Miranda IM is not cross-platform, nor does it split the protocol functions (ala libpurple) from the UI (ala pidgin), like gaim/pidgin does.
Pidgin sucks, as does Kopete and the other Linux/cross-platform alternatives, which is why I'm telling everyone I know to move over to Skype. Skype supports voice, video, encryption, proper file transfers, works on all platforms and runs on mobile devices (such as my PDA and my PSP).
The pidgin developers continue to unjustifiably be arrogant, ignorant assholes who seem to want to lock people into using their broken application.
As an example, Try to find the source for gaim on Sourceforge... you can't. Why? Because they locked it out. This, by the way, is a DIRECT violation of not only the GPL under which gaim was released, but also the Terms of Service of Sourceforge themselves. You can't just make source you've already released, unavailable.
Wait... when did all Apple notebooks get a touchscreen, and since when did they allow simultaneous, disparate input from resistive input devices? (i.e. fingers, stylus, etc.)
I think you're just making stuff up here, I haven't yet seen a SINGLE Apple notebook with a touchscreen that allowed multitouch yet. Have you? Got a URL?
Really, if they were serious about pwnzoring your machine they'd just take it from you. It's not like they have to 'hack' your machine. They're the police. They own your machine by... picking it up and taking it. OWNED!
You must be new to this.
First step in Search & Seizure of a suspect's assets is to DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT! This means you photograph the back of the computer, the front, the wiring, etc. You track where that wiring goes, you follow it to the wall outlet (and possibly further).
You NEVER just blindly shut down a machine and take it with you. It is absolutely critical that you try to access the RUNNING machine to gain access to the data as much as you can, without modifying anything (like the Firewire bulk copy hack discovered recently).
Once you shut down the machine, you may no longer be able to access things like mounted Truecrypt volumes, swap, RAM, lists of running programs or other data regions of the drive. If the suspect knows you're coming, they may have already "prepared" their system for just such a case... (shred -99 on shutdown?)
I know that if my machine was shut down, it would take more than 50+ years of brute-force cracking with several hundred thousand high-end computers to get into my encrypted volumes... assuming they know the exact bit-for-bit layout of my LVM and drive partitioning.
If my machine is booted and running, and someone figures a way to bypass my login password... they could gain access to everything that I have mounted and available.
This is what I think a lot of Linux people don't seem to get: People don't need MS Office compatibility, they need MS Office. And it has to run perfectly. Until there is an Office version for Linux, Linux will never take off. And since MS knows this, there will never be a version of Office for Linux.
How exactly is this our problem? How is this a Linux problem? Microsoft Office is written by Microsoft. We have nothing to do with that application.
If you think lack of one proprietary application that runs on one proprietary operating system means the death-knell for another, completely unrelated, free operating system... I think you need to do a little more 'research' and a little less 'lecturing'.
Talk to Microsoft. If they wanted to gain more market share, they'd release Office for Linux. This is not our problem to solve, and by the way, Linux has already taken off... in case you missed the last 8 years of the industry.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Well, killing them is a bit harsh, but stopping them from procreating has a lot of advantages.
We're actually polluting our own evolution, by letting people with genetic predispositions to incurable disease continue to breed and have children, thus passing on those genes.
What happens in 300 years, when EVERYONE on the planet has a dominant or recessive gene for say... diabetes? cancer? liver failure? alzheimers? What then?
I'm sure if my client's requirements were to have no lag, the cluster would allow for that. I've never personally had the need to test it in that fashion, and since I wasn't working in a telephony environment, it wouldn't matter.
Besides, the telephony space has mirrored and triplet'd hardware anyway, from trunking switches to fibre backplanes. All of this is possible and done already in the production telephony space. They already have processes in place to do rolling upgrades of hardware. Patching a live kernel for telephony customers is completely irrelevant.
Frankly, if you roll to another node and you lose connections, then your cluster is misconfigured.
I've built and deployed clusters where I'm actively playing a streaming video across the cluster from a mounted drive, physically yank the power cable from the active node of the cluster, there's about a 1-2 second lag in the video, and then it continues to play right where it was, without any disconnects or interruptions.
In fact, I use this as a way to demonstrate that there is ZERO loss of connectivity when nodes are downed or recycled.
You might want to look into how your cluster is (mis)configured and fix it.
Once again, we have an over-engineered solution to a non-existent problem.
Any enterprise-level customer is going to have a VERY lengthy Q&A process before deploying anything into production. This includes testing kernels, hardware, networks, interaction, application, data and so on. One pharmaceutical company I know of is federally mandated to do this twice a year, every year, for every single machine that reads, writes or generates data. Period.
So you hot-patch a running Linux kernel. How do you Q&A that? How do you roll back if the patch fails? Where is your 'control'?
The answer? A duplicate machine. But wait, if you have two identical machines... isn't that... a cluster?
Exactly. And THIS is how you perform upgrades. You split the cluster, upgrade one half, verify that the upgrade worked, then roll the cluster over to that node, and upgrade the second portion of the cluster. If you have more machines in the cluster, you do 'round-robin' upgrades. You NEVER EVER touch a running, production system like that.
Well, not if you want any sort of data integrity or control and want to pass any level of quality validation on that physical environment.
In the.gov eyes, everyone who objects to their way of thinking or acting or their decisions, is a terrorist.
In the eyes of the rest of the world, disagreeing with your government's actions is called patriotism. In fact, it is precisely this type of disagreement that FOUNDED this country.
Unfortunately, we've all lost touch with that, and we mistakenly believe we are given "rights" by the government, but that is entirely false. The people grant the government their rights, not the reverse.
If I feel that the elected officials my vote was used to put into office are not acting in my best interests, I have a moral and patriotic responsibility to remove them from office, and replace them with someone who DOES suit my best interests (and that of my fellow man).
Don't be confused by the double-speak thrown out in the manipulated media; objecting to the.gov does not make you a terrorist, it makes you a patriot... and we need more of them.
It'll happen, it'll just take some time (and possibly some major traumatic inflect on human life and population to change people's minds).
You're missing the point. RIAA/EMI/etc. have always said they want to be compensated (read: "paid"), every time their music changes hands or locations.
This means if you buy a new CD, listen to it, and then resell it in a second-hand music store, they want a percentage of that second sale.
If you buy a CD from the store, and then buy some songs from it on iTunes to put onto your iPod, they want a cut of that as well, AND if you copy that to some upstream "file backup" facility, they want a cut of that as well.
The ultimate model they're shooting for, is pay-to-play, where you "rent" the music you want to hear, much like a jukebox in old-time diners.
1. Apple gave up using PPC processors back a couple of years ago in favor of the switch to Intel, to satisfy the volume requirements of Apple's customers.
2. P.A. Semi makes devices and processors based on the PPC and PPC64 architecture
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to look.
You might want to read this paper on the matter: ""I've Got Nothing To Hide" and other Misunderstandings of Privacy"
You forget that any action by me to enter my passphrase or encryption password, even if it only leads to useless junk data, just made me complicit in violating my own 5th Amendment rights, which means I can no longer use those rights to defend me.
Once you ignore the Constitution, it no longer can be used to protect you. This is precisely what the.gov wants, so they can systematically dismantle and shred it, by proving that nobody follows the rights in it anyway.
Works for me... I have hourly backups, accessible remotely. Let them confiscate the laptop. They won't be able to get in with any sort of boot disk; Linux, Windows, KNOPPIX or otherwise.
I'll write the laptop off with my insurance company as theft, get it replaced with another brand new one at my destination, buy a new HDD, pop it in, and restore my encrypted backup remotely at my destination.
Problem solved, and I don't even see a dent in my productivity, nor do they have access to my data... ever.
Better yet, don't use your password at all to unlock anything, since doing so makes you complicit in violating the Constitution.
If enough people openly just ignore the rights granted to us in the Constitution, we fulfill their ultimate goal; to shred that document by making everyone complicit.
"I may know the password, but it is not my intellectual property to give. If they want the password they will have to contact my work and get it from them."
As someone else already posted:
"If you don't provide a method by which they can search your laptop, they can in turn legally confiscate it until such time as they can figure out how to search your laptop. So, you either give up the keys, or surrender your laptop. It's your choice."
You'll just lose the laptop, and have to fly without it...
Might want to think hard about what's on your laptop if you're going to be passing through a US international airport.
What's on my laptop is a 320 gigabyte AES-256 luks-encrypted LVM volume set sitting on an encrypted physical drive. This is unlocked using a 32-character passphrase which is not stored anywhere but in my brain. Without that passphrase you basically unpack a kernel and recognize the hardware... and that's it.
I use Ubuntu on my laptop, and this is all configured out of the box on that distro.
A warrant grants a privilege to the police to forcibly obtain information they would otherwise not be allowed to obtain through force. But you don't need a warrant when you have cooperation.
...or live in the USA.
This article is about the UK, where these things called "warrants" actually have some sort of meaning or value. Here in the US, they no longer do. We have "retroactive warrants" and "FISA" to get around that.
Basically in the USA in today's administration, we have two approaches:
They raid your house/phone/work/car/laptop/pda/whatever, and if they:
a...find something they can use against you in court, they obtain a retroactive warrant to make the prosecution legal. If they do NOT find anything against you, they..
b...use the information obtained to pursue the investigatory path through your friends, coworkers, job history, credit rating, etc. to implicate you in some way for whatever it is they're trying to find you guilty of.
Let's not forget the credo here: "Innocent UNTIL proven guilty.." not "unless proven guilty", but "until".
Also, remember that stopping crimes here isn't about finding the guilty, it's about cherryp-picking the evidence to fit the prosecution's theory of the crime. Leaving a purse on a park bench and waiting for someone to grab it so you can nail them for purse-snatching, for example... or setting up a disabled car on the side of the road with a speed camera in the dash, to catch people speeding past.
It hasn't been about the crime for many years now.
We have a huge debt and a lot of immediate things the government simply needs to take care of.
Do you honestly believe, even for a moment, that one cent of this additional revenue will go towards debt?
No, it will go to fund new programs, which will then incur even more debt, of course. It will pad and line the pockets of industries that do not exist yet, further complicating the problem.
Here in Connecticut, specifically New London County, there is a more-sinister problem afoot:
From time to time, you'll be driving down the road and see one of those smaller "trailers" with the bright LED numbers indicating your speed, and the sign with the actual speed posted above the digital readout. If you're speeding, the 1-foot tall numbers will blink. If you go under the speed limit, they stop blinking.
These were originally intended as a way to see if the majority of traffic is going higher than the posted limit, or lower, etc. so they can change the posted limits accordingly.
However, the evil part of this plan, is that on the BACK SIDE of that little trailer is a speed camera, which snaps a photo of your license plate when you pass it. I've personally seen it take snaps of cars exceeding the limit, but NOT take photos of those who were not exceeding the limit.
There is no signage telling you that this "indicator" is really a hidden traffic/speed camera, or that you're being photographed (presumably to have speeding tickets mailed to you in the mail at a later date).
Have you been to Penn Station lately? The booth that says "POLICE" on it, in the main lobby area, is staffed with... you guessed it... Marines.
There are police patrolling around with dogs, and there are dozens of Marines also patrolling around, all of them armed.
They are one and the same, in the same working environment, in the same booth that says "POLICE" on it. People see them as synonymous. This is a dangerous precedent.
The last 10 years of my resume has nothing BUT Open Source/Linux work, much of that working for big, non-OSS companies.
I just got a new job at a Fortune 500 financial firm in lower Manhattan spending my day building and debugging FLOSS applications for Linux and Solaris. Their criteria for hiring me was specifically because of my long-standing ties to the OSS community and my work on FLOSS for the last 14 years.
These companies do exist, and they DO value your OSS contributions, if you state them clearly and succinctly on your cv/resume.
Slashdot Mirror
Miranda IM is not cross-platform, nor does it split the protocol functions (ala libpurple) from the UI (ala pidgin), like gaim/pidgin does.
Pidgin sucks, as does Kopete and the other Linux/cross-platform alternatives, which is why I'm telling everyone I know to move over to Skype. Skype supports voice, video, encryption, proper file transfers, works on all platforms and runs on mobile devices (such as my PDA and my PSP).
The pidgin developers continue to unjustifiably be arrogant, ignorant assholes who seem to want to lock people into using their broken application.
As an example, Try to find the source for gaim on Sourceforge... you can't. Why? Because they locked it out. This, by the way, is a DIRECT violation of not only the GPL under which gaim was released, but also the Terms of Service of Sourceforge themselves. You can't just make source you've already released, unavailable.
Wait... when did all Apple notebooks get a touchscreen, and since when did they allow simultaneous, disparate input from resistive input devices? (i.e. fingers, stylus, etc.)
I think you're just making stuff up here, I haven't yet seen a SINGLE Apple notebook with a touchscreen that allowed multitouch yet. Have you? Got a URL?
You must be new to this.
First step in Search & Seizure of a suspect's assets is to DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT! This means you photograph the back of the computer, the front, the wiring, etc. You track where that wiring goes, you follow it to the wall outlet (and possibly further).
You NEVER just blindly shut down a machine and take it with you. It is absolutely critical that you try to access the RUNNING machine to gain access to the data as much as you can, without modifying anything (like the Firewire bulk copy hack discovered recently).
Once you shut down the machine, you may no longer be able to access things like mounted Truecrypt volumes, swap, RAM, lists of running programs or other data regions of the drive. If the suspect knows you're coming, they may have already "prepared" their system for just such a case... (shred -99 on shutdown?)
I know that if my machine was shut down, it would take more than 50+ years of brute-force cracking with several hundred thousand high-end computers to get into my encrypted volumes... assuming they know the exact bit-for-bit layout of my LVM and drive partitioning.
If my machine is booted and running, and someone figures a way to bypass my login password... they could gain access to everything that I have mounted and available.
How exactly is this our problem? How is this a Linux problem? Microsoft Office is written by Microsoft. We have nothing to do with that application.
If you think lack of one proprietary application that runs on one proprietary operating system means the death-knell for another, completely unrelated, free operating system... I think you need to do a little more 'research' and a little less 'lecturing'.
Talk to Microsoft. If they wanted to gain more market share, they'd release Office for Linux. This is not our problem to solve, and by the way, Linux has already taken off... in case you missed the last 8 years of the industry.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Well, killing them is a bit harsh, but stopping them from procreating has a lot of advantages.
We're actually polluting our own evolution, by letting people with genetic predispositions to incurable disease continue to breed and have children, thus passing on those genes.
What happens in 300 years, when EVERYONE on the planet has a dominant or recessive gene for say... diabetes? cancer? liver failure? alzheimers? What then?
"We don't care."
I'm sure if my client's requirements were to have no lag, the cluster would allow for that. I've never personally had the need to test it in that fashion, and since I wasn't working in a telephony environment, it wouldn't matter.
Besides, the telephony space has mirrored and triplet'd hardware anyway, from trunking switches to fibre backplanes. All of this is possible and done already in the production telephony space. They already have processes in place to do rolling upgrades of hardware. Patching a live kernel for telephony customers is completely irrelevant.
tune2fs -C400 /dev/sdXX
Frankly, if you roll to another node and you lose connections, then your cluster is misconfigured.
I've built and deployed clusters where I'm actively playing a streaming video across the cluster from a mounted drive, physically yank the power cable from the active node of the cluster, there's about a 1-2 second lag in the video, and then it continues to play right where it was, without any disconnects or interruptions.
In fact, I use this as a way to demonstrate that there is ZERO loss of connectivity when nodes are downed or recycled.
You might want to look into how your cluster is (mis)configured and fix it.
Once again, we have an over-engineered solution to a non-existent problem.
Any enterprise-level customer is going to have a VERY lengthy Q&A process before deploying anything into production. This includes testing kernels, hardware, networks, interaction, application, data and so on. One pharmaceutical company I know of is federally mandated to do this twice a year, every year, for every single machine that reads, writes or generates data. Period.
So you hot-patch a running Linux kernel. How do you Q&A that? How do you roll back if the patch fails? Where is your 'control'?
The answer? A duplicate machine. But wait, if you have two identical machines... isn't that... a cluster?
Exactly. And THIS is how you perform upgrades. You split the cluster, upgrade one half, verify that the upgrade worked, then roll the cluster over to that node, and upgrade the second portion of the cluster. If you have more machines in the cluster, you do 'round-robin' upgrades. You NEVER EVER touch a running, production system like that.
Well, not if you want any sort of data integrity or control and want to pass any level of quality validation on that physical environment.
In the .gov eyes, everyone who objects to their way of thinking or acting or their decisions, is a terrorist.
In the eyes of the rest of the world, disagreeing with your government's actions is called patriotism. In fact, it is precisely this type of disagreement that FOUNDED this country.
Unfortunately, we've all lost touch with that, and we mistakenly believe we are given "rights" by the government, but that is entirely false. The people grant the government their rights, not the reverse.
If I feel that the elected officials my vote was used to put into office are not acting in my best interests, I have a moral and patriotic responsibility to remove them from office, and replace them with someone who DOES suit my best interests (and that of my fellow man).
Don't be confused by the double-speak thrown out in the manipulated media; objecting to the .gov does not make you a terrorist, it makes you a patriot... and we need more of them.
It'll happen, it'll just take some time (and possibly some major traumatic inflect on human life and population to change people's minds).
You're missing the point. RIAA/EMI/etc. have always said they want to be compensated (read: "paid"), every time their music changes hands or locations.
This means if you buy a new CD, listen to it, and then resell it in a second-hand music store, they want a percentage of that second sale.
If you buy a CD from the store, and then buy some songs from it on iTunes to put onto your iPod, they want a cut of that as well, AND if you copy that to some upstream "file backup" facility, they want a cut of that as well.
The ultimate model they're shooting for, is pay-to-play, where you "rent" the music you want to hear, much like a jukebox in old-time diners.
First and foremost EMI/RIAA/etc, we are not CONSUMERS , we are CUSTOMERS . Please correct your spelling.
We do not "consume" music, we do not "consume" goods. We are not an organism that feeds on these digital goods like a virus.
Second, once you start treating us like customers, we will then begin behaving like them.
1. Apple gave up using PPC processors back a couple of years ago in favor of the switch to Intel, to satisfy the volume requirements of Apple's customers.
2. P.A. Semi makes devices and processors based on the PPC and PPC64 architecture
3. Apple buys P.A. Semi
Am I the only one who is confused here?
That rhetoric is getting old... very old.
Refusing to consent to illegal searches does not make me a terrorist. You might find this 'tutorial' on how to handle illegal searches enlightening.
"If you have nothing to hide..."
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to look. You might want to read this paper on the matter: ""I've Got Nothing To Hide" and other Misunderstandings of Privacy"
You forget that any action by me to enter my passphrase or encryption password, even if it only leads to useless junk data, just made me complicit in violating my own 5th Amendment rights, which means I can no longer use those rights to defend me.
Once you ignore the Constitution, it no longer can be used to protect you. This is precisely what the .gov wants, so they can systematically dismantle and shred it, by proving that nobody follows the rights in it anyway.
Works for me... I have hourly backups, accessible remotely. Let them confiscate the laptop. They won't be able to get in with any sort of boot disk; Linux, Windows, KNOPPIX or otherwise.
I'll write the laptop off with my insurance company as theft, get it replaced with another brand new one at my destination, buy a new HDD, pop it in, and restore my encrypted backup remotely at my destination.
Problem solved, and I don't even see a dent in my productivity, nor do they have access to my data... ever.
Better yet, don't use your password at all to unlock anything, since doing so makes you complicit in violating the Constitution.
If enough people openly just ignore the rights granted to us in the Constitution, we fulfill their ultimate goal; to shred that document by making everyone complicit.
As someone else already posted:
You'll just lose the laptop, and have to fly without it...
What's on my laptop is a 320 gigabyte AES-256 luks-encrypted LVM volume set sitting on an encrypted physical drive. This is unlocked using a 32-character passphrase which is not stored anywhere but in my brain. Without that passphrase you basically unpack a kernel and recognize the hardware... and that's it.
I use Ubuntu on my laptop, and this is all configured out of the box on that distro.
Requiring me to unlock my encrypted volume using that password immediately violates my 5th Amendment rights, and is hence, unconstitutional.
So once again, Privacy 1, Government 0.
They seem to keep forgetting that it is the PEOPLE who gives the government their power, not the reverse.
...or live in the USA.
This article is about the UK, where these things called "warrants" actually have some sort of meaning or value. Here in the US, they no longer do. We have "retroactive warrants" and "FISA" to get around that.
Basically in the USA in today's administration, we have two approaches:
They raid your house/phone/work/car/laptop/pda/whatever, and if they:
Let's not forget the credo here: "Innocent UNTIL proven guilty.." not "unless proven guilty", but "until".
Also, remember that stopping crimes here isn't about finding the guilty, it's about cherryp-picking the evidence to fit the prosecution's theory of the crime. Leaving a purse on a park bench and waiting for someone to grab it so you can nail them for purse-snatching, for example... or setting up a disabled car on the side of the road with a speed camera in the dash, to catch people speeding past.
It hasn't been about the crime for many years now.
Do you honestly believe, even for a moment, that one cent of this additional revenue will go towards debt?
No, it will go to fund new programs, which will then incur even more debt, of course. It will pad and line the pockets of industries that do not exist yet, further complicating the problem.
Here in Connecticut, specifically New London County, there is a more-sinister problem afoot:
From time to time, you'll be driving down the road and see one of those smaller "trailers" with the bright LED numbers indicating your speed, and the sign with the actual speed posted above the digital readout. If you're speeding, the 1-foot tall numbers will blink. If you go under the speed limit, they stop blinking.
They look like this: http://www.newtonpolice.org/images/speedtrailer.jpg
These were originally intended as a way to see if the majority of traffic is going higher than the posted limit, or lower, etc. so they can change the posted limits accordingly.
However, the evil part of this plan, is that on the BACK SIDE of that little trailer is a speed camera, which snaps a photo of your license plate when you pass it. I've personally seen it take snaps of cars exceeding the limit, but NOT take photos of those who were not exceeding the limit. There is no signage telling you that this "indicator" is really a hidden traffic/speed camera, or that you're being photographed (presumably to have speeding tickets mailed to you in the mail at a later date).
Have you been to Penn Station lately? The booth that says "POLICE" on it, in the main lobby area, is staffed with... you guessed it... Marines.
There are police patrolling around with dogs, and there are dozens of Marines also patrolling around, all of them armed.
They are one and the same, in the same working environment, in the same booth that says "POLICE" on it. People see them as synonymous. This is a dangerous precedent.
The last 10 years of my resume has nothing BUT Open Source/Linux work, much of that working for big, non-OSS companies.
I just got a new job at a Fortune 500 financial firm in lower Manhattan spending my day building and debugging FLOSS applications for Linux and Solaris. Their criteria for hiring me was specifically because of my long-standing ties to the OSS community and my work on FLOSS for the last 14 years.
These companies do exist, and they DO value your OSS contributions, if you state them clearly and succinctly on your cv/resume.