1: It appears clear that the government is coming down on the side of big business in all this mess. Until now, they've been kind of on the sidelines, if not on the side of keeping the Internet free. That situation is apparently gone.
2: Your hundred thousand crackers are using an infrastructure that was put in place while the media giants were sleeping, and the government favored Internet freedom. Neither of those is true, any more. Don't count on that infrastructure moving forward, or even remaining recognizable. Ports? What are those? All we need are 25, 53, 110, 80, and 443, so why put in all this other mess and make life easy for crackers when a half dozen suffice for *approved* traffic?
It's happened: The buggy-whip makers have been put in charge of the auto industry. Piece by piece, at the bequest of the old-guard publishing industries, our courts and legislators are killing the Internet and the promise it held.
Since 9/11, so many people have been quoting George Orwell's 1984. So for this circumstance, I'll have to choose a different quote from the same work, and adapt it:
"If there is hope, it must come from South America and India". (Substitute for Orwell's proles)
From what I heard before the Bono Extension passed, there were miles of historically significant film rotting away in vaults and basements. There were also archivists eager to get their hands on that footage, so that they could preserve at least some of it before it deteriorated entirely.
The Bono Copyright Extension passed, and it's quite likely that now those pieces of history will be gone, forever. But I guess that's OK, because Steamboat Willie will be safe in Disney's vaults.
I agree that this has to be interpreted along the lines of the original Constitutional Framers' thoughts, and that line appeals more to the conservative sides of the bench.
After all, if the mere ability to make money sufficed as a Constitutional argument, self-employed prostitutes should take their cases to the Supreme Court.
>"Self-expiring" email schemes work essentially the same way: a trusted key authority generates and stores encryption keys for any and all email.
>Reading an email requires authentication to the key authority, which either returns the key or decrypts the email. After a preset time, the key authority
>purges the encryption key, after which the email encrypted with that key is theoretically unreadable.
Now one must ask, is the encryption key truly purged, or merely taken offline? If the former, at what point does the FBI require that the keys NOT be purged, and be merely taken offline? Or for that matter, what about system backups that retain keys? You've got to backup your keys, in case of a true system failure, because unexpired messages MUST be read. But you then need to take care to purge backups of keyspace appropriately, as well.
And those are one two more points of failure, as well as the others people are mentioning.
In the mid-Hudson valley there's a place called "The Rhinebeck Aerodrome", where they have a combination ground museum and flight show of old aeroplanes. I took the family there, a few years ago, and saw quite a show.
I'm not enough of a student of history to remember most of the things they flew, but some of them were OLD. One of the newer things was a Sopwith Camel - as in Snoopy, the WWI flying Ace. Some of the planes took off at one end of the runway, flew the length at about 20 ft altitude, and landed at the other end. One really old plain had not conventional control surfaces - it worked by warping the wing surfaces.
The Sopwith Camel was interesting in that (apparently like other planes of its time) it had no throttle. But it did have a new innovation. The engine had nine cylinders, but four could be shut off. To get the same effect as throttling, the pilot ran on nine, five, or no cylinders. It was interesting to hear, when flying.
and then you can protect the whole shebang under the DMCA.
Right now, it's not illegal for someone to make a key generator, it's just copyright infringement to use it *for a pirated copy*. Presumably it's legal to use the key generator to activate a legitimately purchased copy of XP.
But by including a movie clip and citing DMCA, the mere act of writing a key generator becomes a crime.
It's one thing with code, and one could argue that even code should be better documented. Then we can get into commenting and documentation extractors, but that's not the point.
It's an entirely different thing with file formats, protocols, and the like. Microsoft tries to call these things Standards. In order to truly be a standard, something has to exist apart from its implementation. It's OK to have a reference implementation, but that's a supplement to documentation, not a replacement for documentation. Plus a live program implementing a standard is a completely different thing than a reference implementation.
Standards are supposed to have a life beyond any single given implementation - that's why it's called a Standard. Otherwise, every version might well be incompatible with the one before in subtle ways. This is also a good reason for Standards to be simple and clear.
I'm referring more specifically to how brittle the Registry is, and how frequently packages don't/can't do a good job of cleaning themselves out on an uninstall.
We don't want or need the MS source code. As a matter of fact, we're better off without it, because anyone who looks at it becomes questionable as a programmer, because of 'copyright contamination.'
We need file formats, wire formats, protocols. If Microsoft doesn't have clear, concise documentation, if Microsoft considers 'the source IS the documentation' for this stuff, then *THAT* is part of the problem with computing today.
OS/2 was sorely lacking in midi/music software. Some (forgot who) company had finished developing a program called "Easy Keys for OS/2" and was on the verge of release.
Microsoft bought the company. "Easy Keys" never was released, and as far as I can tell, the company was never heard from, again.
History repeats itself because nobody listens the first time.
I've heard this, too.
So either it's true, or an urban legend.
If true, are they getting away with it because the stockholders aren't complaining to the SEC? So how about if a bunch of Slashdotters buy a share of MS each, and then complain to the SEC, as stockholders.
I'll have to agree with Nader, the wad of cash they're sitting on distorts capitalism. There's an equivalent in the real world of physics, too. It's called a black hole.
So what's holding it back?
on
Inside the Itanium
·
· Score: 3, Informative
How about the fact that VLIW (or EPIC, if you prefer) compiler technology really isn't there yet for general purpose problems? Maybe you can write a program for EPIC and get it to scream, but simply recompiling the ray-tracer (or what-have-you) you already have just won't show much. Take a look on comp.arch for more, especially under X86-64 for evolution vs revolution opinions.
Or just run "lcap CAP_SYS_ADMIN" to drop mount
capability. Unfortunately, you drop a bunch of other capabilities too. While you're at it, run "lcap CAP_SYS_BOOT" to prevent reboots, and "lcap CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE" to prevent those immutable and append-only attributes from getting changes, "lcap CAP_SYS_MODULE" to lock your modules in place, and prevent further loading, and "lcap CAP_SYS_RAWIO" to close down/proc/kmem. There are more things you can remove from the kernel capabilities bounding set to lock your system down.
Of course, by the time you're done, your system is about as easy to administer as if it were halted. Not to mention log rotation requiring a reboot.
For all the groaning in November, it's still critical that a recount was even possible. It was eventually done, the results published, and history knows exactly what happened. Had ballots been stolen or tampered, that would have become part of history too, even if the results then couldn't be.
The moment it's exclusively electronic, it can get cracked *undetectably*. The detection is the key.
Some of us also take some pride in living in the only state that doesn't have a McDonalds in its capital city.
Or living in the last state to get a Wal Mart. Though we've got three of them now, IIRC. Plus Burlington got a Starbucks sometime in the last year, or so.
As the internet becomes mundane, perhaps analogies
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2
...with real-world things begin to hold.
The US air transportation system doesn't have a single heart, but it certainly does have a few large hubs.
The US government certainly has a *something* in Washington, DC. Many would argue both for and against calling it a heart or brain, though.
Beyond those two, our modern country and world get terribly diffuse.
Where is the heart of the Interstate Highway System?
Is Kansas still the heart of the US? (Read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman.)
Or perhaps according to William Gibson and other cyberpunks, the religion of the Internet is Voodoun. So obviously the Heart must be somewhere in the Carribean.
instead of treating them like idiots in front of TV sets.
First point, bandwidth is instantaneous, or at least short-term averaged. It isn't something you lump by the whole-day and average. Telephone rates are tiered: 8:00-17:00 is expensive, 17:00-23:00 is cheaper, and 23:00-8:00 is dirt cheap. Plus weekends go on another rate scheme. This is all based on usage, and giving us monetary incentive to shift our usage and even out load on the telepone infrastructure.
Why can't bandwidth caps be the same way? I'd be perfectly happy to set a cron job to fetch ISOs in the wee hours of the morning.
Which brings me to point two: Multicast - I don't know enough about it, basically some rules in the firewall script to prevent its abuse. I believe it may be used in streaming media, but don't know enough.
But why can't "they" (whoever "they" are) figure out that there are more things that would be well-done with multicast, and use it. How about if the ISP could multicast a Usenet feed through the night? If I want a Usenet feed, tune in and catch my groups. How about if "someone" (neighbor of "they" above) would multicast ISO images.
There seems to be this evil desire to turn the Internet into TV. Well, why can't we co-opt some of the good side of TV, and make more efficient use of bandwidth by 'broadcasting' some of those things so dear to us?
Finally, someone else brought this up, and it bears repeating. If they're going to bill me for use of bandwidth, then we need to something about unsolicited use of bandwidth. Script kiddies probing me are now causing financial damage. Spam causes financial damage. Getting DDOSed causes me financial damage, in addition to the service denial, itself.
At Christmas, I took the wife and kids back to Grandma's house.
As we came to the gate at boarding time, they were conducting the 'random search' on a bearded male who looked to be in his early 20's. A little later, they pulled me aside for the 'random search'. I guess the fact that I was travelling with a wife and two kids doesn't matter, nor does being in my mid-40s. I'm a bearded male.
I have a friend who has the same name as a porno producer, and he's gotten terrible hassles coming back into the US, over mistaken identity.
Somehow I doubt adding computers to the profiling scheme will improve things much. Imagine kids cracking the things to get their friends searched on family vacations. Or their enemies.
HPs target market for utility pricing on Linux is the same people who pay for it on Unix. They're simply moving it onto a equal footing.
From a corporate adoption point of view, this is good. It says, "The company can buy reliable Linux computing service," in a way that can be measured by costs and contracts.
A lot of EDA software is priced according to the speed of the system it runs on. Same thing.
>You do not understand correctly. You do not need a Passport ID to install or activate Windows XP.
Well, it's obvious that I have never installed Windows XP, then. The way I tend to play with my hardware, I hope never to have to. Activation would be a real pain as I swap parts through the box every few months.
Obviously one wouldn't need Passport to install, but I thought I heard somewhere that you needed it to Activate.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things:
1: It appears clear that the government is coming down on the side of big business in all this mess. Until now, they've been kind of on the sidelines, if not on the side of keeping the Internet free. That situation is apparently gone.
2: Your hundred thousand crackers are using an infrastructure that was put in place while the media giants were sleeping, and the government favored Internet freedom. Neither of those is true, any more. Don't count on that infrastructure moving forward, or even remaining recognizable. Ports? What are those? All we need are 25, 53, 110, 80, and 443, so why put in all this other mess and make life easy for crackers when a half dozen suffice for *approved* traffic?
It's happened: The buggy-whip makers have been put in charge of the auto industry. Piece by piece, at the bequest of the old-guard publishing industries, our courts and legislators are killing the Internet and the promise it held.
Since 9/11, so many people have been quoting George Orwell's 1984. So for this circumstance, I'll have to choose a different quote from the same work, and adapt it:
"If there is hope, it must come from South America and India". (Substitute for Orwell's proles)
From what I heard before the Bono Extension passed, there were miles of historically significant film rotting away in vaults and basements. There were also archivists eager to get their hands on that footage, so that they could preserve at least some of it before it deteriorated entirely.
The Bono Copyright Extension passed, and it's quite likely that now those pieces of history will be gone, forever. But I guess that's OK, because Steamboat Willie will be safe in Disney's vaults.
I agree that this has to be interpreted along the lines of the original Constitutional Framers' thoughts, and that line appeals more to the conservative sides of the bench.
After all, if the mere ability to make money sufficed as a Constitutional argument, self-employed prostitutes should take their cases to the Supreme Court.
Don't know why it's not 'Score:2' to begin with.
This is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they allowed patents and copyrights in there in the first place.
>"Self-expiring" email schemes work essentially the same way: a trusted key authority generates and stores encryption keys for any and all email.
>Reading an email requires authentication to the key authority, which either returns the key or decrypts the email. After a preset time, the key authority
>purges the encryption key, after which the email encrypted with that key is theoretically unreadable.
Now one must ask, is the encryption key truly purged, or merely taken offline? If the former, at what point does the FBI require that the keys NOT be purged, and be merely taken offline? Or for that matter, what about system backups that retain keys? You've got to backup your keys, in case of a true system failure, because unexpired messages MUST be read. But you then need to take care to purge backups of keyspace appropriately, as well.
And those are one two more points of failure, as well as the others people are mentioning.
Honesty is simpler.
In the mid-Hudson valley there's a place called "The Rhinebeck Aerodrome", where they have a combination ground museum and flight show of old aeroplanes. I took the family there, a few years ago, and saw quite a show.
I'm not enough of a student of history to remember most of the things they flew, but some of them were OLD. One of the newer things was a Sopwith Camel - as in Snoopy, the WWI flying Ace. Some of the planes took off at one end of the runway, flew the length at about 20 ft altitude, and landed at the other end. One really old plain had not conventional control surfaces - it worked by warping the wing surfaces.
The Sopwith Camel was interesting in that (apparently like other planes of its time) it had no throttle. But it did have a new innovation. The engine had nine cylinders, but four could be shut off. To get the same effect as throttling, the pilot ran on nine, five, or no cylinders. It was interesting to hear, when flying.
and then you can protect the whole shebang under the DMCA.
Right now, it's not illegal for someone to make a key generator, it's just copyright infringement to use it *for a pirated copy*. Presumably it's legal to use the key generator to activate a legitimately purchased copy of XP.
But by including a movie clip and citing DMCA, the mere act of writing a key generator becomes a crime.
It's one thing with code, and one could argue that even code should be better documented. Then we can get into commenting and documentation extractors, but that's not the point.
It's an entirely different thing with file formats, protocols, and the like. Microsoft tries to call these things Standards. In order to truly be a standard, something has to exist apart from its implementation. It's OK to have a reference implementation, but that's a supplement to documentation, not a replacement for documentation. Plus a live program implementing a standard is a completely different thing than a reference implementation.
Standards are supposed to have a life beyond any single given implementation - that's why it's called a Standard. Otherwise, every version might well be incompatible with the one before in subtle ways. This is also a good reason for Standards to be simple and clear.
I'm referring more specifically to how brittle the Registry is, and how frequently packages don't/can't do a good job of cleaning themselves out on an uninstall.
We don't want or need the MS source code. As a matter of fact, we're better off without it, because anyone who looks at it becomes questionable as a programmer, because of 'copyright contamination.'
We need file formats, wire formats, protocols. If Microsoft doesn't have clear, concise documentation, if Microsoft considers 'the source IS the documentation' for this stuff, then *THAT* is part of the problem with computing today.
One could make the argument that it's impossible to simply install/uninstall and run software without damaging the operating system.
This reminds me of the old OS/2 days.
OS/2 was sorely lacking in midi/music software. Some (forgot who) company had finished developing a program called "Easy Keys for OS/2" and was on the verge of release.
Microsoft bought the company. "Easy Keys" never was released, and as far as I can tell, the company was never heard from, again.
History repeats itself because nobody listens the first time.
I've heard this, too.
So either it's true, or an urban legend.
If true, are they getting away with it because the stockholders aren't complaining to the SEC? So how about if a bunch of Slashdotters buy a share of MS each, and then complain to the SEC, as stockholders.
I'll have to agree with Nader, the wad of cash they're sitting on distorts capitalism. There's an equivalent in the real world of physics, too. It's called a black hole.
How about the fact that VLIW (or EPIC, if you prefer) compiler technology really isn't there yet for general purpose problems? Maybe you can write a program for EPIC and get it to scream, but simply recompiling the ray-tracer (or what-have-you) you already have just won't show much. Take a look on comp.arch for more, especially under X86-64 for evolution vs revolution opinions.
It doesn't drop existing mounts, just your ability to make new mounts or umount. The logfiles are already in place and working.
Or just run "lcap CAP_SYS_ADMIN" to drop mount /proc/kmem. There are more things you can remove from the kernel capabilities bounding set to lock your system down.
capability. Unfortunately, you drop a bunch of other capabilities too. While you're at it, run "lcap CAP_SYS_BOOT" to prevent reboots, and "lcap CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE" to prevent those immutable and append-only attributes from getting changes, "lcap CAP_SYS_MODULE" to lock your modules in place, and prevent further loading, and "lcap CAP_SYS_RAWIO" to close down
Of course, by the time you're done, your system is about as easy to administer as if it were halted. Not to mention log rotation requiring a reboot.
Because it's an indication of being less *owned* than some other places.
For all the groaning in November, it's still critical that a recount was even possible. It was eventually done, the results published, and history knows exactly what happened. Had ballots been stolen or tampered, that would have become part of history too, even if the results then couldn't be.
The moment it's exclusively electronic, it can get cracked *undetectably*. The detection is the key.
Some of us also take some pride in living in the only state that doesn't have a McDonalds in its capital city.
Or living in the last state to get a Wal Mart. Though we've got three of them now, IIRC. Plus Burlington got a Starbucks sometime in the last year, or so.
...with real-world things begin to hold.
The US air transportation system doesn't have a single heart, but it certainly does have a few large hubs.
The US government certainly has a *something* in Washington, DC. Many would argue both for and against calling it a heart or brain, though.
Beyond those two, our modern country and world get terribly diffuse.
Where is the heart of the Interstate Highway System?
Is Kansas still the heart of the US? (Read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman.)
Or perhaps according to William Gibson and other cyberpunks, the religion of the Internet is Voodoun. So obviously the Heart must be somewhere in the Carribean.
instead of treating them like idiots in front of TV sets.
First point, bandwidth is instantaneous, or at least short-term averaged. It isn't something you lump by the whole-day and average. Telephone rates are tiered: 8:00-17:00 is expensive, 17:00-23:00 is cheaper, and 23:00-8:00 is dirt cheap. Plus weekends go on another rate scheme. This is all based on usage, and giving us monetary incentive to shift our usage and even out load on the telepone infrastructure.
Why can't bandwidth caps be the same way? I'd be perfectly happy to set a cron job to fetch ISOs in the wee hours of the morning.
Which brings me to point two: Multicast - I don't know enough about it, basically some rules in the firewall script to prevent its abuse. I believe it may be used in streaming media, but don't know enough.
But why can't "they" (whoever "they" are) figure out that there are more things that would be well-done with multicast, and use it. How about if the ISP could multicast a Usenet feed through the night? If I want a Usenet feed, tune in and catch my groups. How about if "someone" (neighbor of "they" above) would multicast ISO images.
There seems to be this evil desire to turn the Internet into TV. Well, why can't we co-opt some of the good side of TV, and make more efficient use of bandwidth by 'broadcasting' some of those things so dear to us?
Finally, someone else brought this up, and it bears repeating. If they're going to bill me for use of bandwidth, then we need to something about unsolicited use of bandwidth. Script kiddies probing me are now causing financial damage. Spam causes financial damage. Getting DDOSed causes me financial damage, in addition to the service denial, itself.
"That's not right. You there... Policeman... Please take me away from this insanity."
spoken by 'Cave Guy' aka 'Royce '
from the cartoon 'Freakazoid'
(quote approximate)
Not only are we making up a language based on a TV show, we're making up a computer programming language based on that.
At Christmas, I took the wife and kids back to Grandma's house.
As we came to the gate at boarding time, they were conducting the 'random search' on a bearded male who looked to be in his early 20's. A little later, they pulled me aside for the 'random search'. I guess the fact that I was travelling with a wife and two kids doesn't matter, nor does being in my mid-40s. I'm a bearded male.
I have a friend who has the same name as a porno producer, and he's gotten terrible hassles coming back into the US, over mistaken identity.
Somehow I doubt adding computers to the profiling scheme will improve things much. Imagine kids cracking the things to get their friends searched on family vacations. Or their enemies.
HPs target market for utility pricing on Linux is the same people who pay for it on Unix. They're simply moving it onto a equal footing.
From a corporate adoption point of view, this is good. It says, "The company can buy reliable Linux computing service," in a way that can be measured by costs and contracts.
A lot of EDA software is priced according to the speed of the system it runs on. Same thing.
>You do not understand correctly. You do not need a Passport ID to install or activate Windows XP.
Well, it's obvious that I have never installed Windows XP, then. The way I tend to play with my hardware, I hope never to have to. Activation would be a real pain as I swap parts through the box every few months.
Obviously one wouldn't need Passport to install, but I thought I heard somewhere that you needed it to Activate.