You, like many others, is mistaking between kernel inclusion and hardware support. Have a look in the more than 70 binary blobs present in the firmware packages in the non-free repository of Debian, and you will understand.
DO NOT use any packages from the www.debian-multimedia.org website. It's broken by default, and can break a system badly, and since Squeeze, there's nothing that you will need in it. If you aren't convince by my post, read the video of the new york Debconf presentation that the Multimedia team made last summer.
Is this SO HARD to drop 1 file in the USB key so that you need a 3rd party to do it for you? If you really think that, then complain about the maker of the chip-set that is annoying you. If you don't get a reply, then don't buy hardware from them anymore!
I know some people will say just replace the wifi cards with something more open, but why should I have to replace perfectly good hardware that works?
If the driver of the said card is annoying you each time you install a new system, and that you do that often, then the answer is: OF COURSE YES! Why would you keep some hardware that is annoying you? And more than this: why didn't you think about it before your purchased? Purchasing some hardware that are famous for running closed drivers/firmware is pushing makers to do it again. You should simply force you to not do it.
I'm all for keeping the kernel clean, but please, distro makers... make it easy to find and install the non-free bits that are needed to operate non-free hardware. It's ridiculous to expect that everyone builds their computers from only free and open hardware.
At least in modern ubuntu releases, this is fairly easy and automated with the Hardware Drivers app. This is sorely missing in Debian.
Is this a joke??? Man, firmware loading is available since Lenny (that means: more than 2 years), and is available in Squeeze as well. Frankly, you are complaining about a defect that doesn't exist. IT IS extremely easy to load a firmware. But by the way, the netinst installer for Squeeze wont have WPA support (because nobody cared about it), so I guess it wont be an issue, you will have to use a wire anyway for the time of the installation. So it wont bother you at install time!:)
I know what you are about to say: how lame is it to not have WPA in the installer. That's exactly what I said 2 months ago in the debian-release list. But the issue is that nobody cared to work on it, and now it's already too late to include it. So don't complain, and contribute !
No, that script is called... Debian. You just need to learn how to install a firmware on the installation medium, as I said above. Having a completely free kernel doesn't mean that you can't run some non-free kernels, it just means that the bad non-free software has been separated and push to the non-free repository (we we use to say is "not part of Debian"). This is really a PROGRESS and an ENHANCEMENT, so that we have READABILITY over what is free and what is not. Please do not mistake. Note that creating a USB medium with all the firmware is extremely easy.
Removing all the firmware from what we call "main", doesn't mean that they aren't available. It means that if you want them, you need to go pick them up by yourself, and put it in your installation medium (the most easy being an USB key with the HDD media boot.img loaded in). This is why we have "non-free": to separate the good from the bad. I don't know why you are saying "someone else will write a script" when all this is already supported in the default installer (again: you just need to drop the non-free firmware or driver in the medium you are installing from).
What a jerk. Not only you are insulting and racist, but you didn't even car reading what I wrote. Where exactly did you see that I was proud of what the Chinese gov. is doing? All what I was thinking is that there's no reason to add more crap to what we have already from the gov. I was also only returning the compliment you had, to see your reaction. Clearly, you don't like reading them, so why people living in China would?
Lucky, I know a few Americans that aren't like you.
I'm a French guy living in China, and married with a Chinese, and all what I earn for a living comes from the net. To such a comment, I have only one thing to answer: go to hell, with your "recommendations". How about we do a global embargo on USA (not only on Internet) because you guys think you own the planet and make endless wars? They don't have the right to do this. Let's cut them until they learn how to behave.
If I'm not mistaking, Echelon is a pretty old technology that does voice recognition on the phone lines, and that works with an agreement with Australia, USA and UK. I don't think Echelon has anything to do with the Internet traffic man in the middle, which might be designated otherwise. Am I wrong here?
Tsss... I'll take that as humor. But just in case anyone think you are serious, let me show my reasoning.
I can't remember exactly where I could read it, but I did read that there was 30% of all Internet traffic going by California alone. I wonder how that was in fact checked, but had all the reasons in the world to believe it. Now, I wrote "USA" because I thought it was very difficult to check for geographic locations of routes. But that's not it: I do check for it very often myself. I in fact believe that 30% is very under-estimated, not only because of that thing that I read online, but simply because I very often use traceroute (in fact, I use mtr) to check for my servers (my company has many points of presence all around the world). And to date, I can't remember a single time where traffic from Asia-Pacific isn't going through USA to reach Europe !!!
So, I'm not even using a 3rd party, I know because I use Internet! Unless all these reverse DNS entries are fake (which would be strange: what network provider isn't willing to advertise about himself?), all traffic really IS going by USA. Now, consider this: there's a lot of Internet users in Asia, which very often are reaching sites in America (the continent...), Europe and other places. That alone is a reassurance that 30% isn't at all unbelievable. Then compare this to how much traffic is actually going BY China (in order to reach another destination), see the difference, and understand how much this buzz was silly. Of course, so much traffic from China is going to USA all the time, and never ever, the opposite thing happens.
As for ChinaNet (one of the 2 gov. controlled Internet access provider in China), I can tell (by my own experience, not by any reading from others...) that their link to USA is often saturated to the point it becomes very difficult to browse any site that isn't in Asia if you don't bounce. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to save on the huge cost that this traffic must be generating.
Do you have any reasoning that would help thinking otherwise? I don't think so...
You don't know how many times I have read that all spams are coming from China when they in fact come from USA. I've heard countless times French right wingers saying that France cannot compete with China because of their small work taxes, when in fact taxes in China are sometimes higher than in France. This is just an example. Here, we have more than 30% of the WORLD TRAFFIC that is hijacked by USA absolutely 100% of the time, and with NSA doing deep packet inspection (and not even hiding to do so). Medias in USA should look at their own gov. with suspicion rather than saying bullshit about others without checking!
Great, a new GUI stack... But how am-I going to run FreeNX then? Instead of working on silly stuff and REMOVING networking, they'd better work on ADDING a nice FreeNX stack to begin with.
regarding everything from the ethics of releasing the code
For Christ sake, it's been years that we (slashdot readers) all know what's going on about session cookies over an unencrypted wifi like at Starbucks and so on. Releasing Firesheep just shows everyone that aren't tech savvy how much SSL is important, and how easy session hijacking can be. Releasing Firesheep could only make some good in this regard, as nobody was moving forward, including major social networking sites. This is exactly the same as when you release a security fix: you should at the same time, disclose what the issue is. Here, it's been decades we know, and nobody is doing anything.
We can go in a room if the door isn't locked, with a big sign "get in, free entrance". Well, isn't it time to think that maybe, having a door might help? I'm not even talking about a big lock, or making the room nuclear explosion proof, but maybe just a simple door with a lock could help? No, it's better (according to people that TFA's correspondents) to blame those shouting there's no door...
Now, it's going to be interesting to see if these social networking sites will finally do the move to encryption. And it's not as if it was a technology so hard to implement is it? So what the hell are they waiting for? Maybe they feel like having databases of stolen accounts sold in the wild, so they can say "oh, look at bad guys"? Come on... Do your homework, then we'll talk again.
I regret to say that your understanding is wrong. China blocks a lot more than only content in Chinese.
By the way, the current situation is that when you do some "politically incorrect" queries on Google, you got flagged to have the full of Google HK blocked all together. Otherwise, you can search whatever you want, since Google HK isn't blocked at all (until you search for the wrong things). No need to tell here what's wrong to search, you guys all know and it has been discussed many times.
Do you really think there's nobody reading the web in China? Think twice. Few DAYS after the news about Opera Mini having the same "issue" being posted on slashdot, its proxy has been blocked, and Opera had to make a new version taking the Great Firewall of China into account. Would you mind giving your source that proves the government is that stupid, as is asking the person just right next to my post?
Frankly, and excuse me to say it this way, but that's bullshit. If there's 512 MB of RAM, and you can allocate 32 MB only, what's the point of having that much available on the hardware? Just so that the specs looks good for new buyers? I'm ok that there should be limits set somehow, but not like that. How could an application like Stellarium that I run in my n900 run on iOS ? Are you going to say "sorry, there's too much risk that your phone will crash, so I wont let you load all your stars database"?
As for PalmOS, that was bullshit the an even more stupid way. COME ON, only 32 KB of RAM, even when there was 3MB absolutely and totally available? And what about this RAM pagination stupidity that they came with, when the processor didn't even need it? Are you going to say that there is a valid reason behind it, appart from developers of PalmOS knowing absolutely nothing but (old type of 68k based) Mac OS?
That's the case of a mobile hotspot and some phones like n900 (and I heard, some Androids) can do it. Why buying another device that will make it more expensive, and will take-over your SIM card, preventing you to actually call, or use your phone for other purposes? Not even saying that the MiFi device plus a normal phone will be quite a cost... which will cover the cost of a Nokia n900 (or that Android phone which I can't recall the model name).
iOS does not have a swapfile, so if you use too much dynamic memory, the OS gives you a warning or two, then kills your process. The bane of iOS developers is that "too much" is not defined, and in fact varies based on what other apps (Safari, Mail, iPod, etc) that are in memory have done
That clearly reminds me PalmOS (the 3.0 to 3.5 Palm time), where you didn't even have enough RAM allocated dynamically to be able to do such a simple thing as decompressing a Gif file (the lookup table didn't fit in it). Like with the iOS now, the doc was pretty much not clear about how much RAM you could allocate when running an application, but we finally found that we could only count on 32MB !!! So, at the end, after 10 years, phone operating systems didn't evolve much in terms of stupidity...:)
If a patent is issued in error or in contravention of the law, it's not valid. It's as simple as that.
I wish it was, unfortunately, we've seen so many invalid patent being enforced that I cannot agree. This US patent office really seems to do a bad and disgusting job.
I don't like software patents either, but development does take its time and money and you currently still have to play by the rules like everyone else. Just because you're not selling as many devices as HTC doesn't mean you don't have to pay the same royalties. Even Google, like every other company, is asking for patent royalties, so why suddenly Microsoft shouldn't?
Because they are talking about "multimedia in emails" kind of patent. It's like charging a patent fee for hot water as if microsoft invented it, and this makes everyone sic! Lucky enough, this only applies to country without freedom like USA.
Slashdot Mirror
You, like many others, is mistaking between kernel inclusion and hardware support. Have a look in the more than 70 binary blobs present in the firmware packages in the non-free repository of Debian, and you will understand.
DO NOT use any packages from the www.debian-multimedia.org website. It's broken by default, and can break a system badly, and since Squeeze, there's nothing that you will need in it. If you aren't convince by my post, read the video of the new york Debconf presentation that the Multimedia team made last summer.
however, I wonder if they're shooting themselves in the foot and removing hardware support.
Stop wondering, and use the non-free repository.
Is this SO HARD to drop 1 file in the USB key so that you need a 3rd party to do it for you? If you really think that, then complain about the maker of the chip-set that is annoying you. If you don't get a reply, then don't buy hardware from them anymore!
I know some people will say just replace the wifi cards with something more open, but why should I have to replace perfectly good hardware that works?
If the driver of the said card is annoying you each time you install a new system, and that you do that often, then the answer is: OF COURSE YES! Why would you keep some hardware that is annoying you? And more than this: why didn't you think about it before your purchased? Purchasing some hardware that are famous for running closed drivers/firmware is pushing makers to do it again. You should simply force you to not do it.
I'm all for keeping the kernel clean, but please, distro makers... make it easy to find and install the non-free bits that are needed to operate non-free hardware. It's ridiculous to expect that everyone builds their computers from only free and open hardware.
At least in modern ubuntu releases, this is fairly easy and automated with the Hardware Drivers app. This is sorely missing in Debian.
Is this a joke??? Man, firmware loading is available since Lenny (that means: more than 2 years), and is available in Squeeze as well. Frankly, you are complaining about a defect that doesn't exist. IT IS extremely easy to load a firmware. But by the way, the netinst installer for Squeeze wont have WPA support (because nobody cared about it), so I guess it wont be an issue, you will have to use a wire anyway for the time of the installation. So it wont bother you at install time! :)
I know what you are about to say: how lame is it to not have WPA in the installer. That's exactly what I said 2 months ago in the debian-release list. But the issue is that nobody cared to work on it, and now it's already too late to include it. So don't complain, and contribute !
No, that script is called ... Debian. You just need to learn how to install a firmware on the installation medium, as I said above. Having a completely free kernel doesn't mean that you can't run some non-free kernels, it just means that the bad non-free software has been separated and push to the non-free repository (we we use to say is "not part of Debian"). This is really a PROGRESS and an ENHANCEMENT, so that we have READABILITY over what is free and what is not. Please do not mistake. Note that creating a USB medium with all the firmware is extremely easy.
Removing all the firmware from what we call "main", doesn't mean that they aren't available. It means that if you want them, you need to go pick them up by yourself, and put it in your installation medium (the most easy being an USB key with the HDD media boot.img loaded in). This is why we have "non-free": to separate the good from the bad. I don't know why you are saying "someone else will write a script" when all this is already supported in the default installer (again: you just need to drop the non-free firmware or driver in the medium you are installing from).
On the installer simply tick:
[ * ] Desktop environment
If the computer is already installed, do "apt-get install gnome" and everything is installed. What's so fu*king hard here?
What a jerk. Not only you are insulting and racist, but you didn't even car reading what I wrote. Where exactly did you see that I was proud of what the Chinese gov. is doing? All what I was thinking is that there's no reason to add more crap to what we have already from the gov. I was also only returning the compliment you had, to see your reaction. Clearly, you don't like reading them, so why people living in China would?
Lucky, I know a few Americans that aren't like you.
I'm a French guy living in China, and married with a Chinese, and all what I earn for a living comes from the net. To such a comment, I have only one thing to answer: go to hell, with your "recommendations". How about we do a global embargo on USA (not only on Internet) because you guys think you own the planet and make endless wars? They don't have the right to do this. Let's cut them until they learn how to behave.
If I'm not mistaking, Echelon is a pretty old technology that does voice recognition on the phone lines, and that works with an agreement with Australia, USA and UK. I don't think Echelon has anything to do with the Internet traffic man in the middle, which might be designated otherwise. Am I wrong here?
Tsss... I'll take that as humor. But just in case anyone think you are serious, let me show my reasoning.
I can't remember exactly where I could read it, but I did read that there was 30% of all Internet traffic going by California alone. I wonder how that was in fact checked, but had all the reasons in the world to believe it. Now, I wrote "USA" because I thought it was very difficult to check for geographic locations of routes. But that's not it: I do check for it very often myself. I in fact believe that 30% is very under-estimated, not only because of that thing that I read online, but simply because I very often use traceroute (in fact, I use mtr) to check for my servers (my company has many points of presence all around the world). And to date, I can't remember a single time where traffic from Asia-Pacific isn't going through USA to reach Europe !!!
So, I'm not even using a 3rd party, I know because I use Internet! Unless all these reverse DNS entries are fake (which would be strange: what network provider isn't willing to advertise about himself?), all traffic really IS going by USA. Now, consider this: there's a lot of Internet users in Asia, which very often are reaching sites in America (the continent...), Europe and other places. That alone is a reassurance that 30% isn't at all unbelievable. Then compare this to how much traffic is actually going BY China (in order to reach another destination), see the difference, and understand how much this buzz was silly. Of course, so much traffic from China is going to USA all the time, and never ever, the opposite thing happens.
As for ChinaNet (one of the 2 gov. controlled Internet access provider in China), I can tell (by my own experience, not by any reading from others...) that their link to USA is often saturated to the point it becomes very difficult to browse any site that isn't in Asia if you don't bounce. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to save on the huge cost that this traffic must be generating.
Do you have any reasoning that would help thinking otherwise? I don't think so...
You don't know how many times I have read that all spams are coming from China when they in fact come from USA. I've heard countless times French right wingers saying that France cannot compete with China because of their small work taxes, when in fact taxes in China are sometimes higher than in France. This is just an example. Here, we have more than 30% of the WORLD TRAFFIC that is hijacked by USA absolutely 100% of the time, and with NSA doing deep packet inspection (and not even hiding to do so). Medias in USA should look at their own gov. with suspicion rather than saying bullshit about others without checking!
Great, a new GUI stack... But how am-I going to run FreeNX then? Instead of working on silly stuff and REMOVING networking, they'd better work on ADDING a nice FreeNX stack to begin with.
It didn't work on my laptop (Squeeze with Firef^w Iceweasel 3.5.13). Thomas
regarding everything from the ethics of releasing the code
For Christ sake, it's been years that we (slashdot readers) all know what's going on about session cookies over an unencrypted wifi like at Starbucks and so on. Releasing Firesheep just shows everyone that aren't tech savvy how much SSL is important, and how easy session hijacking can be. Releasing Firesheep could only make some good in this regard, as nobody was moving forward, including major social networking sites. This is exactly the same as when you release a security fix: you should at the same time, disclose what the issue is. Here, it's been decades we know, and nobody is doing anything.
We can go in a room if the door isn't locked, with a big sign "get in, free entrance". Well, isn't it time to think that maybe, having a door might help? I'm not even talking about a big lock, or making the room nuclear explosion proof, but maybe just a simple door with a lock could help? No, it's better (according to people that TFA's correspondents) to blame those shouting there's no door...
Now, it's going to be interesting to see if these social networking sites will finally do the move to encryption. And it's not as if it was a technology so hard to implement is it? So what the hell are they waiting for? Maybe they feel like having databases of stolen accounts sold in the wild, so they can say "oh, look at bad guys"? Come on... Do your homework, then we'll talk again.
I regret to say that your understanding is wrong. China blocks a lot more than only content in Chinese.
By the way, the current situation is that when you do some "politically incorrect" queries on Google, you got flagged to have the full of Google HK blocked all together. Otherwise, you can search whatever you want, since Google HK isn't blocked at all (until you search for the wrong things). No need to tell here what's wrong to search, you guys all know and it has been discussed many times.
Slashdot isn't censored ... yet. The censorship is still a black list, and not a white list, luckily.
Tor is simply blocked if you don't have a specific entry node. So it's not really working well...
Do you really think there's nobody reading the web in China? Think twice. Few DAYS after the news about Opera Mini having the same "issue" being posted on slashdot, its proxy has been blocked, and Opera had to make a new version taking the Great Firewall of China into account. Would you mind giving your source that proves the government is that stupid, as is asking the person just right next to my post?
Frankly, and excuse me to say it this way, but that's bullshit. If there's 512 MB of RAM, and you can allocate 32 MB only, what's the point of having that much available on the hardware? Just so that the specs looks good for new buyers? I'm ok that there should be limits set somehow, but not like that. How could an application like Stellarium that I run in my n900 run on iOS ? Are you going to say "sorry, there's too much risk that your phone will crash, so I wont let you load all your stars database"?
As for PalmOS, that was bullshit the an even more stupid way. COME ON, only 32 KB of RAM, even when there was 3MB absolutely and totally available? And what about this RAM pagination stupidity that they came with, when the processor didn't even need it? Are you going to say that there is a valid reason behind it, appart from developers of PalmOS knowing absolutely nothing but (old type of 68k based) Mac OS?
That's the case of a mobile hotspot and some phones like n900 (and I heard, some Androids) can do it. Why buying another device that will make it more expensive, and will take-over your SIM card, preventing you to actually call, or use your phone for other purposes? Not even saying that the MiFi device plus a normal phone will be quite a cost ... which will cover the cost of a Nokia n900 (or that Android phone which I can't recall the model name).
iOS does not have a swapfile, so if you use too much dynamic memory, the OS gives you a warning or two, then kills your process. The bane of iOS developers is that "too much" is not defined, and in fact varies based on what other apps (Safari, Mail, iPod, etc) that are in memory have done
That clearly reminds me PalmOS (the 3.0 to 3.5 Palm time), where you didn't even have enough RAM allocated dynamically to be able to do such a simple thing as decompressing a Gif file (the lookup table didn't fit in it). Like with the iOS now, the doc was pretty much not clear about how much RAM you could allocate when running an application, but we finally found that we could only count on 32MB !!! So, at the end, after 10 years, phone operating systems didn't evolve much in terms of stupidity... :)
If a patent is issued in error or in contravention of the law, it's not valid. It's as simple as that.
I wish it was, unfortunately, we've seen so many invalid patent being enforced that I cannot agree. This US patent office really seems to do a bad and disgusting job.
I don't like software patents either, but development does take its time and money and you currently still have to play by the rules like everyone else. Just because you're not selling as many devices as HTC doesn't mean you don't have to pay the same royalties. Even Google, like every other company, is asking for patent royalties, so why suddenly Microsoft shouldn't?
Because they are talking about "multimedia in emails" kind of patent. It's like charging a patent fee for hot water as if microsoft invented it, and this makes everyone sic! Lucky enough, this only applies to country without freedom like USA.