The problem with this model is that you have to produce billions of plastic disks, consuming unrenewable natural resources and cluttering up people's homes.
You're still consuming unrenewable resources by storing that data as bits and bytes on electronic and rotating storage medium. Where do you think the power comes from that powers the computers and the hard drives and the DSL/Cable/whatever modems, routers and switches that delivered it to you?
That's right... coal and natural gas. Unrenewable, natural resources.
This is the same argument that using battery-powered cars and electric cars are more efficient than using petroleum-based fuels. They're not. Just because you're "recharging" at the pump less, doesn't mean it costs less. You're just transferring costs from the local station the regional power grid... who uses petroleum, natural gas and coal to deliver that power to the "recharging" station.
We've been on the Do Not Call list for about 3 years (or however long DNC has been in effect) on our current phone line. The telemarketing calls dropped for awhile, but only those with a human on the other end. I immediately go into my own script when they call, asking for their company name, contact information and town/state where the company is located. In 90% of the cases, they do not tell me this information "because they do not have to." they say. Eventually they hang up when I ask to be removed from their call list.
But now we're getting 3-5 calls PER DAY from automated machines with pre-recorded messages that kick in ~4 seconds after I say "Hello?". I've listened to them all the way through, and they do not provide any company name, chance to talk to a human, nothing.
What they DO provide, is some long-distance toll number to call back, presumably to "learn more" or to "enter the sweepstakes" or some other drivel. Does my calling the number back imply that I agree with their unstated terms? Does it charge me $50.00/minute to listen to a 5 minute message that STILL has no human on the other end? I don't know.
What I do know is.. the Do Not Call list DOES NOT WORK.
It's being bypassed all the time now by these damn automated machines, tying up our phone at all hours. They call at 7:00am, they call at 9:00pm, they call at all hours, and its annoying. We have elderly parents and a young daughter. When the phone rings at 10:00pm, 11:00pm and so on, we immediately go into "Ut oh! Who is hurt?" mode, raising our stress level, and we usually can't get back to sleep easily.
DNC is a waste of time. Soon, I'll be ripping out the phone and using mobile phones only, though I still get 1-2 calls a month on my cell from "surveys". Blarg!
I have the tickets to prove it, and this was 4 years ago.
Remember when they used to marker in 'S.S' on your ticket stubs to indicate an additional search? I had a flight going West with two stops (nice-n-cheap tickets though). That's 3 separate planes, with luggage checked straight through.
Let me go through this slowly:
I arrived at Airport 1 and checked my luggage to my final destination.
I was searched thoroughly before boarding, and again at the ticket gate.
I boarded the plane, and we arrived at the first stop. I deplaned, walked to my connecting flight's gate and waited.
Before boarding the second plane, I was searched again (bags, patted down, wanded with the metal detector wand).
I boarded that second plane and continued to work on the flight.
We landed at the second destination, and I walked to my second connection and waited. At this point, I had ticket stubs with 'S.S'. markered in on them for 2 separate flights (first plane, second plane), and I had already been searched 2 times.
Before boarding the third plane, they called out people with the 'S.S' on their ticket and said they had been randomly selected to be searched. Since I already had been 'randomly selected' TWO TIMES on this one trip, I thought this was a bit ridiculous. What "new" gear could I possibly have acquired since the last two flights? Plastic spoons? A magazine? Its not like I left the airport, put a bomb in my bag and walked back in without being detected.
SO I was searched again, the third time on this one way leg of the trip. I remember showing the security officer and several people in line my handful of ticket stubs from that trip with the red marker 'S.S.' on each one, and thinking how ridiculous this was.
I had the same results on the return leg, searched at every single stop, for a total of 6 "randomly selected" searches.
I call bullshit, this is not random. Its profiling, plain and simple.
I'm a white, caucasian male with short hair, travelling on official business with some computer gear and clothes. I travel ~50k miles a year, book my tickets in advance, and never fly first class or one-way. I don't pay cash, I don't look Muslim, and I don't carry anything that could be seen as 'dangerous' (well, except maybe my iPod I guess these days).
Why was I singled out so many times on this one flight? No idea. I've been singled out dozens of times before, before this and after, but never 6 times in the same trip... until then.
But now I choose alternate forms of transportation. Its just not worth it to fly anymore. Its slower, more stressful, impossible to work, and they limit what you can and can't bring with you. I'll just take the train or drive myself now, even if its 10 hours of driving.
I would recommend that to my Windows friends and colleagues, but it DOES NOT install on Windows XP with the latest updates and service packs.
Version 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.2a all balk with the same problem: "Installation of C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe has failed. The system cannot find the path specified."
It created the path, but now refuses to install files into it. All of the versions available from the TrueCrypt website fail with this same error (and yes, I am an Administrator with local Administrator rights).
Only by using private VPNs (like The pirate party one) or by using additional software higher up the network stack like Tor can basic anonymity be enabled.
If by "basic anonymity", you mean lack of trusted anonymity or NO anonymity, then we all agree. It is a pretty simple (and common) matter to become a maliscious Tor node. Google it.
These new Internet applications are great as a demo of what can be done, but they're not really useful in the larger scheme of things, ESPECIALLY in corporate or business environments.
In many of the corporations I've been in, getting outbound port 80 access from various departments is restricted (for good reason), as are IM ports and other things. You don't want to be putting company financials out on some website's spreadsheet, do you?
What routers are you going through?
Who else can see that information?
Is there a caching proxy upstream that you don't know about?
What happens when the network goes down?
Too risky, and it only works where there's an Internet connection, which (contrary to public belief) is not ubiquitous these days.
Take a slightly complex word document from a client. (bulleted lists, block indents, embedded objects)
View it in word, view it in writer.
Both are readable, but they do not look exactly the same.
Margins are off, wrap doesn't line up, linespacing is slightly off.
Microsoft properly asserts that OpenOffice is not 100% compatible with their product. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice documents are publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own formats.
Show me where the documentation for the Microsoft Word.doc format is, and I'll make sure those corrections make it into the proper hands for fixes in Oo.org.
I don't like spam any more than anybody else does here but it's an unfortunate fact of life that is here to stay as long as we are using the current e-mail system.
What's a spam?
Seriously, since I've put dspam + graymilter on our mailserver, we haven't seen a SINGLE SPAM slip through in several YEARS now. Sure, we get false positives from time to time, but not a single spam slips through, at ALL.
I don't have to deal with it, and I don't have to change to a different email system either. Problem solved. My users love us for it, we decrease our overall bandwidth for using it, and we gain cpu cycles back since we're not processing junk email we'll end up quarantining anyway.
How nearsighted of them;) No support for PPC64 at all? I even tried building Wine on an 8-way POWER5 machine to run the Windows 32-bit binary under, and that didn't work either.
So how about it? When will we see a PPC/PPC64 Linux binary of Folding@Home? Where is the source, Luke? I'll build it myself!
My Linksys WRT54G (not GS) is a transparent Squid proxy already. I don't see why this ASUS machine can't do the same.
It points to a secondary FreeBSD machine for that, because I have a 5GiB cache on the Squid side. Everything is anonymized through Privoxy + Tor, with no configuration changes on the client side.
Users don't even know (or care) that their traffic is being proxied or anonymized at all.
For user data stored on the FreeBSD machine, I also usersnapshot to do backups of another disk slice that is GELI encrypted as well, which works out very nicely for the overall solution.
Everything that goes out port 80 (or comes back in on the response) through the Linksys is redirected through the Squid server on the FreeBSD machine. iptables(1) on the Linksys does all the magic for me, as follows:
There's more to it, but that should get you started. Its really easy to implement, and I'd trust my FreeBSD machine to process those packets faster than the processor on the Linksys ever could (not even considering the storage requirements for such a caching mechanism).
The Squid cache on the FreeBSD side resides on a partition that is GELI encrypted. Do I have anything to hide? No, but I do have a right to protect the identity of my users, their browsing habits and their data.
If you're using a Palm device and you have Plucker installed (grab one of the snapshots to get the latest), you can get the freshly-built FULL MySQL 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 documentation here, and the PostgreSQL documentation for 8.1.4 here.
Enjoy, and let me know if there's anything else we can do.
(don't forget to check out the other things we've created for you over here)
I'm sure you realize that PalmOS devices store *ALL* of their data in cleartext, right? Marking those records private and protecting them with a password?
Futile, just fetch the records directly (and pilot-link is the de-facto tool for this) and open it in an editor, or run strings(1) across it to see everything in cleartext.
There are applications, such as GNU/Keyring and others that can help you secure your passwords, memos, data and whatever else you want on PalmOS devices.
In short, never trust the vendor's default application suite to do what you want, or be as secure as you need.
I've been happily using Privoxy + Tor + i2p together for quite some time now to browse the web, Google and other sites of interest.
I also have 2 transparent Squid proxies in front of my LAN here (on my side) running with squid-prefetch, and they too use the same privoxy and tor and i2p setups for prefetching. This way, duplicate requests from anyone inside my network don't HAVE TO go to the live site, if it already exists in the Squid cache. Since its transparent (done at the router with iptables), the users don't have to configure anything at all on their end.
And I much prefer SwitchProxy over FoxyProxy any day.
The West is hardly on the verge of collapse because of it. Nor have their actions reduced the presence of Western forces in the Middle East. I hardly think that al-Qaeda is particularly heartened by the U.S. governments increased surveillance of its own people, etc, either.
But if bin Laden predicted that the U.S. would invade Iraq a year and a half after 9/11, costing way more in money and lives than the more predictable invasion of Afghanistan, then I will grant you that he must be a genius.
He's already had a dry-run. Remember when the World Trade Center was attacked back in 1993? Remember who was president then? Yes, George Bush Sr. Remember what happened during that term? Desert Storm in Iraq. What did we try to do? Depose Saddam Hussein.
Who financed, trained and armed Al Queda back a decade or more ago, to help them push Russia out of Afghanistan? That's right, we did.
Osama knew precisely what would happen if he orchestrated an attack on the US again, while a Bush president was in office.
In the last 30-something presidents, we've seen two attacks on domestic soil from foreign terrorists (if you believe that 9/11 involved these foreign terrorists). Both attacks occured at the World Trade Center. Both attacks were under Bush presidencies. Both attacks resulted in an invasion of Iraq, and the attempted deposing of Saddam Hussein (Saddam, I should add, is theologically opposed to what Osama believes in, and would never support his efforts).
Let's not forget the $9 BILLION dollars that was lost after being hand-flown to Iraq, and the resulting investigation that Bush is trying to halt.
Google up the references, its all out there. Its all scary stuff.
So the situation clearly calls for the killing of innocent civilians then? I don't follow...
Terrorism has but one objective, a political one.
The "Muslim" terrorists broadly want to establish Muslim governments (or governments that are more fundamentalist) in the countries where they live or operate. They target Westerners purely as a means to that end; to deter Western governments from propping up non-Muslim governments.
If you're inconvenienced, killed, afraid, paranoid, lose civil liberties; they really don't care. Its not their goal or objective.
If the US withdrew from the Middle East you would probably see the domestic threat of attacks decrease or stop entirely.
You shoot them in the head. Yes, 7 times, The more the better, so they cannot hit that switch.
Unless of course, that switch happens to be the kind that is *OFF* when depressed, and detonates when not depressed. You press and hold the button when you're alive, and when you're dead, muscle tension relaxes (or you just let it go). Tick, tick, tick, boom.
I believe that what's happening now is the result of someone reading 1984 and thinking "hmm, good idea!"
Instead of them treating Orwell's 1984 as a warning, they're treating it like a guidebook on how to run the Government. "Look, a HOWTO!"
Scary times indeed, where $9B goes "missing" in Iraq, after being hand-flown there (google it), and where 11 MILLION people marched on their state capitols to protest this conflict in Iraq (not a "War", since Congress has not declared war against Iraq), and Bush called those 11 million people "a focus group".
If 11 million people can't affect change, what will it take? Civil war?
Personally, DSPAM isn't nearly as good and has flagged many legitamate messages and sent them to the Junk folder.
And what happened when you retrained those false positives as ham? Did you see future mails of the same/similar type get caught again? I bet you didn't.
I've been using dspam for a very long time for my users, and they love it. They love having zero spam in their mailbox, they love the simplicity of the user interface. They love how it treats users on a per-user basis, not globally (i.e. some users WANT html emails, some do not. Each can mark them as they see fit.)
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You're still consuming unrenewable resources by storing that data as bits and bytes on electronic and rotating storage medium. Where do you think the power comes from that powers the computers and the hard drives and the DSL/Cable/whatever modems, routers and switches that delivered it to you?
That's right... coal and natural gas. Unrenewable, natural resources.
This is the same argument that using battery-powered cars and electric cars are more efficient than using petroleum-based fuels. They're not. Just because you're "recharging" at the pump less, doesn't mean it costs less. You're just transferring costs from the local station the regional power grid... who uses petroleum, natural gas and coal to deliver that power to the "recharging" station.
We still aren't solving the problem.
Is he really defending it, even when he's openly called the Constitution just a goddamned piece of paper!?
We've been on the Do Not Call list for about 3 years (or however long DNC has been in effect) on our current phone line. The telemarketing calls dropped for awhile, but only those with a human on the other end. I immediately go into my own script when they call, asking for their company name, contact information and town/state where the company is located. In 90% of the cases, they do not tell me this information "because they do not have to." they say. Eventually they hang up when I ask to be removed from their call list.
But now we're getting 3-5 calls PER DAY from automated machines with pre-recorded messages that kick in ~4 seconds after I say "Hello?". I've listened to them all the way through, and they do not provide any company name, chance to talk to a human, nothing.
What they DO provide, is some long-distance toll number to call back, presumably to "learn more" or to "enter the sweepstakes" or some other drivel. Does my calling the number back imply that I agree with their unstated terms? Does it charge me $50.00/minute to listen to a 5 minute message that STILL has no human on the other end? I don't know.
What I do know is.. the Do Not Call list DOES NOT WORK.
It's being bypassed all the time now by these damn automated machines, tying up our phone at all hours. They call at 7:00am, they call at 9:00pm, they call at all hours, and its annoying. We have elderly parents and a young daughter. When the phone rings at 10:00pm, 11:00pm and so on, we immediately go into "Ut oh! Who is hurt?" mode, raising our stress level, and we usually can't get back to sleep easily.
DNC is a waste of time. Soon, I'll be ripping out the phone and using mobile phones only, though I still get 1-2 calls a month on my cell from "surveys". Blarg!
I have the tickets to prove it, and this was 4 years ago.
Remember when they used to marker in 'S.S' on your ticket stubs to indicate an additional search? I had a flight going West with two stops (nice-n-cheap tickets though). That's 3 separate planes, with luggage checked straight through.
Let me go through this slowly:
I call bullshit, this is not random. Its profiling, plain and simple.
I'm a white, caucasian male with short hair, travelling on official business with some computer gear and clothes. I travel ~50k miles a year, book my tickets in advance, and never fly first class or one-way. I don't pay cash, I don't look Muslim, and I don't carry anything that could be seen as 'dangerous' (well, except maybe my iPod I guess these days).
Why was I singled out so many times on this one flight? No idea. I've been singled out dozens of times before, before this and after, but never 6 times in the same trip... until then.
But now I choose alternate forms of transportation. Its just not worth it to fly anymore. Its slower, more stressful, impossible to work, and they limit what you can and can't bring with you. I'll just take the train or drive myself now, even if its 10 hours of driving.
You can't get to the executables without unpacking them from the installer... unless you have some un-InstallShield tool that I'm not aware of.
I would recommend that to my Windows friends and colleagues, but it DOES NOT install on Windows XP with the latest updates and service packs.
Version 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.2a all balk with the same problem: "Installation of C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe has failed. The system cannot find the path specified."
It created the path, but now refuses to install files into it. All of the versions available from the TrueCrypt website fail with this same error (and yes, I am an Administrator with local Administrator rights).
Oops! Another case of not testing your software before you release it.
If by "basic anonymity", you mean lack of trusted anonymity or NO anonymity, then we all agree. It is a pretty simple (and common) matter to become a maliscious Tor node. Google it.
Does it work on the airplane? The train? The bus?
These new Internet applications are great as a demo of what can be done, but they're not really useful in the larger scheme of things, ESPECIALLY in corporate or business environments.
In many of the corporations I've been in, getting outbound port 80 access from various departments is restricted (for good reason), as are IM ports and other things. You don't want to be putting company financials out on some website's spreadsheet, do you?
What routers are you going through?
Who else can see that information?
Is there a caching proxy upstream that you don't know about?
What happens when the network goes down?
Too risky, and it only works where there's an Internet connection, which (contrary to public belief) is not ubiquitous these days.
Microsoft properly asserts that OpenOffice is not 100% compatible with their product. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice documents are publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own formats.
Show me where the documentation for the Microsoft Word .doc format is, and I'll make sure those corrections make it into the proper hands for fixes in Oo.org.
Put $85 million dollars behind the development of OpenOffice.org, and then we can think about comparing the two.
How much have you donated to improve the free office suite you're crucifying here?
ISO9000 means one thing:
What's a spam?
Seriously, since I've put dspam + graymilter on our mailserver, we haven't seen a SINGLE SPAM slip through in several YEARS now. Sure, we get false positives from time to time, but not a single spam slips through, at ALL.
I don't have to deal with it, and I don't have to change to a different email system either. Problem solved. My users love us for it, we decrease our overall bandwidth for using it, and we gain cpu cycles back since we're not processing junk email we'll end up quarantining anyway.
How nearsighted of them ;) No support for PPC64 at all? I even tried building Wine on an 8-way POWER5 machine to run the Windows 32-bit binary under, and that didn't work either.
So how about it? When will we see a PPC/PPC64 Linux binary of Folding@Home? Where is the source, Luke? I'll build it myself!
My Linksys WRT54G (not GS) is a transparent Squid proxy already. I don't see why this ASUS machine can't do the same.
It points to a secondary FreeBSD machine for that, because I have a 5GiB cache on the Squid side. Everything is anonymized through Privoxy + Tor, with no configuration changes on the client side.
Users don't even know (or care) that their traffic is being proxied or anonymized at all.
For user data stored on the FreeBSD machine, I also use rsnapshot to do backups of another disk slice that is GELI encrypted as well, which works out very nicely for the overall solution.
Everything that goes out port 80 (or comes back in on the response) through the Linksys is redirected through the Squid server on the FreeBSD machine. iptables(1) on the Linksys does all the magic for me, as follows:
There's more to it, but that should get you started. Its really easy to implement, and I'd trust my FreeBSD machine to process those packets faster than the processor on the Linksys ever could (not even considering the storage requirements for such a caching mechanism).
The Squid cache on the FreeBSD side resides on a partition that is GELI encrypted. Do I have anything to hide? No, but I do have a right to protect the identity of my users, their browsing habits and their data.
Everyone else should do the same (or similar).
Enjoy, and let me know if there's anything else we can do.
(don't forget to check out the other things we've created for you over here)
I'm sure you realize that PalmOS devices store *ALL* of their data in cleartext, right? Marking those records private and protecting them with a password?
Futile, just fetch the records directly (and pilot-link is the de-facto tool for this) and open it in an editor, or run strings(1) across it to see everything in cleartext.
There are applications, such as GNU/Keyring and others that can help you secure your passwords, memos, data and whatever else you want on PalmOS devices.
In short, never trust the vendor's default application suite to do what you want, or be as secure as you need.
I've been happily using Privoxy + Tor + i2p together for quite some time now to browse the web, Google and other sites of interest.
I also have 2 transparent Squid proxies in front of my LAN here (on my side) running with squid-prefetch, and they too use the same privoxy and tor and i2p setups for prefetching. This way, duplicate requests from anyone inside my network don't HAVE TO go to the live site, if it already exists in the Squid cache. Since its transparent (done at the router with iptables), the users don't have to configure anything at all on their end.
And I much prefer SwitchProxy over FoxyProxy any day.
Sorry, I beg to differ..
He's already had a dry-run. Remember when the World Trade Center was attacked back in 1993? Remember who was president then? Yes, George Bush Sr. Remember what happened during that term? Desert Storm in Iraq. What did we try to do? Depose Saddam Hussein.
Who financed, trained and armed Al Queda back a decade or more ago, to help them push Russia out of Afghanistan? That's right, we did.
Osama knew precisely what would happen if he orchestrated an attack on the US again, while a Bush president was in office.
In the last 30-something presidents, we've seen two attacks on domestic soil from foreign terrorists (if you believe that 9/11 involved these foreign terrorists). Both attacks occured at the World Trade Center. Both attacks were under Bush presidencies. Both attacks resulted in an invasion of Iraq, and the attempted deposing of Saddam Hussein (Saddam, I should add, is theologically opposed to what Osama believes in, and would never support his efforts).
Let's not forget the $9 BILLION dollars that was lost after being hand-flown to Iraq, and the resulting investigation that Bush is trying to halt.
Google up the references, its all out there. Its all scary stuff.
Terrorism has but one objective, a political one.
The "Muslim" terrorists broadly want to establish Muslim governments (or governments that are more fundamentalist) in the countries where they live or operate. They target Westerners purely as a means to that end; to deter Western governments from propping up non-Muslim governments.
If you're inconvenienced, killed, afraid, paranoid, lose civil liberties; they really don't care. Its not their goal or objective.
If the US withdrew from the Middle East you would probably see the domestic threat of attacks decrease or stop entirely.
Unless of course, that switch happens to be the kind that is *OFF* when depressed, and detonates when not depressed. You press and hold the button when you're alive, and when you're dead, muscle tension relaxes (or you just let it go). Tick, tick, tick, boom.
They're not allowed to, they're excluded from doing root delegation. Look closely at the option ruleset there.
This will work also:
Instead of them treating Orwell's 1984 as a warning, they're treating it like a guidebook on how to run the Government. "Look, a HOWTO!"
Scary times indeed, where $9B goes "missing" in Iraq, after being hand-flown there (google it), and where 11 MILLION people marched on their state capitols to protest this conflict in Iraq (not a "War", since Congress has not declared war against Iraq), and Bush called those 11 million people "a focus group".
If 11 million people can't affect change, what will it take? Civil war?
And what happened when you retrained those false positives as ham? Did you see future mails of the same/similar type get caught again? I bet you didn't.
I've been using dspam for a very long time for my users, and they love it. They love having zero spam in their mailbox, they love the simplicity of the user interface. They love how it treats users on a per-user basis, not globally (i.e. some users WANT html emails, some do not. Each can mark them as they see fit.)
Here's an example of my own stats..
hacker: TP True Positives: 122601
TN True Negatives: 124711
FP False Positives: 211
FN False Negatives: 1046
SC Spam Corpusfed: 3708
NC Nonspam Corpusfed: 456
TL Training Left: 0
SHR Spam Hit Rate 99.15%
HSR Ham Strike Rate: 0.17%
OCA Overall Accuracy: 99.49%