What's interesting is that people assume Bradley Manning is actually guilty of leaking State Dept. cables because Lamo produced a chat transcript after "Collater Murder" became a fiasco for the Pentagon.
We don't know that Manning was the person chatting with Lamo. We only know that Manning is still being held incommunicado by the US military in Kuwait.
I thought the real motive was to steal money from Iraq!
What a fool I was. It's now evident that the plan was -- and always was -- to steal money from the United States.
But with Iraq it's resources. The more USD-denominated fuel that flows out of Iraq, the more dollars can be printed for bankers over here (esp. if those dollars will be seeking out foreign goods and labor). (See: petrodollars.)
It is no accident that we threatened Iraq with invasion just weeks after they stopped accepting USD for oil (switching to Euros instead and prompting a slew of oil producing countries to investigate a similar currency switch). Iraq had be made into an example: You do not shift your resources away from the dollar!
Perhaps Haystack was poorly designed, but I can think of one factor that could eventually trump the anonymity of any such network: The prevalence of malware on Windows. A botnet controlled for the purpose could probably compromise/decode a lot of what's going on in these networks. That's why I recommend people use non-Windows systems if they want Tor, I2P, etc. to remain useful.
I agree that state editorial control over all media would be a bad thing, but I also think it's disingenuous to dwell on this bugaboo when media reform is broached... as if healthcare death-panels were right around the corner.
There's no reason that I can see why media has to be 99% commercial. It could be a mix that also includes a significant public sector modeled on the BBC (complete with large market share targets set by the regulator), and even a slice of official government outlets alongside.
The underlying problem we have is that only one organizational model (commercial-corporate) is considered legitimate. We should be insisting on a mix.
I don't think having the government run by a bunch of unaccountable monopolists and cartels is any better than state control. Actually the latter carries with it some notion of responsibility that the former does not.
The media do need to be regulated in terms of ownership and market shares. Limited cross-ownership with other industries, and no more regional monopolies. On top of that, I'd advise some form of robust public media, with news bureaus in many more places than just NYC, DC, LA, a fraction of state capitols and the foreign conquest of the day.
Iraq-related documents are unlikely to answer your questions (although they are good ones to ask).
I think it boils down to what the corporate aristocracy wants, regardless of what Obama wants. Offensive wars are ways to aggregate power and wealth at the expense of the poor. Obama knows that if he tries to prosecute, the corporate media will attack him without mercy.
We're not going to make much progress without some kind of drastic media reform.
A chat transcript from Adrian Lamo's computer does not prove that Bradley Manning was on the other end of that chat. Manning is still being held incommunicado and there has been no verification on his part.
The press may be promoting a scapegoat offered to them by the Pentagon. For the time being, they lie when they talk about what "Manning claimed".
It could also be that Manning leaked the 'Collateral Murder' video and the Pentagon needed to manufacture a more publicly acceptable reason to prosecute him. I think this is most likely what happened. Wikileaks say they have not received the purported diplomatic cables, and I tend believe them.
Yes, it works well for enthusiast system developers. It's awful for app developers. I should have been more clear on those points.
Or putting it another way, if you're scratching your own itch as a developer, your contribution will be valuable to other devs and perhaps sysadmins too. But if you're thinking about typical end-users as your target, then "desktop Linux" doesn't look appealing at all. This is especially true if you want to distribute commercially as you would have to support DISTROS x VERSIONS number of OS variations, not to mention that the system won't quite treat your app as normal software because the package-handling assumptions revolve around the idea that all software comes through free repositories.
Audio is still a mess, less so on the blocking/mixing issue, but still having problems with hardware support: One OEM can wire outputs very differently from another even given the same audio chip meaning that reasonable defaults are a game of chance... you can install Ubuntu and get L-R front speakers on your surrounds, headphones, or some lines that didn't get a jack connected to them on that computer.
And audio can still disappear without a trace after system updates... much the same case as with X11 video disappearing (it still does this on many systems even with minor settings changes).
AND THEN there is the problem with large OEMs like Dell taking widely-available chips for which Linux drivers exist, and asking the mfg. to knock a few dollars off. My experience has been that Linux drivers often work with these variations, but not well.
LSB doesn't define the desktop environment, nor other features like app installation interfaces (both UI and programmatic). People get lost (or even if they don't, they tend to FEEL a bit lost) without such features.
No one can write a guideline for copying/moving app data files (say, photos) or making basic configuration changes using the LSB as a guide. Nor can they write instructions for installing software (defining the package format as LSB does is not enough).
Mark Shuttleworth is also right to say that LSB doesn't properly handle the question of revision numbers for all the different components in the OS: There isn't enough synchronization. Sadly though, he seems to miss all the other points I brought up and instead of bringing in high-level design people he's got his team aping the look of Mac OS X.
The whole concept of "Linux" as a desktop platform is empty, a sort of mass delusion among hackers. Linux is just a kernel. Yet people write apps on Ubuntu expecting them to work on Mandriva and Fedora too. The same thing doesn't occur with Linux-based mobile platforms: Who writes an app for Android (which BTW does not have "Linux" in the title) and expects it to run on WebOS and Meego??
Android is a full OS platform, one that benefits from being paired with complete hardware builds by the mfg. with some help from Google. The desktop "Linux" morass has no such dynamic, making it an inferior choice for most non-hackers and I dare say even most techies.
Due to some unfortunate attitudes/politics in the FOSS world, "Linux" is still only loosely defined as a desktop platform.
Without being defined more clearly with a platform spec -- including UI -- and an SDK to make app developers feel at home, the usability and fragility of the desktop-oriented features (*cough* sound *cough* graphics *cough*) will not much improve, nor will top-notch app developers feel more attracted to the amorphous non-platform.
Fortunately, that problem doesn't extend as much into the cellphone/PDA world, so a lot of progress is being made there. Google was not savagely attacked for 'taking away our UI freedom' when they started Android as an open-source project. Same thing for WebOS and others. Note that Android has an SDK and is relatively well-defined as a platform, and even the nut-less Linux Foundation now has an SDK for their mobile offering (something they won't do with the desktop).
And also note: Last I checked none of the desktop Linux-based distros had a platform spec or SDK either. My take on what went wrong is that the issue of creating a desktop Linux became politicized early-on by hackers and other CLI-jockeys when they held a lot more sway than they do now. So having a mandatory/standard GUI was seen as chaining users to something big and overly-complex that many hackers did not want. (My answer to that is, run a non-desktop distro if you want the GUI to be optional.)
Open source works mainly when the audience being served is programmers and system admins because these types are familiar with and appreciate tweaking to get something to work (and even then, only to a point). Projects that truly focus on end-users' needs are rare: Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Android and maybe a couple others. The rest are either very nuts-and-bolts, or they are nuts-and-bolts with a thick candy coating.
Making you a criminal means you won't be able to defend your rights if you step on the toes of powerful people, and making you forget about integrity removes barriers to the acceptance of the only law that stands when you remove all other laws: "the most powerful wins".
However, a number of invalid/immoral laws have been overcome by the widespread breaking of them.
This issue is like many others these days and has more to do with how perceptions are influenced by corporate PR. If you don't want their power law to keep winning out, and if you want to make lasting progress, then media reform must be undertaken.
...you assume a high degree of income disparity throughout society. But if the middle class becomes proportionally much larger, then trust becomes less of a problem.
What's interesting is that I2P has been gaining popularity much more rapidly in Europe than elsewhere. I guess HADOPI-type laws are having their effect. In the far east the project is forming partnerships with dissident groups so that media files and other large data sets can be transmitted in relative safety.
Bittorrent, iMule and a distributed filesystem are available on the network which is both anonymized and highly decentralized (moreso than Tor).
I thought it was weird of Mozilla to push the personas idea since it seems tacky. But it's true that the window frame represents the security context for an application like a web browser, and a uniform customization of the frame would make the browser more secure against window imitation threats.
the S/MIME option doesn't work (or alert the users) unless keys can be exchanged ahead of time and out-of-band.
S/MIME is basically in the PKI class, so the same "legal intercept" techniques that work against HTTPS can work against S/MIME with a little adaptation.
Slashdot Mirror
What's interesting is that people assume Bradley Manning is actually guilty of leaking State Dept. cables because Lamo produced a chat transcript after "Collater Murder" became a fiasco for the Pentagon.
We don't know that Manning was the person chatting with Lamo. We only know that Manning is still being held incommunicado by the US military in Kuwait.
I thought the real motive was to steal money from Iraq!
What a fool I was. It's now evident that the plan was -- and always was -- to steal money from the United States.
But with Iraq it's resources. The more USD-denominated fuel that flows out of Iraq, the more dollars can be printed for bankers over here (esp. if those dollars will be seeking out foreign goods and labor). (See: petrodollars.)
It is no accident that we threatened Iraq with invasion just weeks after they stopped accepting USD for oil (switching to Euros instead and prompting a slew of oil producing countries to investigate a similar currency switch). Iraq had be made into an example: You do not shift your resources away from the dollar!
What are the chances that more zits will appear as a result of this sale?
...with the idea that government is necessarily evil. That is the libertarian-corporate clusterf--k that has infected our entire political culture.
Perhaps Haystack was poorly designed, but I can think of one factor that could eventually trump the anonymity of any such network: The prevalence of malware on Windows. A botnet controlled for the purpose could probably compromise/decode a lot of what's going on in these networks. That's why I recommend people use non-Windows systems if they want Tor, I2P, etc. to remain useful.
I agree that state editorial control over all media would be a bad thing, but I also think it's disingenuous to dwell on this bugaboo when media reform is broached... as if healthcare death-panels were right around the corner.
There's no reason that I can see why media has to be 99% commercial. It could be a mix that also includes a significant public sector modeled on the BBC (complete with large market share targets set by the regulator), and even a slice of official government outlets alongside.
The underlying problem we have is that only one organizational model (commercial-corporate) is considered legitimate. We should be insisting on a mix.
I don't think having the government run by a bunch of unaccountable monopolists and cartels is any better than state control. Actually the latter carries with it some notion of responsibility that the former does not.
The media do need to be regulated in terms of ownership and market shares. Limited cross-ownership with other industries, and no more regional monopolies. On top of that, I'd advise some form of robust public media, with news bureaus in many more places than just NYC, DC, LA, a fraction of state capitols and the foreign conquest of the day.
Iraq-related documents are unlikely to answer your questions (although they are good ones to ask).
I think it boils down to what the corporate aristocracy wants, regardless of what Obama wants. Offensive wars are ways to aggregate power and wealth at the expense of the poor. Obama knows that if he tries to prosecute, the corporate media will attack him without mercy.
We're not going to make much progress without some kind of drastic media reform.
A chat transcript from Adrian Lamo's computer does not prove that Bradley Manning was on the other end of that chat. Manning is still being held incommunicado and there has been no verification on his part.
The press may be promoting a scapegoat offered to them by the Pentagon. For the time being, they lie when they talk about what "Manning claimed".
It could also be that Manning leaked the 'Collateral Murder' video and the Pentagon needed to manufacture a more publicly acceptable reason to prosecute him. I think this is most likely what happened. Wikileaks say they have not received the purported diplomatic cables, and I tend believe them.
Nevertheless, these recent Wikileaks releases will primarily point the finger at the Bush admin, not Obama.
Yes, it works well for enthusiast system developers. It's awful for app developers. I should have been more clear on those points.
Or putting it another way, if you're scratching your own itch as a developer, your contribution will be valuable to other devs and perhaps sysadmins too. But if you're thinking about typical end-users as your target, then "desktop Linux" doesn't look appealing at all. This is especially true if you want to distribute commercially as you would have to support DISTROS x VERSIONS number of OS variations, not to mention that the system won't quite treat your app as normal software because the package-handling assumptions revolve around the idea that all software comes through free repositories.
Audio is still a mess, less so on the blocking/mixing issue, but still having problems with hardware support: One OEM can wire outputs very differently from another even given the same audio chip meaning that reasonable defaults are a game of chance... you can install Ubuntu and get L-R front speakers on your surrounds, headphones, or some lines that didn't get a jack connected to them on that computer.
And audio can still disappear without a trace after system updates... much the same case as with X11 video disappearing (it still does this on many systems even with minor settings changes).
AND THEN there is the problem with large OEMs like Dell taking widely-available chips for which Linux drivers exist, and asking the mfg. to knock a few dollars off. My experience has been that Linux drivers often work with these variations, but not well.
LSB doesn't define the desktop environment, nor other features like app installation interfaces (both UI and programmatic). People get lost (or even if they don't, they tend to FEEL a bit lost) without such features.
No one can write a guideline for copying/moving app data files (say, photos) or making basic configuration changes using the LSB as a guide. Nor can they write instructions for installing software (defining the package format as LSB does is not enough).
Mark Shuttleworth is also right to say that LSB doesn't properly handle the question of revision numbers for all the different components in the OS: There isn't enough synchronization. Sadly though, he seems to miss all the other points I brought up and instead of bringing in high-level design people he's got his team aping the look of Mac OS X.
The whole concept of "Linux" as a desktop platform is empty, a sort of mass delusion among hackers. Linux is just a kernel. Yet people write apps on Ubuntu expecting them to work on Mandriva and Fedora too. The same thing doesn't occur with Linux-based mobile platforms: Who writes an app for Android (which BTW does not have "Linux" in the title) and expects it to run on WebOS and Meego??
Android is a full OS platform, one that benefits from being paired with complete hardware builds by the mfg. with some help from Google. The desktop "Linux" morass has no such dynamic, making it an inferior choice for most non-hackers and I dare say even most techies.
...for their acceleration. Pretty friggin sad.
It is a MOZILLA issue.
Due to some unfortunate attitudes/politics in the FOSS world, "Linux" is still only loosely defined as a desktop platform.
Without being defined more clearly with a platform spec -- including UI -- and an SDK to make app developers feel at home, the usability and fragility of the desktop-oriented features (*cough* sound *cough* graphics *cough*) will not much improve, nor will top-notch app developers feel more attracted to the amorphous non-platform.
Fortunately, that problem doesn't extend as much into the cellphone/PDA world, so a lot of progress is being made there. Google was not savagely attacked for 'taking away our UI freedom' when they started Android as an open-source project. Same thing for WebOS and others. Note that Android has an SDK and is relatively well-defined as a platform, and even the nut-less Linux Foundation now has an SDK for their mobile offering (something they won't do with the desktop).
And also note: Last I checked none of the desktop Linux-based distros had a platform spec or SDK either. My take on what went wrong is that the issue of creating a desktop Linux became politicized early-on by hackers and other CLI-jockeys when they held a lot more sway than they do now. So having a mandatory/standard GUI was seen as chaining users to something big and overly-complex that many hackers did not want. (My answer to that is, run a non-desktop distro if you want the GUI to be optional.)
Open source works mainly when the audience being served is programmers and system admins because these types are familiar with and appreciate tweaking to get something to work (and even then, only to a point). Projects that truly focus on end-users' needs are rare: Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Android and maybe a couple others. The rest are either very nuts-and-bolts, or they are nuts-and-bolts with a thick candy coating.
Making you a criminal means you won't be able to defend your rights if you step on the toes of powerful people, and making you forget about integrity removes barriers to the acceptance of the only law that stands when you remove all other laws: "the most powerful wins".
However, a number of invalid/immoral laws have been overcome by the widespread breaking of them.
This issue is like many others these days and has more to do with how perceptions are influenced by corporate PR. If you don't want their power law to keep winning out, and if you want to make lasting progress, then media reform must be undertaken.
...you assume a high degree of income disparity throughout society. But if the middle class becomes proportionally much larger, then trust becomes less of a problem.
You could be placed under investigation because of Who you ssh with.
Exactly. What they are demanding is the banishment of anonymity at the very least.
http://www.geti2p.net/
What's interesting is that I2P has been gaining popularity much more rapidly in Europe than elsewhere. I guess HADOPI-type laws are having their effect. In the far east the project is forming partnerships with dissident groups so that media files and other large data sets can be transmitted in relative safety.
Bittorrent, iMule and a distributed filesystem are available on the network which is both anonymized and highly decentralized (moreso than Tor).
...chatting with Lamo. No one has been able to speak to Manning and that chat log seems to be the only thing pointing to him.
I thought it was weird of Mozilla to push the personas idea since it seems tacky. But it's true that the window frame represents the security context for an application like a web browser, and a uniform customization of the frame would make the browser more secure against window imitation threats.
They're looking so 1990s, and a 20-year old image is never good in the computer business.
...like flagging videos of egregious and potentially embarrassing acts withing military archives...
the S/MIME option doesn't work (or alert the users) unless keys can be exchanged ahead of time and out-of-band.
S/MIME is basically in the PKI class, so the same "legal intercept" techniques that work against HTTPS can work against S/MIME with a little adaptation.
I mean, without giving the keys to the Indian government?
VPNs are already considered in-house administered encryption, and their government is demanding access to them.