Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne denounced the app, saying criminals would find it “useful” because it would alert them to where police stops were happening.
It sounds like someone needs to do their policing inside their private residence, instead of in public. If you just leave a cop sitting on the front seat of your car where any citizen can see it, you shouldn't expect your cop habit to remain a private matter.
What we really need to do is to blame the HDTV format which forces us to get those letterbox size screens.
Maybe we should also blame HDTV's success for such high expectations of low price. People are talking about $800 (roughly the low end where > 1080 starts) as being "expensive" for a computer monitor. And if you don't need more than 1920x1080, then a quick look at prices confirms that $800 is expensive. Yet back in the mid/late 1990s I remember buying a pair of 19" CRT monitors (I still have them, but they're not in use -- don't remember the exact resolution but I'm pretty sure the horiz part was less than 1920) and they each cost about that much. And that was mid-range, not really high-end stuff.
$800 for a geek's monitor is not expensive. Either settle for mainstream (1920x1080) resolution (which if not ideal, isn't really terrible either) or pay real money, where the stuff you're looking for starts at around $800 and goes up from there -- just like it has always been.
We're all just frustrated that our hard disks are down to under a hundred bucks a Terabyte, SSDs are even viable, CPUs are offering incredible jaw-dropping value, immense amounts of RAM are dirt cheap, yet a few things (monitors and tape drives) aren't quite following the same trends. So let's bitch about monitors and tape drives.;-)
Cool. but sometimes I hear weird rumors about Intel vpro, which make me wonder "what is a network?" If your CPU (?!) is listening for 3G radio signals, there's not just "management network" and "production network" but also "their network" although I guess you can always have your computer wear a tinfoil hat.
Admittedly, one of the major failings of the Tablet PC is being addressed with the Win8 touch interface and app ecosystem.
And, what might that be? All I see is yet another "me too" product from Microsoft.
When he said "Tablet PC" he did not mean tablet form-factor personal computer. (One of the various shitty things about Microsoft is that they use highly generic product names; they would sell something called "Computer(TM)" if they thought they'd get away with it.) He is not talking about addressing a failure in Apple or RIM products; he is talking about addressing a failure in a specific Microsoft product that was called "Tablet PC."
(Microsoft sees Tablet PC's major failing, as its property of not making money for Microsoft, not locking people into an app store, etc. Doing exactly what Apple does, should be just fine for MS, except for the iPad's one horrible design flaw, where people are able to buy them by paying Apple instead of paying Microsoft. In that respect, the iPad is even worse than Tablet PC.)
If I understand correctly, that sounds like just a risk for people who dual-boot, purchase second-hand machines, and so on. And that's something so I don't want to totally discount it. And Red Hat obviously needs to robustly handle those situations.
But nevertheless, it sounds like for people whose machines never run Windows, one global known-to-everyone-signing key purchased for the world for a mere $99, really would make it so that out-of-the-box "Windows 8 Certified" machines with default SecureBoot settings, would initially trust it so that people could can install and boot whatever OSes they want to. (This is the Great Satan?!?)
If Microsoft code is never run on your computer, then they can't sabotage its trust database. I bet for most Linux users, that's.. not fine (you can't buy second-hand machines and know that they'll still work) but.. live-with-able.
It is reasonable to demand privacy in your search history. I do not want my health insurance company to know that I was searching for information about a particular kind of disease.
I totally understand. It is very reasonable for you to not want them to know that.
What I'm wondering is: if you don't want someone else to know something, then why are you transmitting that information to a stranger? You even picked as your stranger, an inhuman machine (both literally (computer) and metaphorically (corporate)) who has no reponsibility to you, no empathy for you, and sense of discretion. And on top of that: YOU KNOW IN ADVANCE THAT THIS PARTICULAR BUSINESS IS TO PROFILE YOU! That's what Google does. That's what their search is for. That's why they offer it. And you knew that. This isn't even subtle, the way that some people haven't thought about what Facebook really is. It's Google, the goliath of advertising, and we're talking about this in 2012!
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate the technical legal jargon of "reasonable expectation of privacy" because it's so utterly contrary to the layman's usage of those words. It's unreasonable (reason is what tells you that you don't have privacy) and a person's expectation is that by disclosing the information to an out-of-control unbound party, the information will cease to be confidential.
The worse thing about it, is that when we pretend that such things are private, we undermine privacy. We make it so that policy is the only thing we have protecting us. And policy is almost the worst thing I can imagine to pull out of the toolbox, for handling this sort of thing.
Search anonymously. Encrypt things. Don't shout secrets. You have more power on your pocket-sized $300 computer than a hundred Congresses could ever give you.
Perhaps it's a competitor (or ex-girlfriend, or anyone else with a grudge) trying to get that company's site added to various blacklists. I'd think posting to Slashdot would be an above average site for doing that.
Yeah, that's the most damning thing about it. Even if you decide it's best to be very lenient with the government, the volume of search warrants to prosecutions suggests that most of the time that they asked for the warrant, it turned out that it was unjustified and probably did not actually lead to useful evidence.
In real life, if someone cried wolf that often, eventually the wolf-crier would lose credibility with you. If you thought back to all the times they previously cried wolf and gave persuasive arguments that there was a wolf, but now realize that most of those arguments were bullshit, then you would rethink what is truly a persuasive argument.
Yet the FISA court appears to not have this memory and intelligence. Less than my dog it seems. Believe me, it takes far fewer than THIRTY THOUSAND "psych! I didn't really throw the ball!" lessons for her to learn I didn't really throw the ball.
There are a couple things about Garrett's blog that have mystified me. I'm not saying he's wrong or anything, just that he says some things which can only possibly make sense, if there's something else which isn't be said. Seriously, please help filling in the blanks.
An alternative was producing some sort of overall Linux key. It turns out that this is also difficult, since it would mean finding an entity who was willing to take responsibility for managing signing or key distribution. That means having the ability to keep the root key absolutely secure and perform adequate validation of people asking for signing. That's expensive. Like millions of dollars expensive.
What happens if someone did that, but didn't take the "responsibility" seriously and didn't spend the millions of dollars? If there were a "Linux" signing key, but it were released to the public so that anyone (including malware authors) could sign their bootloader to UEFI's satisfaction, that would obviously nullify the point of secureboot but other than that, what would be the consequences?
Does someone have to post a bond to get a signing key (i.e. if you leak your key, it contractually costs you n megadollars)? Or is there some key revocation process, where that fact that some signing key is no longer trusted by the UEFI central authority, is somehow magically signalled to millions of Flash ROMs?
Neither of those ideas bear scrutiny. Is there a third deterrent?
Instead we're writing a very simple bootloader. This will do nothing other than load a real bootloader (grub 2), validate that it's signed with a Fedora signing key and then execute it.
(Where if I understand this correctly, the "very simple bootloader" is the thing that Microsoft is signing.) Why check that grub2 is signed, instead of just loading any old grub2? Obviously, the answer of course, is that doing that would defeat the point of secureboot but nevertheless it solves the problem created by UEFI. Other than making secureboot irrelevant, what would be the consequences of that?
Secure boot is built on the idea that all code that can touch the hardware directly is trusted, and any untrusted code must go through the trusted code. This can be circumvented if users can execute arbitrary code in the kernel. So, we'll be moving to requiring signed kernel modules and locking down certain aspects of kernel functionality.
Again: why? So what if the kernel or a kernel module lets you touch the hardware? At that point you've already booted and taken control of your machine, so secureboot can't stop you. Garrett's project has succeeded at letting Red Hat customers run Red Hat on their UEFI machines with default settings at this point. The problem is over, isn't it?
One idea that leaps to mind is that if Red Hat didn't say their bootloader would only load signed grubs2 and their grub2 would only load kernels which prohibit loading untrusted kernelspace code (e.g. unsigned modules), then Microsoft would refuse to sign their initial bootloader. But saying things and doing things are two different things. It's inconceivable that for a $99 fee, Microsoft has guaranteed that the Red Hat kernel never under any circumstances run not-Red-Hat-blessed code. I'm convinced their strategy can't be based on code-auditing or statements from those who create the code, that the code will never run other untrusted code. That's not viable. If you could audit a who kernel for $99 then Theo deRaady woudl be out of a hobby.
A lot of our users want to build their own kernels. Some even want to build their own distributions. Signing our bootloader and kernel is an impediment to that. We'll be providing all the tools we use for signing our binaries, but for obvious reasons we can't hand out our keys.
They all broke the same law. Not donating enough to the politicians and judges.
But how do we know they didn't donate enough? Without a right to face your didn't-bribe accuser with bribe receipts in the courtroom, there's serious risk that the value of bribes may be nullified. Without a free press publishing statistics to correlate donations with respect for the donator's privacy, how can the public make informed choices about if, or how much, they should donate?
Is that the society we want to live in? One where you slip government officials a little something on the side with the understanding that you will be treated as a preferred citizen, and then the government welches on the deal? That's not the social contract I was brought up to expect.
we always assume the creationists are wrong, but what if they aren't?
No assumptions are made. We know for sure that it's bullshit pseudoscience.
All the anti-mystics could be wrong, Quetzalcoatl or Odin or Jehova or FSM could come down from the heavens and reveal himself, saying, "Most of you were all atheists to my particular religion but ha ha, turns out I was the right guess," and then whichever deity it is could explain how they created the world and initially seeded life, but then that deity would follow up with, "but how your creationists ever happened to randomly guess The Truth, I have no idea, for their ramblings and justifications were all total bullshit and I never ever revealed any of My Truth to them, nor did any of them actually look at what I did reveal, nor did they use coherent arguments for how what they observed even remotely suggested what they guessed had happened. They were incredibly lucky liars."
That's how bullshit creationism is. It could be correct, and it would still not be science.
And multiple points of view are totally fine, even if they do include "higher powers" but if you throw away all of
getting your idea by looking at the world
citing evidence that supports your hypothesis
imagining what kind of evidence could disprove your hypothesis, and then looking for it
performing experiments which result in evidence which happens to confirm your hypothesis, though it could have disproven it, had you been wrong
then it's not science. Evolution went through all of that. Creationism hasn't gone through any of it.
Does 6489 this 6489 mean 6489 I have 6489 discovered 6489 a way to 6489 keep my 6489 industrial 6489 data 6489 from being 6489 stolen 6489 by Chinese 6489 spies?
Hi, welcome to the 21st century. I see you have just arrived. I know this will seem very strange to you 20th century visitors, but here's the deal: HBO doesn't give a damn about getting their money, except maybe in terms of discouraging it from happening. None of the media companies do. Their main business model is that whenever a customer comes to them and waves money in their face, the media company's response is "Fuck you! Get that fucking money out of my fucking face."
HBO is only going to be interested in this, if it comes with some assurance that customers will be unhappy, and will have increased motivation to stop sending their monthly checks.
The video industries know what Apple did to the poor bastards in music, who were all trying to go out of business but are now burdened with so many accursed sales directly trackable to Apple's store. Forewarned MPAA companies are not going to have their suicides sabotaged the same way -- they're not that oblivious.
Our cars come with all these different paint jobs:
Pink with orange dots
Pink with orange rainbows (warning: rainbow contains only one color, but still recognized as "probably gay" by 52% of people polled)
Pink with orange Jesus fishes
Pink with orange swastikas
Orange with pink swastikas (warning: car does not actually start)
Pink with reddish-orange swastikas
Pink with yellow swastikas
Pink with orange Coca Cola ad
How many more paint schemes do car manufacturers need to offer? Your complaints about our cars' appearances ring hollow. Quit your bitching!
(And why do people keep bringing up the fact that in 1997 we purchased a radical new law that no person is allowed to repaint their car, and that no person is allowed to manufacture or sell paint? WTF does that have to do with anything?)
As an American, I prefer to ignore your statistic for so many of us being creationists, and I am not interested in your so-called evidence that the figure is correct. The number just feels wrong, therefore it must be a lie. My gut tells me there aren't nearly that many creationists around here, because neither I nor the people I know, are anything like that!
Furthermore, I don't understand how many people could be creationists, so that's another argument that not nearly many of them could be.
Finally, your poll is biased and invalid, because.. because.. I want it to be.
retailers such as PC World and Comet will be expected to say things like "this computer is better than that one because it is Windows 8 certified".
The heart of the issue is: "expected by who?" Evidence (it was lame but at least I cited something; what have you got?) suggests it's not the people who buy the computers.
I've come to like complexity in villainous characters. I know, I know, it's all the rage now; I'm just saying this is a bandwagon I jumped on. They can't all be Saurons, give me a Jaime Lannister now and then.
Do you honestly think that retail outlets will even consider selling computers without those stickers?
That's a tough question. At first we all assume that the stickers must be pretty important, but my guess (pre-looking-at-evidence) is that most retail sellers would in fact be willing to do just that, since users never asked for those stickers in the first place; they're ads.
(What forces, other than MS's insistence, have created the need for these stickers? Have retailers, in fact, pressured OEMs for them?)
I know they're not retail outlets (exactly not what you asked about, I realize) but I can't help but notice that when you try to search for computers at newegg, MS certification isn't one of the search options. Even trivia such as 3.1GHz vs 3.3GHz CPU clockspeeds seems to be more important. (?!) At least among mail order customers, we have evidence that there exists no market force which favors certification.
At this point, yeah, I think I can honestly say that retail outlets will sell computers without those strickers. Sure, I could be wrong, but all intuition and evidence points me that way.
I wonder if I ought to visit a retail outlet and peel the stickers off all their computers. Then monitor how it effects the sales at that particular outlet. That would be a good experiment..
..if only it weren't so absurd. Just imagining the experiment, makes me think even more that the stickers don't matter a bit.
That would probably make for good website poll, alas at sites other than slashdot: "do you look for a MS certification sticker prior to buying a computer?"
My solution is better. My solution will allow you to to load Linux via secure boot, and effortlessly update grub or the kernel from your distribution, no matter which distribution that is (it doesn't have to be Red Hat) -- or you can compile the kernel or grub yourself, if you like, and it'll still get signed. My solution works for everyone. Just make me responsible for the root signing key and I will solve all the problems to almost everyone's satisfaction.
For maximum security, though, I do still need offsite backup volunteers. Wanna be one?
Has Linux sudenly been infected by rootkits? Did I miss a memo?
In all honesty, give us any UEFI-signed Linux kernel, and yes, Linux will be infected by rootkits (or rather "kernelspacekits"). It will be done on purpose, by the people who own the machines upon which Linux is installed, so that they can maintain their systems.
A UEFI-signed Linux kernel, like any other Linux kernel will start to become obsolete within a week or two, because Linux is without a doubt that fastest-improving and best-maintained OS in the history of computing, whether you think it's a good OS or not. (That's a fact, Jack. Sorry FreeBSD fans. I'm not dissing your OS, just saying you're not the mainstreamiest of the Free OSes and you don't have a Red Hat or Canonical or IBM paying its employees to work on your project full time.) Part of why you use Linux, is that you want to take advantage of the awesome maintenance that popular Free Software projects get, and Linux happens to be one of the most popular and well-funded ones. So you probably are going to sometimes want to install kernel updates.
Your UEFI-signed-for-$99 kernel will be that kernel's bootloader, and the loading will be accomplished via some exploit, possibly a deliberately-created one for that very purpose.
It would be a PITA to have to go into BIOS every time I wanted to switch to the other OS.
I'm pretty sure the way it works is that you would be doing that once, at the time you install your OS (or your Linux-based Dom0 or whatever virtualizer your're using).
That in itself is somewhat anti-competitive, and I think some people are concerned about that, but to techies it's just not a big deal. Their ARM stance is much more evil, and of course people are going to be suspicious that MS will try to bring their ARM evil to x86 on the next iteration, so 5-10 years from now they might really try to make it so that you're not allowed to run non-MS OSes.
Get all Linux distros to coordinate on a single Linux key and have the OEMs add it to their hardware. This is undesirable because nobody wants to be responsible for maintaining the One True Key, and even then there would still be OEMs who don't ship with it.
I'll do it. I hereby volunteer. Give me the key. I will take on this responsibility.
I know I can do this job quite effectively, too, without the "millions of dollars" in security and signing practices that Matthew Garret spoke of.
BTW, along the aforementioned line of saving money, I will need some help with offsite backups. Anyone want to help me? In order to keep this root signing key Absolutely Safe from loss, I intend to share it with at least One Million helpers. You won't catch me keeping all my eggs in one basket, no sir.
Why wouldn't this approach work? Why does Red Hat give a damn about the security of the key or loadable modules or drivers or anything else, at long as this approach makes their OS bootable?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like someone needs to do their policing inside their private residence, instead of in public. If you just leave a cop sitting on the front seat of your car where any citizen can see it, you shouldn't expect your cop habit to remain a private matter.
Maybe we should also blame HDTV's success for such high expectations of low price. People are talking about $800 (roughly the low end where > 1080 starts) as being "expensive" for a computer monitor. And if you don't need more than 1920x1080, then a quick look at prices confirms that $800 is expensive. Yet back in the mid/late 1990s I remember buying a pair of 19" CRT monitors (I still have them, but they're not in use -- don't remember the exact resolution but I'm pretty sure the horiz part was less than 1920) and they each cost about that much. And that was mid-range, not really high-end stuff.
$800 for a geek's monitor is not expensive. Either settle for mainstream (1920x1080) resolution (which if not ideal, isn't really terrible either) or pay real money, where the stuff you're looking for starts at around $800 and goes up from there -- just like it has always been.
We're all just frustrated that our hard disks are down to under a hundred bucks a Terabyte, SSDs are even viable, CPUs are offering incredible jaw-dropping value, immense amounts of RAM are dirt cheap, yet a few things (monitors and tape drives) aren't quite following the same trends. So let's bitch about monitors and tape drives. ;-)
Cool. but sometimes I hear weird rumors about Intel vpro, which make me wonder "what is a network?" If your CPU (?!) is listening for 3G radio signals, there's not just "management network" and "production network" but also "their network" although I guess you can always have your computer wear a tinfoil hat.
When he said "Tablet PC" he did not mean tablet form-factor personal computer. (One of the various shitty things about Microsoft is that they use highly generic product names; they would sell something called "Computer(TM)" if they thought they'd get away with it.) He is not talking about addressing a failure in Apple or RIM products; he is talking about addressing a failure in a specific Microsoft product that was called "Tablet PC."
(Microsoft sees Tablet PC's major failing, as its property of not making money for Microsoft, not locking people into an app store, etc. Doing exactly what Apple does, should be just fine for MS, except for the iPad's one horrible design flaw, where people are able to buy them by paying Apple instead of paying Microsoft. In that respect, the iPad is even worse than Tablet PC.)
Thank you.
If I understand correctly, that sounds like just a risk for people who dual-boot, purchase second-hand machines, and so on. And that's something so I don't want to totally discount it. And Red Hat obviously needs to robustly handle those situations.
But nevertheless, it sounds like for people whose machines never run Windows, one global known-to-everyone-signing key purchased for the world for a mere $99, really would make it so that out-of-the-box "Windows 8 Certified" machines with default SecureBoot settings, would initially trust it so that people could can install and boot whatever OSes they want to. (This is the Great Satan?!?)
If Microsoft code is never run on your computer, then they can't sabotage its trust database. I bet for most Linux users, that's .. not fine (you can't buy second-hand machines and know that they'll still work) but .. live-with-able.
I totally understand. It is very reasonable for you to not want them to know that.
What I'm wondering is: if you don't want someone else to know something, then why are you transmitting that information to a stranger? You even picked as your stranger, an inhuman machine (both literally (computer) and metaphorically (corporate)) who has no reponsibility to you, no empathy for you, and sense of discretion. And on top of that: YOU KNOW IN ADVANCE THAT THIS PARTICULAR BUSINESS IS TO PROFILE YOU! That's what Google does. That's what their search is for. That's why they offer it. And you knew that. This isn't even subtle, the way that some people haven't thought about what Facebook really is. It's Google, the goliath of advertising, and we're talking about this in 2012!
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate the technical legal jargon of "reasonable expectation of privacy" because it's so utterly contrary to the layman's usage of those words. It's unreasonable (reason is what tells you that you don't have privacy) and a person's expectation is that by disclosing the information to an out-of-control unbound party, the information will cease to be confidential.
The worse thing about it, is that when we pretend that such things are private, we undermine privacy. We make it so that policy is the only thing we have protecting us. And policy is almost the worst thing I can imagine to pull out of the toolbox, for handling this sort of thing.
Search anonymously. Encrypt things. Don't shout secrets. You have more power on your pocket-sized $300 computer than a hundred Congresses could ever give you.
Perhaps it's a competitor (or ex-girlfriend, or anyone else with a grudge) trying to get that company's site added to various blacklists. I'd think posting to Slashdot would be an above average site for doing that.
Yeah, that's the most damning thing about it. Even if you decide it's best to be very lenient with the government, the volume of search warrants to prosecutions suggests that most of the time that they asked for the warrant, it turned out that it was unjustified and probably did not actually lead to useful evidence.
In real life, if someone cried wolf that often, eventually the wolf-crier would lose credibility with you. If you thought back to all the times they previously cried wolf and gave persuasive arguments that there was a wolf, but now realize that most of those arguments were bullshit, then you would rethink what is truly a persuasive argument.
Yet the FISA court appears to not have this memory and intelligence. Less than my dog it seems. Believe me, it takes far fewer than THIRTY THOUSAND "psych! I didn't really throw the ball!" lessons for her to learn I didn't really throw the ball.
Wow. I swear I used a real keyboard for that, not a tablet. Oh well.
There are a couple things about Garrett's blog that have mystified me. I'm not saying he's wrong or anything, just that he says some things which can only possibly make sense, if there's something else which isn't be said. Seriously, please help filling in the blanks.
What happens if someone did that, but didn't take the "responsibility" seriously and didn't spend the millions of dollars? If there were a "Linux" signing key, but it were released to the public so that anyone (including malware authors) could sign their bootloader to UEFI's satisfaction, that would obviously nullify the point of secureboot but other than that, what would be the consequences?
Does someone have to post a bond to get a signing key (i.e. if you leak your key, it contractually costs you n megadollars)? Or is there some key revocation process, where that fact that some signing key is no longer trusted by the UEFI central authority, is somehow magically signalled to millions of Flash ROMs?
Neither of those ideas bear scrutiny. Is there a third deterrent?
(Where if I understand this correctly, the "very simple bootloader" is the thing that Microsoft is signing.) Why check that grub2 is signed, instead of just loading any old grub2? Obviously, the answer of course, is that doing that would defeat the point of secureboot but nevertheless it solves the problem created by UEFI. Other than making secureboot irrelevant, what would be the consequences of that?
Again: why? So what if the kernel or a kernel module lets you touch the hardware? At that point you've already booted and taken control of your machine, so secureboot can't stop you. Garrett's project has succeeded at letting Red Hat customers run Red Hat on their UEFI machines with default settings at this point. The problem is over, isn't it?
One idea that leaps to mind is that if Red Hat didn't say their bootloader would only load signed grubs2 and their grub2 would only load kernels which prohibit loading untrusted kernelspace code (e.g. unsigned modules), then Microsoft would refuse to sign their initial bootloader. But saying things and doing things are two different things. It's inconceivable that for a $99 fee, Microsoft has guaranteed that the Red Hat kernel never under any circumstances run not-Red-Hat-blessed code. I'm convinced their strategy can't be based on code-auditing or statements from those who create the code, that the code will never run other untrusted code. That's not viable. If you could audit a who kernel for $99 then Theo deRaady woudl be out of a hobby.
"Obvio
But how do we know they didn't donate enough? Without a right to face your didn't-bribe accuser with bribe receipts in the courtroom, there's serious risk that the value of bribes may be nullified. Without a free press publishing statistics to correlate donations with respect for the donator's privacy, how can the public make informed choices about if, or how much, they should donate?
Is that the society we want to live in? One where you slip government officials a little something on the side with the understanding that you will be treated as a preferred citizen, and then the government welches on the deal? That's not the social contract I was brought up to expect.
Was the Manhattan Project secret?
Those people in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge are doing something. Are they related? What are they doing?
There was a bright flash somewhere in White Sands. How did they do it? Did it have something to do with Los Alamos?
Something spectacularly bad just happened at Hiroshima. What was it, and how did they do it?
X37-B is landing. What was it doing? And if you ever find out what it was doing, will you know how they did it?
No assumptions are made. We know for sure that it's bullshit pseudoscience.
All the anti-mystics could be wrong, Quetzalcoatl or Odin or Jehova or FSM could come down from the heavens and reveal himself, saying, "Most of you were all atheists to my particular religion but ha ha, turns out I was the right guess," and then whichever deity it is could explain how they created the world and initially seeded life, but then that deity would follow up with, "but how your creationists ever happened to randomly guess The Truth, I have no idea, for their ramblings and justifications were all total bullshit and I never ever revealed any of My Truth to them, nor did any of them actually look at what I did reveal, nor did they use coherent arguments for how what they observed even remotely suggested what they guessed had happened. They were incredibly lucky liars."
That's how bullshit creationism is. It could be correct, and it would still not be science.
And multiple points of view are totally fine, even if they do include "higher powers" but if you throw away all of
then it's not science. Evolution went through all of that. Creationism hasn't gone through any of it.
Does 6489 this 6489 mean 6489 I have 6489 discovered 6489 a way to 6489 keep my 6489 industrial 6489 data 6489 from being 6489 stolen 6489 by Chinese 6489 spies?
Hi, welcome to the 21st century. I see you have just arrived. I know this will seem very strange to you 20th century visitors, but here's the deal: HBO doesn't give a damn about getting their money, except maybe in terms of discouraging it from happening. None of the media companies do. Their main business model is that whenever a customer comes to them and waves money in their face, the media company's response is "Fuck you! Get that fucking money out of my fucking face."
HBO is only going to be interested in this, if it comes with some assurance that customers will be unhappy, and will have increased motivation to stop sending their monthly checks.
The video industries know what Apple did to the poor bastards in music, who were all trying to go out of business but are now burdened with so many accursed sales directly trackable to Apple's store. Forewarned MPAA companies are not going to have their suicides sabotaged the same way -- they're not that oblivious.
Our cars come with all these different paint jobs:
How many more paint schemes do car manufacturers need to offer? Your complaints about our cars' appearances ring hollow. Quit your bitching!
(And why do people keep bringing up the fact that in 1997 we purchased a radical new law that no person is allowed to repaint their car, and that no person is allowed to manufacture or sell paint? WTF does that have to do with anything?)
As an American, I prefer to ignore your statistic for so many of us being creationists, and I am not interested in your so-called evidence that the figure is correct. The number just feels wrong, therefore it must be a lie. My gut tells me there aren't nearly that many creationists around here, because neither I nor the people I know, are anything like that!
Furthermore, I don't understand how many people could be creationists, so that's another argument that not nearly many of them could be.
Finally, your poll is biased and invalid, because .. because .. I want it to be.
I tried but they wouldn't answer the phone.
The heart of the issue is: "expected by who?" Evidence (it was lame but at least I cited something; what have you got?) suggests it's not the people who buy the computers.
I've come to like complexity in villainous characters. I know, I know, it's all the rage now; I'm just saying this is a bandwagon I jumped on. They can't all be Saurons, give me a Jaime Lannister now and then.
That's a tough question. At first we all assume that the stickers must be pretty important, but my guess (pre-looking-at-evidence) is that most retail sellers would in fact be willing to do just that, since users never asked for those stickers in the first place; they're ads.
(What forces, other than MS's insistence, have created the need for these stickers? Have retailers, in fact, pressured OEMs for them?)
I know they're not retail outlets (exactly not what you asked about, I realize) but I can't help but notice that when you try to search for computers at newegg, MS certification isn't one of the search options. Even trivia such as 3.1GHz vs 3.3GHz CPU clockspeeds seems to be more important. (?!) At least among mail order customers, we have evidence that there exists no market force which favors certification.
At this point, yeah, I think I can honestly say that retail outlets will sell computers without those strickers. Sure, I could be wrong, but all intuition and evidence points me that way.
I wonder if I ought to visit a retail outlet and peel the stickers off all their computers. Then monitor how it effects the sales at that particular outlet. That would be a good experiment..
That would probably make for good website poll, alas at sites other than slashdot: "do you look for a MS certification sticker prior to buying a computer?"
My solution is better. My solution will allow you to to load Linux via secure boot, and effortlessly update grub or the kernel from your distribution, no matter which distribution that is (it doesn't have to be Red Hat) -- or you can compile the kernel or grub yourself, if you like, and it'll still get signed. My solution works for everyone. Just make me responsible for the root signing key and I will solve all the problems to almost everyone's satisfaction.
For maximum security, though, I do still need offsite backup volunteers. Wanna be one?
In all honesty, give us any UEFI-signed Linux kernel, and yes, Linux will be infected by rootkits (or rather "kernelspacekits"). It will be done on purpose, by the people who own the machines upon which Linux is installed, so that they can maintain their systems.
A UEFI-signed Linux kernel, like any other Linux kernel will start to become obsolete within a week or two, because Linux is without a doubt that fastest-improving and best-maintained OS in the history of computing, whether you think it's a good OS or not. (That's a fact, Jack. Sorry FreeBSD fans. I'm not dissing your OS, just saying you're not the mainstreamiest of the Free OSes and you don't have a Red Hat or Canonical or IBM paying its employees to work on your project full time.) Part of why you use Linux, is that you want to take advantage of the awesome maintenance that popular Free Software projects get, and Linux happens to be one of the most popular and well-funded ones. So you probably are going to sometimes want to install kernel updates.
Your UEFI-signed-for-$99 kernel will be that kernel's bootloader, and the loading will be accomplished via some exploit, possibly a deliberately-created one for that very purpose.
I'm pretty sure the way it works is that you would be doing that once, at the time you install your OS (or your Linux-based Dom0 or whatever virtualizer your're using).
That in itself is somewhat anti-competitive, and I think some people are concerned about that, but to techies it's just not a big deal. Their ARM stance is much more evil, and of course people are going to be suspicious that MS will try to bring their ARM evil to x86 on the next iteration, so 5-10 years from now they might really try to make it so that you're not allowed to run non-MS OSes.
I'll do it. I hereby volunteer. Give me the key. I will take on this responsibility.
I know I can do this job quite effectively, too, without the "millions of dollars" in security and signing practices that Matthew Garret spoke of.
BTW, along the aforementioned line of saving money, I will need some help with offsite backups. Anyone want to help me? In order to keep this root signing key Absolutely Safe from loss, I intend to share it with at least One Million helpers. You won't catch me keeping all my eggs in one basket, no sir.
Why wouldn't this approach work? Why does Red Hat give a damn about the security of the key or loadable modules or drivers or anything else, at long as this approach makes their OS bootable?