You don't need to have the computers. That's a good thing, seeing as how reformatting your PC means you just lost a 'computer' to attrition, if you didn't remember to deauthorize it before the wipe. If her employer reformatted those PC's after she left, then those unique IDs are lost forever anyway. I don't know of a technical solution to determining whether you are trying to cheat, or just reformatted the same PC. Macs, as I understand it, use the Apple Serial Number from the hardware when they are authorized, but PC's have no such standardized ID. In practice, I think that iTunes will need reauthorization after 90 days or so of no connectivity, and Apple is a bit restrictive on how many times you can use "Deauthorize All".
So, to be clear, you're saying that the government charges money for licensing so that there is a higher barrier to entry for licensees, which reduces competition against the richest of licensees -- thus inducing them to make the investment in manufacturing, advertising, and distribution.
I call shenanigans. The way you're saying it kind of comes across like, "Well, a patent creates a 'free monopoly' ticket. Someone has to use it! If nobody is granted an effective monopoly, how can anyone expect to get rich from the idea?". Forsooth! Has society not already paid its price by using its government to develop the patent? The people certainly owe no further debt to this idea, or its inventor, or its licensees. It is the property of the public, by virtue of having been developed with their money and by their direct agency.
Not to mention that the USA was designed in part to prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth. As little as 50 years ago, the common man understood that benefits of industry and science should be directed to society as a whole, not an elite few. How so many have forgotten this so quickly is vexing...
It sounds like a stirrer circuit in a microwave. Microwaves without a turntable have used these for a long time, to prevent that (awesome, but definitely undesirable) effect of boiled water exploding onto your hand when you grab the mug. They work by causing a standing wave in the radiation, which agitates the liquid on a very small scale and allows it to circulate.
This is a good application of existing principle to a new problem, but I hardly think this was the biggest obstacle we had to Nuclear Fusion.
Poor choice of words, but it's kind of embarrasing that you didn't get the real meaning of that. AT&T aren't just monitoring traffic that is generated from or destined for their customers -- they're tapping routed traffic, too.
It's not only relevant, it's downright disheartening. Boycotting AT&T won't be enough; You might have to do a tracert ahead of every request to find out if your data will be passing through an AT&T-owned server at some point, lest the government filters promote your data for suspicion and persecution. With the pervasiveness of AT&T's infrastructure holdings in the US, I would think twice about accusing TFA of hyperbole. I mean, if they only collect a tiny fraction of the data, but keep records for every user whose traffic passes through their nodes, I'd have a hard time saying that word choice is wrong.
I also consider that one of the chromosomes could maintain (as a unit) the code for some very complex interaction that can't be further broken down. Maybe something to control the expression of genes, p2p communication (to correlate production of proteins, etc.), or even the definition of types for cell differentiation. Or a kind of file full of unique keys to keep the immune system from attacking the body's own cells (errors in which might result in allergies). Consider the size of concurrency control and locking code in Enterprise software. It's easy to imagine that one chromosome would be the largest by far, especially if it contains an operation that cannot be split into multiple parts, and any subsequent additions to code could appear randomly on any of the 23.
Perhaps I'm dead wrong -- I'm not a genetic researcher -- but whatever corpus of code serves functions like these, assuming they're not all n-th level emergent properties of a massive number of proteins, would intuitively seem to be much less tolerant of fragmentation than others. I'm betting that it contains some kind of code where having it all in one place increases its effectiveness to a point of conferring a survival advantage.
And don't forget about hidden iFrames... Browsers have the ability to target an iframe with a form, so you can pass in whatever form contents are there, and trigger your callback from an onload handler on the body tag of the response. In fact, for asynchronous file uploads, you still have to do it this way.
I was under the impression that EBay's Buy It Now was something users had been clamoring for from day one. I know I always thought, "It'd be nice to let someone pay immediately instead of dragging this out". It's basically an extension of "$XXX.XX OBO" into the online world.
Obviously, that's a bogus patent. Appending in the context of an online system shouldn't make it automagically patentworthy. Perhaps we should not allow ANY injunctions until the patent has been further reviewed by the USPTO. If the USPTO decides to revoke or invalidate a patent before the case goes to court, wouldn't that be better than letting it go to a high-profile court case and then having to read 35 stories about it on Slashdot?
I don't know. I've had several of the recent Apple laptops, including a MacBook Pro, and I'd have to say that I really like the magnetically-actuated latches on the recent models. That magnet would have to be incredibly strong to prevent me from worrying about it coming open at the wrong time. Eg, if I was carrying the laptop and my finger slipped into the little groove for the screen, would it fly open and fall from my hands? If it wouldn't, would that make the magnet strong enough to damage a credit card or possibly even an external hard disk?
I've got no problem with a magnet strong enough to pull a tiny catch on a weak spring out of its slot, but a magnet (or pair of magnets) strong enough to hold the screen shut? Call me skeptical.
Wow. Sounds like you got a real shyster at the Sony Store. I don't know what's worse -- getting a customer service rep who is hostile to the customer and supported by his company, or getting a rep who tries so hard to help and is shut down by the evil empire at every turn. Either way, it's Sony. I've had similar experiences with various companies in Beijing (maybe it's just the prevailing attitude), but the results seem to depend entirely on the company: when the company has no respect for the customer, what can their employees really do about it?
Buy Chinese, and be picky. There are a lot of low-quality products in the market, but if the manufacturers that make good, quality products can make enough money to be a recognizable, competitive, popular brand in the rest of the world... It helps everyone and at the same time it puts another nail in Sony's coffin.
Who's to say that having the 'internal', eg phone-company assigned ID of a call record wouldn't give them access to a complete wealth of information about that call? Even if a gov't informant did what you suggest by purchasing a prepaid phone and using it once, then throwing it away, try this on for size:
From the complete call record, you can get a routing table and a cell-tower ID. That phone was activated, probably at the location and time it was purchased. That gives you a time & place to find the purchaser. Possibly even the serial number of the phone, which could be traced to a specific merchant (or chain of stores, which then would be correlated with the first-known cell tower the phone connected with). From there, it's a simple matter of setting a few people to watch traffic cameras or comb through toll records, or whatever.
And all of this assumes that the person didn't make the sensitive call from their home! Probably the only safe place to use the phone would be from a busy government building during working hours, but that in itself carries risk.
After-the-fact investigation can be very intensive, and very accurate, even if all reasonable precautions are taken by the investigatee. It's just a question of what kind of resources you're willing to invest to get an answer. I think that this administration has shown no qualms about using taxpayer resources for this type of activity when it furthers their private agenda.
Consider, however, that the foreign students are working with something, well, foreign to them. This isn't to say that computers aren't foreign to those of us in the US, but we expect to understand the metaphor. If you approach Linux from the standpoint of rules to be followed, with an expected and logical result, it's easy. Here's the current state of affairs, as I see it:
Windows has a broken metaphor. Its usage patterns have exceptions out the wazoo, unintuitive things to be done, and an inconsistenly applied set of rules underneath. It works fine for most people, but once you've conditioned yourself to its quirks, it does something that conditions the user away from using intuition and inductive or logical reasoning to solve computer-related problems.
Linux, for lack of a more in-depth explanation, has no metaphor at all. It has underlying rules and abstractions. These are consistently applied, but fail to bridge that 'last mile' to the user in many cases. Patent regulations and other crappy IP-related issues make distributing software, and therefore obtaining decent software, difficult.
Mac OS has good, underlying metaphors and a lot of the same logical underpinnings as Linux. I'd say that, even though the hardware requirements border on obscene and they are far from problem-free, for what this guy and 90% of the public want to do (productivity apps, web, email, multimedia), it's the right choice.
The computer is only as good as the software you can obtain for it. Until it's easy for users to obtain quality packages and simple apps with a slick, consistent interface, the article should be pretty indicative of the user experience switching to Linux.
Why bother? I realize that a hardware solution was necessary back in the day, but your Mac already has all the hardware it needs to run a portrait monitor in addition to its main display. I took a 17" Dell LCD that was a freebie with a PC I used for a server last year, and propped it up sideways on a CD spindle next to my iMac G5. A little hocus-pocus, install Screen Spanning Doctor, and BAM! The best of both worlds.
Dual-Monitor is actually loads better, because then all the little frilly palettes and crap can stay off the valuable horizontal real estate of the portrait monitor. Now, if only Pages could maximize the way I want it to...
Where we have tangible results from our defense programs, we have only weighing debt and spiraling spending from our social programs.
And would you expect differently? The government's ability to print money to promote industry was one of the founding strengths of this nation, and is regarded by many to be the real reason behind the war for Independence. Colonial Scrip, when enforced by England, caused poverty and misery in the colonies. The idea of the government being able to purchase labor out of thin air, and our support of it, is older than this country, and scores of men died in our early years to protect it.
No matter whether any businessman is willing to purchase the labor, as long as the work that is done benefits society as much as the currency granted, inflation occurs and yet society as a whole is better off. This is why there were little or no taxes for a very long period of our history. But social services are not the same. Social services, at least as we practice them in the US, are little more than the government printing money and giving it away with no return in kind.
Defense, while it is probably not the best use of our nation's work, is still not a broken system. The government gets some return on their investment, and it provides us with a benefit. Questions of efficiency are better raised elsewhere, but realize that saying "Defense Spending is better than Social Services Spending" is rooted solely in this question: does defense spending, as a whole, represent any benefit to society?
With things like the wiretaps and other privacy invasions, the marginal benefit from these additional 'defense' activities is a net loss to society. If the benefits are immediate and the drawbacks are still 2-3 years away, it doesn't change their long-term feasibility. Just because defense spending in general hasn't become a liability to society yet, doesn't mean that activities of this nature are worthwhile. With the programs you seem to support, society (by the end of the decade) will most certainly be on the losing side of the board.
but that is hardly the answer regarding the struggle between labor and capital.
It most certainly is. "Labor", being persons who work for wages, has collectively shot itself in the foot by being financially irresponsible. In doing so, they have made their negotiations with "capital" fraught with desperation. Just from what you see here, many (if not most) workers live in fear of disaster, unable to imagine or plan for a future in which losing their current job doesn't seriously and dramatically affect their lives.
In short, there are far too many people who have squandered their bargaining power on material posessions that they don't need, and now no longer have the ability to bargain levelly with their employers. I, and the OP, aren't saying that people won't fall on hard times for reasons they can't control -- quite the opposite. Such things are statistically inevitable. But when nobody is holding any bargaining chips, it's easy to see where that leaves us.
Taking the utopian view, keeping things strictly isolated makes them provable. Everything. Your video driver can now be proven in the context of its defined interaction, instead of in a messy process space. Maybe in the near future, we'll have intelligent systems strong enough to do the following:
Mathematically prove the function of small blocks of code, probably using some type of grid/distributed computing, up to the order of a few thousand or even a hundred thousand lines.
Once code is proven, use procedures we have not yet defined to re-integrate the verified parts into a coherent whole, nullifying the performance losses of the initial compartmentalization.
Right now, proving code isn't just very hard -- it's very, very hard because there's always the possibility that some useful, correct technique or transformation hasn't been formalized yet. But by keeping everything compartmentalized, each member becomes verifiable. Nobody is going to run independent tests on source with their own hardware because of the immense complexity, although I look forward to a day when we might verify the correctness of source code as easily as we check MD5 sums today.
By clearly defining acceptable inputs and outputs, and with enough computing power, we should be able to enforce correctness at least in terms of security and stability, if not suitability for a particular task. The video driver might still draw a few wrong pixels, but we will know that it won't draw them outside of its address space, or return a function pointer with corrupted data. I think, though, that this is acceptable. Formal algorithms and approaches tend to be much easier to confirm than their implementations.
Not to pick nits, but the reason it can affect applications installed via drag-and-drop, is that they are owned by your user account. In general terms, without you authenticating, viruses should be able to perform operations on any files you have access to. If the script's payload included an Applescript that started walking your home directory and deleting files ten at a time, it wouldn't have required any additional prowess. Anything your user account owns (which is typically all the really important files in the system -- documents, email, music and whatnot) is potentially vulnerable to anything that is run in user space. I agree with the article you linked to; This looks like a proof-of-concept, designed to be annoying but not devastating.
Not entirely true. I'd say that fiddling with bits in my home directory is pretty damaging, and that's the kind of virus we're talking about here. Thankfully, OSX has rsync. Backing up that home directory often will do you a hell of a lot more good than some virus or malware scanner.
Not that I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, mind you. TFA was useless, and didn't persuade me of any risk. I just prefer an elegant solution that solves several problems (dropping the MacBook Pro, fire, children, spilled drinks, etc.) instead of simply purporting to solve a nonexistent one.
It applies to networks in the US, to an extent. But the tech is new, at least here. Carriers had to make all manner of upgrades to comply with emergency/911 legislation, and now they're trying to commercialize it.
In the US, a single cell of coverage might be (and usually is) up to 8-10 km in diameter. Previously, there was no way to get any kind of accuracy. So a lot of phones are equipped with GPS, so they can be 'pinged'. Even the ones that aren't GPS-enabled have been given signal strength feedback so that the tower can estimate how far away the phone is, and the towers have been fitted with specialized antenna arrays to deduce direction. But a lot of times, the GPS is necessary because there will only be 1 tower and therefore very low accuracy.
These upgrades have been 'in-process' here for about 6-7 years. That they have penetrated to the point of commercial viability is both good and bad. Now I can expect 911 dispatch to find me, but...
This won't work for every application, but I wrote a Nextel J2ME app last year that provides realtime location tracking to a central server -- but it manages the employee's timecard as well. It tracks the employee's position if and only if they are on the clock, because otherwise the program isn't running. I think we need to have more services like this, to provide managers with the tools they need without destroying any hope the employee might have as to privacy. And it's basically impossible to 'cheat the clock' because your location will be known.
The article seems to be talking about services like Sprint's, where the employer, by virtue of being the account owner, can 'ping' any phone that's turned on. They're basically trying to commercialize the network upgrades they made for 911 services by offering your boss the same level of access, which doesn't sit well with me. Not just that, the service opens the floodgates for privacy/discrimination issues. What if your boss decides to sit down on a Sunday morning and (just out of curiosity, of course) see who goes to church, and where? Or worse, has IT set up a cron job to check people at random and alert him if they're in 'hot spots' he defines?
It may not matter so much to the Slashdot crowd, but a lot of workers can't afford a cellphone unless work provides it, or won't realize what kind of abuse they may be inviting by carrying a phone like this.
AFAIK, the iPod already supports this. You just turn on "Sound Check" in the iTunes prefs, and it will pre-scan your whole library, setting volume adjustments. Anyone care to confirm that these settings transfer to the iPod? I'm convinced they do, but I don't have any quantitative trials to base this opinion on.
One of the main thrusts of Negroponte's solution is that, for effective computing, more than traditional computers are required. The $100 machine being designed for OLPC is engineered to work in areas without electricity, without telephone or other wired network connectivity, and will most likely be set up to receive additional materials and assignments via WiFi from classroom teachers.
How an outdated PC with a CRT monitor would help children who live in a hovel 150 miles from the nearest city, is beyond me. Places that have electricity and telecommunications equipment are already using outdated or inexpensive technology to help themselves out. Nobody is going to run electricity and data lines to a computer lab for a village of 70 people, and if they do so, they probably won't survive the ensuing coup and/or vandalism. Not to mention that the totalitarian governments of the area would probably try to seize and/or control the compound by use of force.
He's a founder. Look what happened when John Sculley came in in the early 90's. We got the Newton, which I liked, and still like, a lot. But we also got to see the American MBA in action.
The type of accounting and business strategy that for-hire CEO's and CFO's are trained with tells them that everything is about increasing shareholder value in the short-to-mid term (ie, no more than 2-5 years). They are unconcerned with providing value to employees or customers, unless doing so will assist them with goal #1. Even if they think they are working for the long-term success of the company, all the tools they have to put things in perspective are centered around the short-term stock value.
When Jobs came back to Apple, it was like he was the spurned father called to the hospital when his child was morbidly ill or injured. This company is his baby, and he wants to see it succeed in the long term. He wants products that his customers will slowly come to believe they can't live without, not some flash-in-the-pan fad with the latest buzzwords attached.
A lot of Silicon Valley CEO's are founders and have this fatherly instinct. They don't get press because they weren't ousted and then called back to fix things. Neither do the CEO's who weren't called back as their companies went to the chopping block.
If you oust the original founders of the company, it's almost always a death sentence. Apple's board was right to call Jobs back to the helm. But don't think it's something special about Jobs. It's what any company founder should do, and what most would do, because they actually believe in what they're doing.
What is it that Slashdot has against mainstream OS's? Now that Mac OS X is finally gaining some marketshare, we see FUD warning people to avoid it because of the Intel chips. I thought that everyone was pro-switch. There's no evidence that this is a hardware bug, or if it is, that OS X's (Or any other *BSD or *NIX's) implementation of the USB stack is vulnerable.
If it is a hardware bug, though, it reminds me of an old joke:
How many Hardware Engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None. It can be fixed with a software patch.
For an unpatched vulnerability to be exploited, the user must enable the affected service.
Even if passwords are discovered, or new root accounts created, the user must have enabled remote access to their machines for the authentication to yield any damage.
This is the 'architecture' argument used so often here. For any attack to result from a vulnerability, there must usually be complementary bugs in authentication and access, and the user must explicitly enable the services that are vulnerable. Even browser-based attacks won't be able to spawn new processes without an additional exploit or social engineering to get the user to type their password.
It's the same with Linux and BSD. The difference is that Linux and BSD machines are usually doing tasks that require LDAP, SSH, DNS, SMTP, HTTPD, FTP, and other services. The probability of these services being active on a machine at any given time is greater, so the patch process gets a deservedly greater amount of attention.
That being said, I hope Apple doesn't drag their feet anymore. Once someone is trying to target the Mac, the additional 1-3 exploits required to successfully execute an attack could very well be discovered. Most home users wouldn't be vulnerable simply because they don't run the affected services, but I'd prefer to be protected all the same.
That does suck. Even with a good API, it's too easy to just throw the kitchen sink into a constructor or header file instead of including file links as needed. I hadn't thought about all the unnecessary JavaScript that flies around the web and never gets run, or worse, executes but never does anything useful.
The current common practice is to write a header file and just include it inline for every page on the site; This means that the <head> contents can't ever be changed by the individual script. One middle-of-the road approach that I use is to just keep an object as the page buffer and manipulate its array of lines with object methods like:
OpenTag(tagName[, options]);// Push tagName onto a stack and output <tag [options]> Write(text[, tagName[, options]]);// Escape text and optionally enclose it Tag(tagName[, options]);// Insert a self-closing tag CloseTag();// Pop a tag name off the stack and close it
It doesn't give you the flexibility of the DOM, but it's much faster and still ensures proper opening/closing/matching of tags, and consistent formatting/indenting of the markup. If the header lines are kept separate, they can be added or removed right up until the page is output.
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You don't need to have the computers. That's a good thing, seeing as how reformatting your PC means you just lost a 'computer' to attrition, if you didn't remember to deauthorize it before the wipe. If her employer reformatted those PC's after she left, then those unique IDs are lost forever anyway. I don't know of a technical solution to determining whether you are trying to cheat, or just reformatted the same PC. Macs, as I understand it, use the Apple Serial Number from the hardware when they are authorized, but PC's have no such standardized ID. In practice, I think that iTunes will need reauthorization after 90 days or so of no connectivity, and Apple is a bit restrictive on how many times you can use "Deauthorize All".
So, to be clear, you're saying that the government charges money for licensing so that there is a higher barrier to entry for licensees, which reduces competition against the richest of licensees -- thus inducing them to make the investment in manufacturing, advertising, and distribution.
I call shenanigans. The way you're saying it kind of comes across like, "Well, a patent creates a 'free monopoly' ticket. Someone has to use it! If nobody is granted an effective monopoly, how can anyone expect to get rich from the idea?". Forsooth! Has society not already paid its price by using its government to develop the patent? The people certainly owe no further debt to this idea, or its inventor, or its licensees. It is the property of the public, by virtue of having been developed with their money and by their direct agency.
Not to mention that the USA was designed in part to prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth. As little as 50 years ago, the common man understood that benefits of industry and science should be directed to society as a whole, not an elite few. How so many have forgotten this so quickly is vexing...
It sounds like a stirrer circuit in a microwave. Microwaves without a turntable have used these for a long time, to prevent that (awesome, but definitely undesirable) effect of boiled water exploding onto your hand when you grab the mug. They work by causing a standing wave in the radiation, which agitates the liquid on a very small scale and allows it to circulate.
This is a good application of existing principle to a new problem, but I hardly think this was the biggest obstacle we had to Nuclear Fusion.
Poor choice of words, but it's kind of embarrasing that you didn't get the real meaning of that. AT&T aren't just monitoring traffic that is generated from or destined for their customers -- they're tapping routed traffic, too.
It's not only relevant, it's downright disheartening. Boycotting AT&T won't be enough; You might have to do a tracert ahead of every request to find out if your data will be passing through an AT&T-owned server at some point, lest the government filters promote your data for suspicion and persecution. With the pervasiveness of AT&T's infrastructure holdings in the US, I would think twice about accusing TFA of hyperbole. I mean, if they only collect a tiny fraction of the data, but keep records for every user whose traffic passes through their nodes, I'd have a hard time saying that word choice is wrong.
I also consider that one of the chromosomes could maintain (as a unit) the code for some very complex interaction that can't be further broken down. Maybe something to control the expression of genes, p2p communication (to correlate production of proteins, etc.), or even the definition of types for cell differentiation. Or a kind of file full of unique keys to keep the immune system from attacking the body's own cells (errors in which might result in allergies). Consider the size of concurrency control and locking code in Enterprise software. It's easy to imagine that one chromosome would be the largest by far, especially if it contains an operation that cannot be split into multiple parts, and any subsequent additions to code could appear randomly on any of the 23.
Perhaps I'm dead wrong -- I'm not a genetic researcher -- but whatever corpus of code serves functions like these, assuming they're not all n-th level emergent properties of a massive number of proteins, would intuitively seem to be much less tolerant of fragmentation than others. I'm betting that it contains some kind of code where having it all in one place increases its effectiveness to a point of conferring a survival advantage.
And don't forget about hidden iFrames... Browsers have the ability to target an iframe with a form, so you can pass in whatever form contents are there, and trigger your callback from an onload handler on the body tag of the response. In fact, for asynchronous file uploads, you still have to do it this way.
I was under the impression that EBay's Buy It Now was something users had been clamoring for from day one. I know I always thought, "It'd be nice to let someone pay immediately instead of dragging this out". It's basically an extension of "$XXX.XX OBO" into the online world.
Obviously, that's a bogus patent. Appending in the context of an online system shouldn't make it automagically patentworthy. Perhaps we should not allow ANY injunctions until the patent has been further reviewed by the USPTO. If the USPTO decides to revoke or invalidate a patent before the case goes to court, wouldn't that be better than letting it go to a high-profile court case and then having to read 35 stories about it on Slashdot?
I don't know. I've had several of the recent Apple laptops, including a MacBook Pro, and I'd have to say that I really like the magnetically-actuated latches on the recent models. That magnet would have to be incredibly strong to prevent me from worrying about it coming open at the wrong time. Eg, if I was carrying the laptop and my finger slipped into the little groove for the screen, would it fly open and fall from my hands? If it wouldn't, would that make the magnet strong enough to damage a credit card or possibly even an external hard disk?
I've got no problem with a magnet strong enough to pull a tiny catch on a weak spring out of its slot, but a magnet (or pair of magnets) strong enough to hold the screen shut? Call me skeptical.
Wow. Sounds like you got a real shyster at the Sony Store. I don't know what's worse -- getting a customer service rep who is hostile to the customer and supported by his company, or getting a rep who tries so hard to help and is shut down by the evil empire at every turn. Either way, it's Sony. I've had similar experiences with various companies in Beijing (maybe it's just the prevailing attitude), but the results seem to depend entirely on the company: when the company has no respect for the customer, what can their employees really do about it?
Buy Chinese, and be picky. There are a lot of low-quality products in the market, but if the manufacturers that make good, quality products can make enough money to be a recognizable, competitive, popular brand in the rest of the world... It helps everyone and at the same time it puts another nail in Sony's coffin.
Who's to say that having the 'internal', eg phone-company assigned ID of a call record wouldn't give them access to a complete wealth of information about that call? Even if a gov't informant did what you suggest by purchasing a prepaid phone and using it once, then throwing it away, try this on for size:
From the complete call record, you can get a routing table and a cell-tower ID. That phone was activated, probably at the location and time it was purchased. That gives you a time & place to find the purchaser. Possibly even the serial number of the phone, which could be traced to a specific merchant (or chain of stores, which then would be correlated with the first-known cell tower the phone connected with). From there, it's a simple matter of setting a few people to watch traffic cameras or comb through toll records, or whatever.
And all of this assumes that the person didn't make the sensitive call from their home! Probably the only safe place to use the phone would be from a busy government building during working hours, but that in itself carries risk.
After-the-fact investigation can be very intensive, and very accurate, even if all reasonable precautions are taken by the investigatee. It's just a question of what kind of resources you're willing to invest to get an answer. I think that this administration has shown no qualms about using taxpayer resources for this type of activity when it furthers their private agenda.
Consider, however, that the foreign students are working with something, well, foreign to them. This isn't to say that computers aren't foreign to those of us in the US, but we expect to understand the metaphor. If you approach Linux from the standpoint of rules to be followed, with an expected and logical result, it's easy. Here's the current state of affairs, as I see it:
The computer is only as good as the software you can obtain for it. Until it's easy for users to obtain quality packages and simple apps with a slick, consistent interface, the article should be pretty indicative of the user experience switching to Linux.
Jasin NataelWhy bother? I realize that a hardware solution was necessary back in the day, but your Mac already has all the hardware it needs to run a portrait monitor in addition to its main display. I took a 17" Dell LCD that was a freebie with a PC I used for a server last year, and propped it up sideways on a CD spindle next to my iMac G5. A little hocus-pocus, install Screen Spanning Doctor, and BAM! The best of both worlds.
Dual-Monitor is actually loads better, because then all the little frilly palettes and crap can stay off the valuable horizontal real estate of the portrait monitor. Now, if only Pages could maximize the way I want it to...
Jasin NataelAnd would you expect differently? The government's ability to print money to promote industry was one of the founding strengths of this nation, and is regarded by many to be the real reason behind the war for Independence. Colonial Scrip, when enforced by England, caused poverty and misery in the colonies. The idea of the government being able to purchase labor out of thin air, and our support of it, is older than this country, and scores of men died in our early years to protect it.
No matter whether any businessman is willing to purchase the labor, as long as the work that is done benefits society as much as the currency granted, inflation occurs and yet society as a whole is better off. This is why there were little or no taxes for a very long period of our history. But social services are not the same. Social services, at least as we practice them in the US, are little more than the government printing money and giving it away with no return in kind.
Defense, while it is probably not the best use of our nation's work, is still not a broken system. The government gets some return on their investment, and it provides us with a benefit. Questions of efficiency are better raised elsewhere, but realize that saying "Defense Spending is better than Social Services Spending" is rooted solely in this question: does defense spending, as a whole, represent any benefit to society?
With things like the wiretaps and other privacy invasions, the marginal benefit from these additional 'defense' activities is a net loss to society. If the benefits are immediate and the drawbacks are still 2-3 years away, it doesn't change their long-term feasibility. Just because defense spending in general hasn't become a liability to society yet, doesn't mean that activities of this nature are worthwhile. With the programs you seem to support, society (by the end of the decade) will most certainly be on the losing side of the board.
Jasin NataelIt most certainly is. "Labor", being persons who work for wages, has collectively shot itself in the foot by being financially irresponsible. In doing so, they have made their negotiations with "capital" fraught with desperation. Just from what you see here, many (if not most) workers live in fear of disaster, unable to imagine or plan for a future in which losing their current job doesn't seriously and dramatically affect their lives.
In short, there are far too many people who have squandered their bargaining power on material posessions that they don't need, and now no longer have the ability to bargain levelly with their employers. I, and the OP, aren't saying that people won't fall on hard times for reasons they can't control -- quite the opposite. Such things are statistically inevitable. But when nobody is holding any bargaining chips, it's easy to see where that leaves us.
Jasin NataelTaking the utopian view, keeping things strictly isolated makes them provable. Everything. Your video driver can now be proven in the context of its defined interaction, instead of in a messy process space. Maybe in the near future, we'll have intelligent systems strong enough to do the following:
Right now, proving code isn't just very hard -- it's very, very hard because there's always the possibility that some useful, correct technique or transformation hasn't been formalized yet. But by keeping everything compartmentalized, each member becomes verifiable. Nobody is going to run independent tests on source with their own hardware because of the immense complexity, although I look forward to a day when we might verify the correctness of source code as easily as we check MD5 sums today.
By clearly defining acceptable inputs and outputs, and with enough computing power, we should be able to enforce correctness at least in terms of security and stability, if not suitability for a particular task. The video driver might still draw a few wrong pixels, but we will know that it won't draw them outside of its address space, or return a function pointer with corrupted data. I think, though, that this is acceptable. Formal algorithms and approaches tend to be much easier to confirm than their implementations.
Jasin NataelNot to pick nits, but the reason it can affect applications installed via drag-and-drop, is that they are owned by your user account. In general terms, without you authenticating, viruses should be able to perform operations on any files you have access to. If the script's payload included an Applescript that started walking your home directory and deleting files ten at a time, it wouldn't have required any additional prowess. Anything your user account owns (which is typically all the really important files in the system -- documents, email, music and whatnot) is potentially vulnerable to anything that is run in user space. I agree with the article you linked to; This looks like a proof-of-concept, designed to be annoying but not devastating.
Jasin NataelNot entirely true. I'd say that fiddling with bits in my home directory is pretty damaging, and that's the kind of virus we're talking about here. Thankfully, OSX has rsync. Backing up that home directory often will do you a hell of a lot more good than some virus or malware scanner.
Not that I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, mind you. TFA was useless, and didn't persuade me of any risk. I just prefer an elegant solution that solves several problems (dropping the MacBook Pro, fire, children, spilled drinks, etc.) instead of simply purporting to solve a nonexistent one.
Jasin NataelIt applies to networks in the US, to an extent. But the tech is new, at least here. Carriers had to make all manner of upgrades to comply with emergency/911 legislation, and now they're trying to commercialize it.
In the US, a single cell of coverage might be (and usually is) up to 8-10 km in diameter. Previously, there was no way to get any kind of accuracy. So a lot of phones are equipped with GPS, so they can be 'pinged'. Even the ones that aren't GPS-enabled have been given signal strength feedback so that the tower can estimate how far away the phone is, and the towers have been fitted with specialized antenna arrays to deduce direction. But a lot of times, the GPS is necessary because there will only be 1 tower and therefore very low accuracy.
These upgrades have been 'in-process' here for about 6-7 years. That they have penetrated to the point of commercial viability is both good and bad. Now I can expect 911 dispatch to find me, but ...
Jasin NataelThis won't work for every application, but I wrote a Nextel J2ME app last year that provides realtime location tracking to a central server -- but it manages the employee's timecard as well. It tracks the employee's position if and only if they are on the clock, because otherwise the program isn't running. I think we need to have more services like this, to provide managers with the tools they need without destroying any hope the employee might have as to privacy. And it's basically impossible to 'cheat the clock' because your location will be known.
The article seems to be talking about services like Sprint's, where the employer, by virtue of being the account owner, can 'ping' any phone that's turned on. They're basically trying to commercialize the network upgrades they made for 911 services by offering your boss the same level of access, which doesn't sit well with me. Not just that, the service opens the floodgates for privacy/discrimination issues. What if your boss decides to sit down on a Sunday morning and (just out of curiosity, of course) see who goes to church, and where? Or worse, has IT set up a cron job to check people at random and alert him if they're in 'hot spots' he defines?
It may not matter so much to the Slashdot crowd, but a lot of workers can't afford a cellphone unless work provides it, or won't realize what kind of abuse they may be inviting by carrying a phone like this.
Jasin NataelAFAIK, the iPod already supports this. You just turn on "Sound Check" in the iTunes prefs, and it will pre-scan your whole library, setting volume adjustments. Anyone care to confirm that these settings transfer to the iPod? I'm convinced they do, but I don't have any quantitative trials to base this opinion on.
Jasin NataelOne of the main thrusts of Negroponte's solution is that, for effective computing, more than traditional computers are required. The $100 machine being designed for OLPC is engineered to work in areas without electricity, without telephone or other wired network connectivity, and will most likely be set up to receive additional materials and assignments via WiFi from classroom teachers.
How an outdated PC with a CRT monitor would help children who live in a hovel 150 miles from the nearest city, is beyond me. Places that have electricity and telecommunications equipment are already using outdated or inexpensive technology to help themselves out. Nobody is going to run electricity and data lines to a computer lab for a village of 70 people, and if they do so, they probably won't survive the ensuing coup and/or vandalism. Not to mention that the totalitarian governments of the area would probably try to seize and/or control the compound by use of force.
Jasin NataelHe's a founder. Look what happened when John Sculley came in in the early 90's. We got the Newton, which I liked, and still like, a lot. But we also got to see the American MBA in action.
The type of accounting and business strategy that for-hire CEO's and CFO's are trained with tells them that everything is about increasing shareholder value in the short-to-mid term (ie, no more than 2-5 years). They are unconcerned with providing value to employees or customers, unless doing so will assist them with goal #1. Even if they think they are working for the long-term success of the company, all the tools they have to put things in perspective are centered around the short-term stock value.
When Jobs came back to Apple, it was like he was the spurned father called to the hospital when his child was morbidly ill or injured. This company is his baby, and he wants to see it succeed in the long term. He wants products that his customers will slowly come to believe they can't live without, not some flash-in-the-pan fad with the latest buzzwords attached.
A lot of Silicon Valley CEO's are founders and have this fatherly instinct. They don't get press because they weren't ousted and then called back to fix things. Neither do the CEO's who weren't called back as their companies went to the chopping block.
If you oust the original founders of the company, it's almost always a death sentence. Apple's board was right to call Jobs back to the helm. But don't think it's something special about Jobs. It's what any company founder should do, and what most would do, because they actually believe in what they're doing.
Jasin NataelWhat is it that Slashdot has against mainstream OS's? Now that Mac OS X is finally gaining some marketshare, we see FUD warning people to avoid it because of the Intel chips. I thought that everyone was pro-switch. There's no evidence that this is a hardware bug, or if it is, that OS X's (Or any other *BSD or *NIX's) implementation of the USB stack is vulnerable.
If it is a hardware bug, though, it reminds me of an old joke:
Jasin NataelHere's the deal:
This is the 'architecture' argument used so often here. For any attack to result from a vulnerability, there must usually be complementary bugs in authentication and access, and the user must explicitly enable the services that are vulnerable. Even browser-based attacks won't be able to spawn new processes without an additional exploit or social engineering to get the user to type their password.
It's the same with Linux and BSD. The difference is that Linux and BSD machines are usually doing tasks that require LDAP, SSH, DNS, SMTP, HTTPD, FTP, and other services. The probability of these services being active on a machine at any given time is greater, so the patch process gets a deservedly greater amount of attention.
That being said, I hope Apple doesn't drag their feet anymore. Once someone is trying to target the Mac, the additional 1-3 exploits required to successfully execute an attack could very well be discovered. Most home users wouldn't be vulnerable simply because they don't run the affected services, but I'd prefer to be protected all the same.
Jasin NataelThat does suck. Even with a good API, it's too easy to just throw the kitchen sink into a constructor or header file instead of including file links as needed. I hadn't thought about all the unnecessary JavaScript that flies around the web and never gets run, or worse, executes but never does anything useful.
The current common practice is to write a header file and just include it inline for every page on the site; This means that the <head> contents can't ever be changed by the individual script. One middle-of-the road approach that I use is to just keep an object as the page buffer and manipulate its array of lines with object methods like:
It doesn't give you the flexibility of the DOM, but it's much faster and still ensures proper opening/closing/matching of tags, and consistent formatting/indenting of the markup. If the header lines are kept separate, they can be added or removed right up until the page is output.
Jasin Natael