The courts have ruled that The People have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in their phone calls.
The courts were mistaken, or they said that before Congress (and other governments) enacted law that mandated phone service providers make sure that phone calls aren't private, or they said that before the people read all the news stories which provided evidence that the aforementioned law was being used, or they said that before the combination of CALEA (and -alike laws) and technical incompetence ("lawful intercept" is not the source of all our problems), resulted in the proliferation of unusually-easy-to-tap systems which have sometimes been exploited by parties other than (!) law enforcement.
The courts have the power to rule that messages shouted in the town square shall be legally treated as private, but they don't have the capacity to make such messages be private or make people think they're private. Don't you see the difference?
This is what I meant by the two usages of "expectation." You're right that the courts declared you have a reasonable expectation that your phone call is private. But others are right, when they say that your reason tells you to predict or believe (the other meaning of "expect") there is a significant risk of your phone conversation not really being private. You know, for sure (this isn't even a matter of risk or tinfoil hat territory) that your phone service provider deliberately went to extra trouble and expense to reduce the privacy of your phone call. And (much of the time) you don't know what other systems and media that your phone call passes through or how secure they are, which is very much unlike the situation your grandparents faced in 1970. The person on the other end might be using a 2.4 GHz cordless handset without any crypto at all, or they might be using Skype, or there might be some other obscure VoIP link with broken key exchange, or whatever. In some ways, this stuff (even when it uses crypto, if done with the wrong priorities) can be worse for privacy than a plaintext signal on an analog wire.
You can feel confident that if you say something incriminating in that phone call, and someone in Law Enforcement happens to be listening illegally, they won't be able to use that particular statement as evidence in court (but it won't be private; the knowledge will be known and the LEO will now know it might pay off to begin investigating you legally). You can feel confi^H^H^H^H^H hopeful that if someone other than LE is listening and you can prove it, you might be able to have them prosecuted. But none of this will actually impact, much, your estimate of how private the conversation is. And that estimate is far lower than someone's estimate would have been a few decades ago. This, your estimate of how private it really is, is what I (and any other non-lawyer layman) mean by "expectation of privacy." You don't think it's private; you hope it's private, and believe that sometimes the government may take your side in punishing those who take unfair advantage of your known-false hope.
The danger here, is that eventually the courts are going to wake up to the actual realities; the courts may someday realize that people don't really believe some forms of communication to be private, and then they'll change their mind about whether the false-privacy will remain virtualize and the fiction given legal protection. The legal sense of expectation, is going to shift toward the real-life expectation. I think we've seen a lot of this within the example of email.
The good news is that we actually have the capacity, at the endpoints, to make our communication become secure, and gain a reasonable expectation of privacy which
The header is, but that's what the header is for. No intermediate system (or email server, for that matter) has any reason to read or "scan" anything in the body of the email. There just isn't any valid technical reason to do that.
You're talking like a lawyer or civic rights advocate/idealist, and he's talking like a security-conscious person. You're saying there's no technical reason it's valid; he's saying there's no technical barrier which prevents it (unless you encrypted the body).
It's not that you're wrong; it's that people are talking about two different things.
And the fact that there are two different meanings of "expect", which are sometimes diametrically opposite, is what GP MyLongNickName was really talking about. You can argue 'til you're blue in the face about what some judge might say to a lawyer about what "reasonably expectation" people have and you might even be right as a matter of law, but any layman is going to be staring in shock at the abuse piled upon the plain meaning of words like "reasonable" and "expect." The law is not reality. With regard for communications security especially, we have all learned that the law is INSANE; we just like to pretend it's not insane, since in its delusion, the law happens to take We The People's side on this issue.
I don't mean it's insane as in immoral, or out of step with our desires; I mean it's insane in the clinical sense, like someone babbling in a psych ward about things that don't really exist no matter how much we wish they did.
And the only entity that you ever even might expect [literal usage, not legal] to respect the law, is a prosecutor (*) who could have the 4th Amendment thrown in their face. Everyone else who is reading your email, doesn't give a flying fuck about what you expect [legal]. And you should expect [literal] that whenever you give out secrets in plaintext and transmit them through untrusted SMTP systems to untrusted IMAP storage systems.
Yet people DO expect phone conversations to be private.
Wrong. The courts expect them to be private (**). People know better.
(*) Interesting how the 4th amendment reads as though it's a limit on the government's overall power, but the only time we ever really hear about it, is in discussions about the details of the criminal justice system's process. It's almost as though the people never took that amendment seriously.
(**) by default; except when they're not private, thanks to lawful warrants combined with the mandated insecurity of CALEA. I love how it is illegal for phone providers to offer a secure service, yet some people "expect" it to be secure. Did I say the law is insane? No, we are insane.
But if I vote third party, instead of supporting a Republican or a Democrat, then the danger is that Democrat or a Republican might win! Surely, that would be an even worse disaster, than the lesser evil of a Republican or Democrat winning.
Laugh it up, but that really is most peoples' excuse for voting for those parties.
And exactly how does key authentication stop the malware loging onto remote machines.
It doesn't. What it would stop, is the malware (once logged in) having an easy-to-guess sudo password. sudo doesn't care if you know the ssh key and are therefore allowed to log in; it wants a password (not an ssh key) before it'll let you rm -rf/.
Rice farmers in North Korea are not vulnerable to hacking.
Have you audited all your rice's genes? A leaked Monsanto report said most versions have a buffer-overflow bug somewhere in chromosome 6, but they didn't say exactly where. Unless North Korea buys their seed rice from Theo De Raadt...
If I understand correctly (do I?) the way it attacked Linux systems was that some people use a ssh client, where they literally have a preference or setting stored, for logging into the Linux machine as root. User clicks something (which does the equivalent of "ssh root@whatever" and the software automatically supplies a key or passphrase) and the next thing they see is a root bash prompt. Wow.
If that's right, then assuming your Linux machines still have
PermitRootLogin no
in/etc/ssh/sshd_config, then your setup isn't compatible with this malware. You'll need an updated version of this malware.
All machines should have "PermitRootLogin no" and if yours doesn't, you're doing something very very strange. Maybe you should go check that, right now. It'll take.. seconds.
That said, things still aren't very rosy. Presumably the user of this ssh client would also have non-root passwords or keys stored too, to get non-root access. But how many of us usually login as a user with some sudoers powers? And how many of us have a very lazy sudoers configuration, where you're literally allowed to just do "sudo -s" and get a root shell, by only having to type in your password again?
So my earlier "joke" about you needing an updated version of malware, might not really be all that much of a joke.
Tighten up your sudoers file if you can. And whether you can or not, have ssh use key authentication instead of password authentication, so that no remote clients can, or need to, have your password stored in them.
I run Ubuntu server on a certain box, for one reason. If I weren't for this case, that machine wouldn't have Ubuntu, but it does:
Mythbackend.
I want the backend to run the same version of MythTV as my Mythbuntu front ends (and regardless of whatever you overall think of Ubuntu, MythBuntu is a pretty good "applicance" if you're into MythTV). One of the ugly things about MythTV is that the front and back ends need to be the same version; MythTV isn't very tolerant of differing versions. (Or at least that's what the case was in the 0.23-0.24 days; I haven't tried mixing 0.25 with 0.24.)
So I can either compile my own to make sure each side is using the same version (which totally defeats the point of MythBuntu) or I can make sure all the boxes use the same version, by making them all use the same basic repository. I did the latter, because I'm lazy.
BTW, if I were deploying a new system in 2013, I would take a good hard look at LXC, running a minimal Ubuntu with their release of Mythbackend inside of a container, hosted by an overall more stable, less.. scary(?) distro. I think lots of oldschool Linux dudes reach for "heavier" virtualization, not realizing what features have been added to the vanilla (!!!) kernels in the last couple years. No Linux-Vserver or OpenVZ patches needed (assuming you don't consider the contained system to be potentially hostile; DO NOT think of LXC as a security tool, yet). LXC isn't done, but it's already at a point where it's useful in some situations, and your box may very well have it built in, right now.
You need to take a second look at Earth if you think our "double-planet" is half-colonized. We can relatively trivially colonize the interior of the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans, for an insignificant fraction of the cost of colonizing Luna.
To me, by suggesting the most expensive option, you seem to be talking about economic waste.
If you're going to advocate such waste, and that it be done compulsorily (i.e. funded through government) then I'd like to be persuaded that we're already in a post-scarcity economy. Show me our robot butlers, flying cars, closed-due-to-lack-of-sales strip mines, and nearly 100% unemployment rate, please. When we have those things, I'll believe there's no limit to the extravagance we can bear. Until then, though, colonizing the places I mentioned above, is way more sane.
I'm not convinced asteroid mining is profitable either, but at least on the face of it, it's not as guaranteed to be a net loss, as lunar colonization is.
Actually, he did ok (but he needs to get rid of his "things crash here and there") ; you simply forgot a step, and it's probably the more important step for all media consumers in our time:
(3) If they refuse to take your money, don't force the issue.
Failing that, is there anyway to download a film for £4-6 say, as just an AVI file or something, legally?
Once he applies step 3 to the above, everything gets easy, and the Mrs will be glad they didn't settle for a streaming service.
I think I understand what you're trying to protect, and I didn't like "28 Days Later" either. Romero's zombie is the ideal zombie and nothing else matches its perfection.
But nevertheless, if non-undead virus-altered humans are eating people, or non-undead virus-altered humans are sucking their blood, then it is reasonable for the characters in that story to call them zombies and vampires. If the "28 Days Later" scenario happens to you, nobody is going to give you shit for calling those things "zombies." When you say that word, it will be clearly understood.
Furthermore, your problems are going to be very similar to the problems endured by those living in the undead apocalypse in ways which are distinct from the Triffid scenario, or the Survivors or Captain Trips scenario, so I'm not just lumping all post-apocalypses together into one group and asking you to accept them all as zombie stories.
And if the characters in the story are running away from things they call "zombies" and which act like zombies, how isn't it a zombie story?
I think it's a valid zombie story. It's just different, and your emotions are probably triggered by the fact that "28 Days Later" was simply a bad movie made by people who didn't know how to operate cameras -- although you didn't actually mention that movie so maybe I'm projecting and grinding my own axe.;-) If you want to subdivide the zombie scenario into classic slow Romeroesque undead (of course it's our favorite), faster, more dangerous O'Bannon undead, fast/reasonably-dangerous-as-individuals virals (28DL), and very dangerous virals (which I'll admit is different enough to be borderline; some of the problems become distinct), that's totally cool and I highly approve of you taking it seriously enough to have a refined taxonomy. People doing that are why we get to have our important Kirk-vs-Picard debates. But please, give the non-undead zombies their due.
The historical reality is that multiple browser engine implementations have been a major pain in the ass for developers
I just want to double-check here: you have found that getting stuff to work with both gecko and webkit, has been a "major pain in the ass?"
I can't help but suspect that you're really talking about one very special case of multiple browser engine implementations, involving a particular nonstandard one made by a certain company who shall remain nameless. And I don't think that company's browser should be used as an indictment of multiple implementations. It's just an indictment of that one company and their very special place in the market and their unaccountability for basic quality and standards compliance. Fuck them.
There's really just two types of browser: that one special one, and all the others. And the wide implementation diversity within the "all the others" type hasn't ever seemed like a "major pain in the ass" to me. That isn't to say I've never found a gotcha, just that it's not a big deal, and the problems are pretty smalltime compared to the problems created by the real special case.
Some day I'm going to write a page about a "boardwalk game where you manage an empire from your throne" just to see how fast it gets blocked from google search results. Oops, I probably blocked Slashdot just by typing that. The robots who send the notices are amazingly stupid and use leaps of logic that make your average creationist look like an evidence-user.
I'm not saying piracy isn't happening out there, but from what I've seen I bet over 90% of DMCA notices are bogus. If anyone is crawling chilling-effects looking for juicy links to yummy forbidden files, boy are they going to be disappointed. They'll learn that someone's CS101 web crawling assignment has been emailing google about every damn page it finds.
Anyway, since in this case, the content's provenance is systematically known, they can confidently ignore the DMCA notices, as though they virtually received a counter-notice from within their own organization. No need to take anything down. Non-story, other than highlighting how amazingly bad the robots are, and that the special legal obligation created by them, probably ought to be removed or else notice-senders should be held accountable. Congress, do something about that. Can't someone just anonymously slip it into the budget bill?
lxc-start-ephemeral won't protect you (yet) if they decide to chmod +x and then run a local-escalation rootkit, but some day it will. And who remembers to chmod +x the rootkit anyway? I never remember. And without the local escalation I'm fucked, because I always forget to type "sudo."
By your way of thinking, nothing can ever be green.
You're not exactly wrong; it's just that it makes the discussion meaningless, and that means.. oh, excuse me, that means you are wrong.;-)
Combined with crap like "physics trumps economics," (*facepalm*) I have to assume you're having a really shitty day. Sorry to hear that. I hope your weekend refreshes you.
The proposal is still not green. Increasing profit is not the same as reducing energy.
(Reducing energy? I reduce energy every time I add oxygen to carbon. Look, now it has less energy!) Just kidding, I know what you meant. But it was still wrong.
You're under-rating money. Money is power in the very most basic sense (and coincidentally, the whole topic of bitcoins is about restoring that equivalence, as some people see fiat currency as decoupling money from its power). Making money (if only you could do it totally without any negative consequences or side-effects, which I'll admit you can't) really would be green, because with money you can, say, plant forests to soak up CO2, do the expensive shit needed to clean up industrial waste sites or restore mountain tops, or simply use the money to abstain from destructive necessities (e.g. "I don't have to drive to work today, because I don't need to work."). If infinite money representing real resources fell out of the sky into our hands, the whole planet would turn into a hippie paradise overnight (but hopefully without all the patchouli and chlamydia). Don't discount money. Ultimately, the long-term promise/fantasy of cheap solar and fusion energy, is just that.
Similarly, pretty much every single damn non-green activity that happens today, happens because of avoiding monetary consequences -- it happens precisely because we under-rate money as a means of measuring things. When you say you can't put a price on a beautiful meadow, you're saying "fuck this meadow, let's build a parking lot here." If you really had to directly pay to clean up your pollution, repair your environmental destruction, etc, as you did those things, then you'd stop doing them. So would that megacorp that you don't like, if they had to pay.
I swear to you, the very essense of a green "victory" will be a strategy of removing externalities; to make everything be "about money" -- accurating measuring, assessing, collecting that money and using it to restore or protect environmental value.
Within that framework, making money will be good. Making money will mean that you're not polluting (or you're polluting little enough that you're doing more than enough good to offset it), because polluters will be the ones who are losing money, since they wouldn't be generating as much wealth as they use up as pollution.
If this guy can collect solar rays -- or (I'm very serious) even burn coal -- and turn it into usable resources for a net gain, as long as it's a true net gain where his pollution isn't subsidized, then that's green. Infinitely sustainable.
Loss is what can't be sustained. Next time you see something unsustainable, maybe the question is: where's the loss? How come I don't see it? In what way are we using government's power to hide it from the market?
The Broken Window Fallacy represents an overall systemic loss, but that doesn't mean there can't be localized gains. They're just gains at someone else's expense. It harms the economy to go around breaking windows, but it really can benefit someone to go around doing that. That's why "defense" contractors love war. The construction industry probably loves hurricanes. Acknowledging or advocating these localized gains doesn't mean someone fell for the Broken Window Fallacy; it merely means they might be vampiric parasitic assholes.
The ultimate test of moral fiber has always been "doing the right thing when nobody is watching", how is it possible for someone who believes in an omnipresent god to take that test?
That's a test. Why would mystics ever say it's the ultimate test? As you mention, it's impossible (within their view) for anyone to ever really take that test, so I doubt they would accept it as a meaningful test. The ultimate test occurs at the pearly gates.
Furthermore, what's really awesome about religion, is that even if mystics could take that test, they would always pass it.
You may have noticed that religious people always have exactly identical opinions as their gods. The ones who say "God hates fags" happen to hate fags, and the ones who say, "No, God doesn't hate homosexuals" also happen to share either their god's compassion, or their god's apathy. Opinions line up, exactly, on all issues. And whenever there's ambiguity ("I'm not sure what God says about this, I need to analyze the scriptures in more depth") the person is also on the fence or conflicted.
When did you last hear one of them say they disagree with God, about anything? When did someone say, "That seems like a good act to me, but I heard God is against it, so I've decided to work against my own perception of good, and instead do what I think is evil. Because I'm wrong about what's good and evil." (Or better yet, instead of choosing perceived evil for God's sake, how about this: "I'll be punished in purgatory for my disobedience, but that's a price I choose to pay: it's up to us to make a stand against the divine tyrant, and hopefully, through our acts of conviction and sacrifice, persuade him to change his opinion.") It doesn't happen.
Thus, even if no one were watching or guiding, mystics know the right thing to do. Whatever they decide to do, well, I'm sure God would have decided the same thing. Thus, God watching them doesn't count, because being watched by God is no different than being watched by yourself. A mystic is wise enough and informed enough, compassionate enough and uncompromising enough -- a paragon of ideal virtue in every way -- to be qualified to act as their own divine judge. This makes your "ultimate test" irrelevant and useless.
That Christopher Hitchens would make such an easily-swept-aside argument.. oh.. just another reason he's in Hell now. Just where the people he criticized Knew, in their infinite wisdom, he'd end up.;-)
Oh, Nigel Tufnel, you were so right about that thin line.
I think most people's reaction today is that they don't want a wearable computer, because if capabilities were equal, then pocketable computers are simply be more pleasant to use. They get out of your way when they're unwanted, and they don't leave you with a sweaty body part at the end of the day. And capabilities aren't equal; the pocketable computers will be bigger and therefore more capable.
I feel like I agree with that: the idea of putting a watch on my wrist seems alien and uncomfortable.
Twenty years ago, though, it sure seemed ok to me. And I'd like to remind people, that a hundred years ago, the norm for watches was that they went into pockets, and from there we shifted to wearables. This really happened. This happened, upon a medium of civilization full of people just like you. How/why? Unless you can explain why the fashion changed from pocket to wrist back then, then I'm not sure I can accept arguments for how it can't change again.
All that said, just like everyone else, I don't think I want one. My point is that it's hard to predict whether or not the prevailing opinion will persist.
If this is true, and if the author did not assign copyright to the publisher (so that the publisher is now the copyright holder), and if they didn't tell the publisher to do this in some fine print that they didn't read, and if.. probably something else I didn't think of..;-) Er, my point is that if this happened without "the authority of the copyright owner" (to exactly quote DMCA) then the publisher just spoiled that DRM scheme. It's not prohibited for people to remove that DRM, and better yet, it's legal to manufacture, sell, traffick in, offer to the public etc, tools that are primarily intended to crack that DRM, marketed as being for removing that DRM, etc
Pretty neat, huh? Whenever DRM exists without the authority of the copyright holder, beating it isn't "circumvention" under DMCA. If the DRM scheme happens to be a widely used one, then could open up competition for e-readers, removing the legal barrier to innovation, reader sales, usage of the reader, etc.
It's all well and good to be against shredding live puppies, but do we really want to bring back the Nazi party in order to use it to protect the puppies? I mean, I think we can agree that would be worse, right? Right?!?
Slashdot Mirror
The courts were mistaken, or they said that before Congress (and other governments) enacted law that mandated phone service providers make sure that phone calls aren't private, or they said that before the people read all the news stories which provided evidence that the aforementioned law was being used, or they said that before the combination of CALEA (and -alike laws) and technical incompetence ("lawful intercept" is not the source of all our problems), resulted in the proliferation of unusually-easy-to-tap systems which have sometimes been exploited by parties other than (!) law enforcement.
The courts have the power to rule that messages shouted in the town square shall be legally treated as private, but they don't have the capacity to make such messages be private or make people think they're private. Don't you see the difference?
This is what I meant by the two usages of "expectation." You're right that the courts declared you have a reasonable expectation that your phone call is private. But others are right, when they say that your reason tells you to predict or believe (the other meaning of "expect") there is a significant risk of your phone conversation not really being private. You know, for sure (this isn't even a matter of risk or tinfoil hat territory) that your phone service provider deliberately went to extra trouble and expense to reduce the privacy of your phone call. And (much of the time) you don't know what other systems and media that your phone call passes through or how secure they are, which is very much unlike the situation your grandparents faced in 1970. The person on the other end might be using a 2.4 GHz cordless handset without any crypto at all, or they might be using Skype, or there might be some other obscure VoIP link with broken key exchange, or whatever. In some ways, this stuff (even when it uses crypto, if done with the wrong priorities) can be worse for privacy than a plaintext signal on an analog wire.
You can feel confident that if you say something incriminating in that phone call, and someone in Law Enforcement happens to be listening illegally, they won't be able to use that particular statement as evidence in court (but it won't be private; the knowledge will be known and the LEO will now know it might pay off to begin investigating you legally). You can feel confi^H^H^H^H^H hopeful that if someone other than LE is listening and you can prove it, you might be able to have them prosecuted. But none of this will actually impact, much, your estimate of how private the conversation is. And that estimate is far lower than someone's estimate would have been a few decades ago. This, your estimate of how private it really is, is what I (and any other non-lawyer layman) mean by "expectation of privacy." You don't think it's private; you hope it's private, and believe that sometimes the government may take your side in punishing those who take unfair advantage of your known-false hope.
The danger here, is that eventually the courts are going to wake up to the actual realities; the courts may someday realize that people don't really believe some forms of communication to be private, and then they'll change their mind about whether the false-privacy will remain virtualize and the fiction given legal protection. The legal sense of expectation, is going to shift toward the real-life expectation. I think we've seen a lot of this within the example of email.
The good news is that we actually have the capacity, at the endpoints, to make our communication become secure, and gain a reasonable expectation of privacy which
You're talking like a lawyer or civic rights advocate/idealist, and he's talking like a security-conscious person. You're saying there's no technical reason it's valid; he's saying there's no technical barrier which prevents it (unless you encrypted the body).
It's not that you're wrong; it's that people are talking about two different things.
And the fact that there are two different meanings of "expect", which are sometimes diametrically opposite, is what GP MyLongNickName was really talking about. You can argue 'til you're blue in the face about what some judge might say to a lawyer about what "reasonably expectation" people have and you might even be right as a matter of law, but any layman is going to be staring in shock at the abuse piled upon the plain meaning of words like "reasonable" and "expect." The law is not reality. With regard for communications security especially, we have all learned that the law is INSANE; we just like to pretend it's not insane, since in its delusion, the law happens to take We The People's side on this issue.
I don't mean it's insane as in immoral, or out of step with our desires; I mean it's insane in the clinical sense, like someone babbling in a psych ward about things that don't really exist no matter how much we wish they did.
And the only entity that you ever even might expect [literal usage, not legal] to respect the law, is a prosecutor (*) who could have the 4th Amendment thrown in their face. Everyone else who is reading your email, doesn't give a flying fuck about what you expect [legal]. And you should expect [literal] that whenever you give out secrets in plaintext and transmit them through untrusted SMTP systems to untrusted IMAP storage systems.
Wrong. The courts expect them to be private (**). People know better.
(*) Interesting how the 4th amendment reads as though it's a limit on the government's overall power, but the only time we ever really hear about it, is in discussions about the details of the criminal justice system's process. It's almost as though the people never took that amendment seriously.
(**) by default; except when they're not private, thanks to lawful warrants combined with the mandated insecurity of CALEA. I love how it is illegal for phone providers to offer a secure service, yet some people "expect" it to be secure. Did I say the law is insane? No, we are insane.
If you think my comment actually had a point, then you missed the point. :-)
But if I vote third party, instead of supporting a Republican or a Democrat, then the danger is that Democrat or a Republican might win! Surely, that would be an even worse disaster, than the lesser evil of a Republican or Democrat winning.
Laugh it up, but that really is most peoples' excuse for voting for those parties.
It doesn't. What it would stop, is the malware (once logged in) having an easy-to-guess sudo password. sudo doesn't care if you know the ssh key and are therefore allowed to log in; it wants a password (not an ssh key) before it'll let you rm -rf /.
Have you audited all your rice's genes? A leaked Monsanto report said most versions have a buffer-overflow bug somewhere in chromosome 6, but they didn't say exactly where. Unless North Korea buys their seed rice from Theo De Raadt...
Of course I mean "PermitRootLogin no" fixes it .. or rather, might not really fix it.
If I understand correctly (do I?) the way it attacked Linux systems was that some people use a ssh client, where they literally have a preference or setting stored, for logging into the Linux machine as root. User clicks something (which does the equivalent of "ssh root@whatever" and the software automatically supplies a key or passphrase) and the next thing they see is a root bash prompt. Wow.
If that's right, then assuming your Linux machines still have
in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, then your setup isn't compatible with this malware. You'll need an updated version of this malware.
All machines should have "PermitRootLogin no" and if yours doesn't, you're doing something very very strange. Maybe you should go check that, right now. It'll take .. seconds.
That said, things still aren't very rosy. Presumably the user of this ssh client would also have non-root passwords or keys stored too, to get non-root access. But how many of us usually login as a user with some sudoers powers? And how many of us have a very lazy sudoers configuration, where you're literally allowed to just do "sudo -s" and get a root shell, by only having to type in your password again?
So my earlier "joke" about you needing an updated version of malware, might not really be all that much of a joke.
Tighten up your sudoers file if you can. And whether you can or not, have ssh use key authentication instead of password authentication, so that no remote clients can, or need to, have your password stored in them.
I run Ubuntu server on a certain box, for one reason. If I weren't for this case, that machine wouldn't have Ubuntu, but it does:
Mythbackend.
I want the backend to run the same version of MythTV as my Mythbuntu front ends (and regardless of whatever you overall think of Ubuntu, MythBuntu is a pretty good "applicance" if you're into MythTV). One of the ugly things about MythTV is that the front and back ends need to be the same version; MythTV isn't very tolerant of differing versions. (Or at least that's what the case was in the 0.23-0.24 days; I haven't tried mixing 0.25 with 0.24.)
So I can either compile my own to make sure each side is using the same version (which totally defeats the point of MythBuntu) or I can make sure all the boxes use the same version, by making them all use the same basic repository. I did the latter, because I'm lazy.
BTW, if I were deploying a new system in 2013, I would take a good hard look at LXC, running a minimal Ubuntu with their release of Mythbackend inside of a container, hosted by an overall more stable, less .. scary(?) distro. I think lots of oldschool Linux dudes reach for "heavier" virtualization, not realizing what features have been added to the vanilla (!!!) kernels in the last couple years. No Linux-Vserver or OpenVZ patches needed (assuming you don't consider the contained system to be potentially hostile; DO NOT think of LXC as a security tool, yet). LXC isn't done, but it's already at a point where it's useful in some situations, and your box may very well have it built in, right now.
You need to take a second look at Earth if you think our "double-planet" is half-colonized. We can relatively trivially colonize the interior of the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans, for an insignificant fraction of the cost of colonizing Luna.
To me, by suggesting the most expensive option, you seem to be talking about economic waste.
If you're going to advocate such waste, and that it be done compulsorily (i.e. funded through government) then I'd like to be persuaded that we're already in a post-scarcity economy. Show me our robot butlers, flying cars, closed-due-to-lack-of-sales strip mines, and nearly 100% unemployment rate, please. When we have those things, I'll believe there's no limit to the extravagance we can bear. Until then, though, colonizing the places I mentioned above, is way more sane.
I'm not convinced asteroid mining is profitable either, but at least on the face of it, it's not as guaranteed to be a net loss, as lunar colonization is.
Actually, he did ok (but he needs to get rid of his "things crash here and there") ; you simply forgot a step, and it's probably the more important step for all media consumers in our time:
(3) If they refuse to take your money, don't force the issue.
Once he applies step 3 to the above, everything gets easy, and the Mrs will be glad they didn't settle for a streaming service.
I think I understand what you're trying to protect, and I didn't like "28 Days Later" either. Romero's zombie is the ideal zombie and nothing else matches its perfection.
But nevertheless, if non-undead virus-altered humans are eating people, or non-undead virus-altered humans are sucking their blood, then it is reasonable for the characters in that story to call them zombies and vampires. If the "28 Days Later" scenario happens to you, nobody is going to give you shit for calling those things "zombies." When you say that word, it will be clearly understood.
Furthermore, your problems are going to be very similar to the problems endured by those living in the undead apocalypse in ways which are distinct from the Triffid scenario, or the Survivors or Captain Trips scenario, so I'm not just lumping all post-apocalypses together into one group and asking you to accept them all as zombie stories.
And if the characters in the story are running away from things they call "zombies" and which act like zombies, how isn't it a zombie story?
I think it's a valid zombie story. It's just different, and your emotions are probably triggered by the fact that "28 Days Later" was simply a bad movie made by people who didn't know how to operate cameras -- although you didn't actually mention that movie so maybe I'm projecting and grinding my own axe. ;-) If you want to subdivide the zombie scenario into classic slow Romeroesque undead (of course it's our favorite), faster, more dangerous O'Bannon undead, fast/reasonably-dangerous-as-individuals virals (28DL), and very dangerous virals (which I'll admit is different enough to be borderline; some of the problems become distinct), that's totally cool and I highly approve of you taking it seriously enough to have a refined taxonomy. People doing that are why we get to have our important Kirk-vs-Picard debates. But please, give the non-undead zombies their due.
I just want to double-check here: you have found that getting stuff to work with both gecko and webkit, has been a "major pain in the ass?"
I can't help but suspect that you're really talking about one very special case of multiple browser engine implementations, involving a particular nonstandard one made by a certain company who shall remain nameless. And I don't think that company's browser should be used as an indictment of multiple implementations. It's just an indictment of that one company and their very special place in the market and their unaccountability for basic quality and standards compliance. Fuck them.
There's really just two types of browser: that one special one, and all the others. And the wide implementation diversity within the "all the others" type hasn't ever seemed like a "major pain in the ass" to me. That isn't to say I've never found a gotcha, just that it's not a big deal, and the problems are pretty smalltime compared to the problems created by the real special case.
Some day I'm going to write a page about a "boardwalk game where you manage an empire from your throne" just to see how fast it gets blocked from google search results. Oops, I probably blocked Slashdot just by typing that. The robots who send the notices are amazingly stupid and use leaps of logic that make your average creationist look like an evidence-user.
I'm not saying piracy isn't happening out there, but from what I've seen I bet over 90% of DMCA notices are bogus. If anyone is crawling chilling-effects looking for juicy links to yummy forbidden files, boy are they going to be disappointed. They'll learn that someone's CS101 web crawling assignment has been emailing google about every damn page it finds.
Anyway, since in this case, the content's provenance is systematically known, they can confidently ignore the DMCA notices, as though they virtually received a counter-notice from within their own organization. No need to take anything down. Non-story, other than highlighting how amazingly bad the robots are, and that the special legal obligation created by them, probably ought to be removed or else notice-senders should be held accountable. Congress, do something about that. Can't someone just anonymously slip it into the budget bill?
lxc-start-ephemeral won't protect you (yet) if they decide to chmod +x and then run a local-escalation rootkit, but some day it will. And who remembers to chmod +x the rootkit anyway? I never remember. And without the local escalation I'm fucked, because I always forget to type "sudo."
By your way of thinking, nothing can ever be green.
You're not exactly wrong; it's just that it makes the discussion meaningless, and that means .. oh, excuse me, that means you are wrong. ;-)
Combined with crap like "physics trumps economics," (*facepalm*) I have to assume you're having a really shitty day. Sorry to hear that. I hope your weekend refreshes you.
(Reducing energy? I reduce energy every time I add oxygen to carbon. Look, now it has less energy!) Just kidding, I know what you meant. But it was still wrong.
You're under-rating money. Money is power in the very most basic sense (and coincidentally, the whole topic of bitcoins is about restoring that equivalence, as some people see fiat currency as decoupling money from its power). Making money (if only you could do it totally without any negative consequences or side-effects, which I'll admit you can't) really would be green, because with money you can, say, plant forests to soak up CO2, do the expensive shit needed to clean up industrial waste sites or restore mountain tops, or simply use the money to abstain from destructive necessities (e.g. "I don't have to drive to work today, because I don't need to work."). If infinite money representing real resources fell out of the sky into our hands, the whole planet would turn into a hippie paradise overnight (but hopefully without all the patchouli and chlamydia). Don't discount money. Ultimately, the long-term promise/fantasy of cheap solar and fusion energy, is just that.
Similarly, pretty much every single damn non-green activity that happens today, happens because of avoiding monetary consequences -- it happens precisely because we under-rate money as a means of measuring things. When you say you can't put a price on a beautiful meadow, you're saying "fuck this meadow, let's build a parking lot here." If you really had to directly pay to clean up your pollution, repair your environmental destruction, etc, as you did those things, then you'd stop doing them. So would that megacorp that you don't like, if they had to pay.
I swear to you, the very essense of a green "victory" will be a strategy of removing externalities; to make everything be "about money" -- accurating measuring, assessing, collecting that money and using it to restore or protect environmental value.
Within that framework, making money will be good. Making money will mean that you're not polluting (or you're polluting little enough that you're doing more than enough good to offset it), because polluters will be the ones who are losing money, since they wouldn't be generating as much wealth as they use up as pollution.
If this guy can collect solar rays -- or (I'm very serious) even burn coal -- and turn it into usable resources for a net gain, as long as it's a true net gain where his pollution isn't subsidized, then that's green. Infinitely sustainable.
Loss is what can't be sustained. Next time you see something unsustainable, maybe the question is: where's the loss? How come I don't see it? In what way are we using government's power to hide it from the market?
The Broken Window Fallacy represents an overall systemic loss, but that doesn't mean there can't be localized gains. They're just gains at someone else's expense. It harms the economy to go around breaking windows, but it really can benefit someone to go around doing that. That's why "defense" contractors love war. The construction industry probably loves hurricanes. Acknowledging or advocating these localized gains doesn't mean someone fell for the Broken Window Fallacy; it merely means they might be vampiric parasitic assholes.
Problem: Someone just placed a W tile. You have these tiles available to play: H, O, O, S and H.
Your proposed solution: spell the word "HOHOWS".
Analysis: That's not a real word.
That's a test. Why would mystics ever say it's the ultimate test? As you mention, it's impossible (within their view) for anyone to ever really take that test, so I doubt they would accept it as a meaningful test. The ultimate test occurs at the pearly gates.
Furthermore, what's really awesome about religion, is that even if mystics could take that test, they would always pass it.
You may have noticed that religious people always have exactly identical opinions as their gods. The ones who say "God hates fags" happen to hate fags, and the ones who say, "No, God doesn't hate homosexuals" also happen to share either their god's compassion, or their god's apathy. Opinions line up, exactly, on all issues. And whenever there's ambiguity ("I'm not sure what God says about this, I need to analyze the scriptures in more depth") the person is also on the fence or conflicted.
When did you last hear one of them say they disagree with God, about anything? When did someone say, "That seems like a good act to me, but I heard God is against it, so I've decided to work against my own perception of good, and instead do what I think is evil. Because I'm wrong about what's good and evil." (Or better yet, instead of choosing perceived evil for God's sake, how about this: "I'll be punished in purgatory for my disobedience, but that's a price I choose to pay: it's up to us to make a stand against the divine tyrant, and hopefully, through our acts of conviction and sacrifice, persuade him to change his opinion.") It doesn't happen.
Thus, even if no one were watching or guiding, mystics know the right thing to do. Whatever they decide to do, well, I'm sure God would have decided the same thing. Thus, God watching them doesn't count, because being watched by God is no different than being watched by yourself. A mystic is wise enough and informed enough, compassionate enough and uncompromising enough -- a paragon of ideal virtue in every way -- to be qualified to act as their own divine judge. This makes your "ultimate test" irrelevant and useless.
That Christopher Hitchens would make such an easily-swept-aside argument .. oh .. just another reason he's in Hell now. Just where the people he criticized Knew, in their infinite wisdom, he'd end up. ;-)
Oh, Nigel Tufnel, you were so right about that thin line.
I think most people's reaction today is that they don't want a wearable computer, because if capabilities were equal, then pocketable computers are simply be more pleasant to use. They get out of your way when they're unwanted, and they don't leave you with a sweaty body part at the end of the day. And capabilities aren't equal; the pocketable computers will be bigger and therefore more capable.
I feel like I agree with that: the idea of putting a watch on my wrist seems alien and uncomfortable.
Twenty years ago, though, it sure seemed ok to me. And I'd like to remind people, that a hundred years ago, the norm for watches was that they went into pockets, and from there we shifted to wearables. This really happened. This happened, upon a medium of civilization full of people just like you. How/why? Unless you can explain why the fashion changed from pocket to wrist back then, then I'm not sure I can accept arguments for how it can't change again.
All that said, just like everyone else, I don't think I want one. My point is that it's hard to predict whether or not the prevailing opinion will persist.
If this is true, and if the author did not assign copyright to the publisher (so that the publisher is now the copyright holder), and if they didn't tell the publisher to do this in some fine print that they didn't read, and if .. probably something else I didn't think of .. ;-) Er, my point is that if this happened without "the authority of the copyright owner" (to exactly quote DMCA) then the publisher just spoiled that DRM scheme. It's not prohibited for people to remove that DRM, and better yet, it's legal to manufacture, sell, traffick in, offer to the public etc, tools that are primarily intended to crack that DRM, marketed as being for removing that DRM, etc
Pretty neat, huh? Whenever DRM exists without the authority of the copyright holder, beating it isn't "circumvention" under DMCA. If the DRM scheme happens to be a widely used one, then could open up competition for e-readers, removing the legal barrier to innovation, reader sales, usage of the reader, etc.
Let's wait to see what yummy details emerge.
It's all well and good to be against shredding live puppies, but do we really want to bring back the Nazi party in order to use it to protect the puppies? I mean, I think we can agree that would be worse, right? Right?!?
I'm about 0.4.03-1.1+squeeze1 version units of the way in between 1 and 2. Bah, sounds like I have 2 years 6 months and 1 day to deal with upgrading.
Damn, now that I think of it, I probably won't get to it in time.