. Petty criminals, though? People locked up for smoking a joint?
Our prison system is totally screwed up. We have more people per capita in prison than nations that routinely violate human rights standards.
Think outside the box. No leader ever gives an order which he knows will be disobeyed. No law maker makes laws which he knows can't be enforced.
It's time to end the drug war. The drug war costs more American casualties than the Iraq war and Afghanistan war combined.
(Just who appointed you the arbiter of who should have how much wealth, anyway? Isn't that arrogant and rather selfish?)
Uhhhhmmmm, yes. Exactly. That is PRECISELY what people are saying - the same people who are tired of parasitic corporations. You know, the corporations that want top dollar for products made in undeveloped third world countries, by uneducated desperate people who don't demand any more than a bowl of rice in exchange for a day's work. The same corporations that see no point in protecting the health of employees, or customers. Not to worry, though, because when the employees die of one cause or another, there are plenty of other starving nobodies in Africa, Micronesia, and Asia to fill their spots in the assembly line.
Who DID appoint them as the final arbiters of who should have how much wealth?
There is a lot of truth in that post. Look at taxes. I learned the first year after high school that working to hard was foolish. My boss built custom homes - high quality homes, short of extravagent. We worked hard all summer long, to have shells up to finish off throughout the winter. If I worked 53 hours, I got a real nice paycheck thanks to overtime. If I worked 54 to 59 hours, I broke even - meaning, I saw only a few cents or a couple dollars increase in my paycheck. Working over 60 hours meant that I lost money. Yes, my take home check was SMALLER than it would have been working 50 hours. And, thanks to being single, I got squat back at the end of the year.
Right. Globalization, outsourcing, and relocation all started just this year, under Obama. This is really a new phenomena, never seen before January 2009. Uh-huh. Anyone who buys into that probably believes in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the kindness found only in a Republican's heart.
"We are not near the poverty levels of the Great Depression,"
Nothing says the we have seen the worst of our current recession. Nothing says we won't see the desperation of the '30's again. The only thing that happened in the '30's that isn't likely to happen again, is the dust bowl. On the other hand, family farms are barely hanging in there because they can't compete with factory farms. If a few of those conglomerations go belly up, we could be in serious trouble. How much of our population are we willing to see die of starvation?
Nothing to worry about, really. This is just Mother Nature's way of enforcing population control. If we think it's bad here, just wait for Mother to get serious in China. The earth's carrying capacity of humankind is being severely tested, so we can expect more of this sort of thing.
(turn on sarcasm here) Health care? Why fight the inevitable? Only the rich are truly fit to survive anyway.
Gender is largely determined by our genes. But there are a number of articles on the web which demonstrate that hormones present in the womb can alter the initial determination of gender. Short of outright hermaphroditism, a female may have a lot of masculine characteristics, and a male can have a lot of feminine characteristics. Actually, it didn't require a lot of research to figure this out - people everywhere exhibit varying degrees of both masculine and feminine characteristics.
"Prove you're a girl"??? WTF??? PROVE IT??? Give us all a break. Are we going to start demanding DNA and ultrasound analysis of every little leaguer? The kid either grows up thinking that he's a he, or that she's a she. That's good enough for almost anything. And, it should be good enough for the olympics. One shouldn't have to submit to what amounts to sexual molestation. Maybe a blood test. But, the blood test will be little more conclusive than looking at a person. He/she has hormone levels that are outside the norm? Big fucking deal.
This world is getting to damned demanding. No one has a right to demand that I prove my sexuality - NO ONE. Not even if I'm competing on the world stage. This young lady has been researched to death. Her Mama and her Daddy vouch for her, and her birth certificate says "Female".
Drop it, everyone.
The only people who will ever have a legitimate interest in her genitalia are those who find her attractive enough to want to share her bed. And, those people will keep those details private unless they are total jerks.
You kinda miss the point, though. A number of ISP's throttle P2P, and I guess some actually block it. The excuse given is, it's unimportant, and legality is always mentioned. P2P in general, and torrents specifically, shouldn't even be questioned at the ISP level - it is a legitimate protocol with legitimate uses, as you point out.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Apparently, those of us who recognize society's failings, and society's failures, are bad guys. Fine, I can live with that. If I can't, I guess I could get a twitter account, and find people who agree with me.
All those apps should make a stalker's job much easier. I mean, think about it. You stumble over some hottie's pic on the net, so you start checking her out. You've got her twitter nickname, her myspace nickname, and you've got her phone number, her high school, names and phone numbers of all her family and freinds. But, how do you figure out exactly where she IS?
Technology is great, isn't it?
Excuse, me, gotta get back to my stalking.....
Overall, pretty good post. But, you kinda screwed it up with "Of course, it isn't Google's job to fight these kind of fights. That's what newspapers are for,"
We are all aware that the world is changing. If it weren't TFA wouldn't even be a postable story.
The traditional newspapers are losing ground. They are losing readership, and they are losing revenues. (You might argue the "losing readership" - that's really subject for another discussion) Newspapers are still pretty powerful, but they are losing power.
Google is part of the system that is making newspapers irrelevant. So - we can argue, and maybe we SHOULD argue, that it really IS Google's job to fight these kind of fights.
Disclaimer: I'm not real sure that Google really IS the right company to fight these fights, I'm just pointing out that they might have an obligation to help solve problems created by their use of technology.
That deserves +1 funny. But, it's terribly unkind, all the same. GP isn't a cave dweller at all. Well, not since he moved here
"They're buying the name in hopes of turning it into a legit operation. Umm.. good luck with that."
Actually, I'm sort of cheering for them. I don't hold out much hope, but I'm cheering all the same. Go ahead, ask me "WHY?" Well, since you asked, I'll tell you!
Bit Torrent is nothing more, and nothing less, than a protocol. It shouldn't have a legal status, or an illegal status, any more than verbally enunciating ideas should have a legal status. No form of communication should be make illegal.
If these people can actually make torrents work for a legal, reputable company, then we have less to fear from ISP's throttling or even stopping torrents. We, the WWW of internet users, NEED someone to adopt this technological protocol to lend it credibility. More generally, P2P needs to be recognized as an acceptable means of communications. As things stand right now, if you and your family & freinds are amateur photographers, and you have extensive libraries that you like to share between your households, the ISP can claim that you are all pirates, and shut you down.
Yes, we need this.
What you say is perfectly true. But, if/when the courts get fed up with refereeing the "corporate wars", then the courts may well strike down the whole software patent idea. (Yes, lawyers can find a way to do that, and courts are POPULATED with lawyers)
Whether that scenario ever happened or not, corporations will lose tons of money to the corporate wars. MS knows that, as well as every other company out there that holds patents. They don't WANT a corporate patent war, which is made obvious by all the out of court settlements that have been made over the years.
These few millions may well be chump change to MS, but when the real shooting starts, they may be nickle and dimed to death. How many other places are they liable? For instance - I've never really chased down their 32 bit disk access. I know that Digital Research managed to develop 32 bit access before MS. Maybe MS infringes on DR's patent? Did DR file a patent?
See, it's one huge can of worms!
Everyone would benefit in the long run if software patents were outlawed, and pushed into the realm of copyright.
A more accurate question would be, "How long until Microsoft enforces incompatibility with the web again?"
Oh, don't do that!!! I'm laughing my ass off here, and you KNOW how hard it is to screw the damned thing back on!!
If Google diddles your page rank, you're probably just totally Bing-ed!
Ya know, I don't recall ever seeing an advertisement on television for Google products. Google is just so good, people talk about them, and everyone starts using them. I've not even seen an advert for their out of print books - it's just viral on the net.
Bing? Why do I need 127 commercials on my television to tell me how good Bing is? Hmmmmm.
Anyway - back on subject. Let them form their little alliance. People won't notice anyway.
An alternative conclusion could be, since Opera rules the market share in countries that use the cyrillic alphabet, most criminals are from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Still dubious logic, but hey, it's as good as the author's dubious logic!
Sadly, no