Considering every single essential part of the operating system that systemd has "absorbed" so far has also been successfully forked, and a backwards compatible version of that does not depend on systemd is available, I'm not sure how much of a problem the picture you paint above is going to be.
The "ocean of sysd penguins" as you put it, does not represent any kind of actual risk that Slackware would be assimilated into the systemd culture. A completely new fork of Linux, called something else obviously, and that remains systemd-free is actually more likely.
Slackware does not force you to use X. By default, it starts in console mode, and does not use a gui at startup like many other distros do (although I understand it is possible to set up a slackware system to boot into a gui, I have never personally tried it, so I don't actually know what's involved in it).
It will be interesting to see how long Slackware can resist systemd.
Only if you think long waits on the order of "never" would qualify as interesting. It's my understanding that many of people who happen to have significant influence in the direction that Slackware takes are quite opposed to the idea of systemd's inclusion in Slackware, so if one wants an otherwise "slackware-like" system that uses systemd, it will have to be a fork.
Fine... but even that's not an inherent problem with having such things connected to the internet, but a problem with how it may be implemented.
And for what it's worth, if you control the gateway, it is always possible to make a machine behind it believe it has unfettered access to the internet if you know what the device is expecting to see. If you don't, then obviously you can't control it in the first place... and arguably, the device isn't even really yours, much like the smart meters in your home that measure electricity usage. But this lack of control is not what IoT is about.... it is the connectivity itself.
It doesn't matter if it uses a strong encryption if you know the protocol. Https, for example... instead of making https requests to outside, it can make https requests to a local machine, which because it was the destination machine as far as your device is concerned, would have access to the content of the message, and can, based on what that machine can know about the content, can direct the query as necessary to outside, if it is deemed appropriate. The local machine would then forward replies back to the originating device. It breaks end-to-end connectivity, but you can still control what content goes in or out if you really want to.
Of course, if it uses a proprietary encrypted protocol, then it gets a little stranger, but if it's going that far then it probably isn't depending on you to provide network connectivity in the first place either.
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote... I said that I never said it wasn't connected to the internet. If you are the one who provides the device's internet connectivity, then you can control and limit what the device sends or receives, perhaps using another device on your network as a relay point between the device and the internet at large, perhaps breaking end-to-end connectivity, but this can easily be done relatively transparently, as NAT currently does (although one does not necessarily need to use NAT specifically to achieve this), and without any participation on behalf of the end-point communicating machines.
As I said elsewhere, I was expecting that generall speaking you would have to provide the communication facility yourself. That it might use its own communication facilities instead of what you provide, and that being a potential privacy problem is not an inherent problem with connecting everything to the internet, but how such connectivity is being chosen to be implemented.
If the fridge transmitted untrustworthy data, you would use a firewall to block all of it... and probably not allow it to have a public-facing IP address at all. To allow remote access to information it might provide, you would use another local machine on your network that does have a public facing IP (or can otherwise be accessed remotely). Instead of querying your fridge directly, you would query that other machine instead, which could pass on a request to your fridge about its contents on the same network, but would only transmit the information about the fridge contents that you actually asked for. Any pictures of your crotch that your fridge wanted to transmit would stay inside of your network, and would never go anywhere else.
The solution I was addressing assumes that such devices are dependant upon you to provide them with the necessary connectivity. If they are not, then obviously all bets are off. That's not a problem with the concept of having every kind of device being connected to the internet, in general... that's only a problem with the manner in which it might get implemented. Considering it would probably be more expensive to do it that way, I'd be surprised if it ever becomes particularly common or the norm.
I didn't say it wasn't connected to the internet.... I said it could be behind a firewall that controls what goes in and out.
Alternatively, you could put it on a local ip-range only subnet of your network, and have a transparent network-layer proxy which handles outgoing requests, and correctly routes any responses to them, but any actual incoming requests are discarded, behaving similarly to NAT.
And all 60 of them are solvable with a firewall. The only content that actually would get out from your network would be the content that *you* select.
So instead of selling something that they can't sell as many of as they used to because the market might be getting saturated, they are switching to selling something that where the market isn't that saturated because there isn't as high a demand for it in the first place?
The key phrase here is the notion of "private home viewing"... and where works are licensed for such, if the viewing is occurring inside of a privately owned residence that is not being used in sort of commercial, public, or communal capacity, then the phrase is applicable, and if the work is licensed for viewing as such, then the number of people that may happen to be in attendance is irrelevant. Typically, dvds or other movie media that you might buy from a store are licensed for such viewing, and so the terms would apply, regardless of how many people are in your home.
If the information is public, then there is no way to even necessarily know it was obtained in the first place from a website, let alone that a scraper may have been used.
As I said, I know what the CFAA is, but I don't see how it prevents people from doing otherwise lawful research for instance... At most, it only prevents you from doing research with someone else's data.... but then a good researcher that was not being lazy would collect their own data, and not rely on data that did not belong to them anyways.
...since Western Civilization now tells us that things like gender and race have no basis in concrete reality.
Things like that have no lawful basis for certain types of discrimination, but it is wholly erroneous to say they have no lawful basis in concrete reality.
One example of a legal type of discrimination based on sex would be one's right to discriminate on the gender of a person that they may want in a roommate, when the roommate shares any of either a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen with the other person. One is obviously not required to discriminate based on sex for those reasons, of course, but it is but one example of where it is entirely legal to discriminate based on gender.
Thus a security researcher trying to analyze a system is technically committing a felony under the CFAA as it doesn't make any exceptions
It doesn't have to make exceptions.... the law prohibits *UNAUTHORIZED* access to a computer system. If you own the computer system yourself, then who else is supposedly supposed to be authorizing you to access it? If someone else controls authorization to access to some piece of property, then by definition that property belongs to THEM. Unless there is another law that also prohibits private people from owning personal computers, the CFAA does absolutely nothing to stop anyone from accessing anything that they want on the devices that they have purchased for themselves. As a secondary point, how the hell would they supposedly even know, anyway?
I read the article... it says that the CFAA somehow prevents people from doing legitimate research, but fails to even give a single example of actually how this happens. How does the law that is supposed prevent computer fraud stop a person from doing research, exactly?
I will consider having a phone with ads on its lock screen when a company is paying me to own it, and that is over and above fully paying for the data plan necessary to deliver such ads to the phone.
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Considering every single essential part of the operating system that systemd has "absorbed" so far has also been successfully forked, and a backwards compatible version of that does not depend on systemd is available, I'm not sure how much of a problem the picture you paint above is going to be.
The "ocean of sysd penguins" as you put it, does not represent any kind of actual risk that Slackware would be assimilated into the systemd culture. A completely new fork of Linux, called something else obviously, and that remains systemd-free is actually more likely.
Slackware does not force you to use X. By default, it starts in console mode, and does not use a gui at startup like many other distros do (although I understand it is possible to set up a slackware system to boot into a gui, I have never personally tried it, so I don't actually know what's involved in it).
Oldest, sure... but behind? least developed? Where are you getting those ideas from?
Only if you think long waits on the order of "never" would qualify as interesting. It's my understanding that many of people who happen to have significant influence in the direction that Slackware takes are quite opposed to the idea of systemd's inclusion in Slackware, so if one wants an otherwise "slackware-like" system that uses systemd, it will have to be a fork.
I saw what you did there.
And for what it's worth, if you control the gateway, it is always possible to make a machine behind it believe it has unfettered access to the internet if you know what the device is expecting to see. If you don't, then obviously you can't control it in the first place... and arguably, the device isn't even really yours, much like the smart meters in your home that measure electricity usage. But this lack of control is not what IoT is about.... it is the connectivity itself.
It doesn't matter if it uses a strong encryption if you know the protocol. Https, for example... instead of making https requests to outside, it can make https requests to a local machine, which because it was the destination machine as far as your device is concerned, would have access to the content of the message, and can, based on what that machine can know about the content, can direct the query as necessary to outside, if it is deemed appropriate. The local machine would then forward replies back to the originating device. It breaks end-to-end connectivity, but you can still control what content goes in or out if you really want to.
Of course, if it uses a proprietary encrypted protocol, then it gets a little stranger, but if it's going that far then it probably isn't depending on you to provide network connectivity in the first place either.
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote... I said that I never said it wasn't connected to the internet. If you are the one who provides the device's internet connectivity, then you can control and limit what the device sends or receives, perhaps using another device on your network as a relay point between the device and the internet at large, perhaps breaking end-to-end connectivity, but this can easily be done relatively transparently, as NAT currently does (although one does not necessarily need to use NAT specifically to achieve this), and without any participation on behalf of the end-point communicating machines.
As I said elsewhere, I was expecting that generall speaking you would have to provide the communication facility yourself. That it might use its own communication facilities instead of what you provide, and that being a potential privacy problem is not an inherent problem with connecting everything to the internet, but how such connectivity is being chosen to be implemented.
If the fridge transmitted untrustworthy data, you would use a firewall to block all of it... and probably not allow it to have a public-facing IP address at all. To allow remote access to information it might provide, you would use another local machine on your network that does have a public facing IP (or can otherwise be accessed remotely). Instead of querying your fridge directly, you would query that other machine instead, which could pass on a request to your fridge about its contents on the same network, but would only transmit the information about the fridge contents that you actually asked for. Any pictures of your crotch that your fridge wanted to transmit would stay inside of your network, and would never go anywhere else.
The solution I was addressing assumes that such devices are dependant upon you to provide them with the necessary connectivity. If they are not, then obviously all bets are off. That's not a problem with the concept of having every kind of device being connected to the internet, in general... that's only a problem with the manner in which it might get implemented. Considering it would probably be more expensive to do it that way, I'd be surprised if it ever becomes particularly common or the norm.
I didn't say it wasn't connected to the internet.... I said it could be behind a firewall that controls what goes in and out.
Alternatively, you could put it on a local ip-range only subnet of your network, and have a transparent network-layer proxy which handles outgoing requests, and correctly routes any responses to them, but any actual incoming requests are discarded, behaving similarly to NAT.
And all 60 of them are solvable with a firewall. The only content that actually would get out from your network would be the content that *you* select.
So instead of selling something that they can't sell as many of as they used to because the market might be getting saturated, they are switching to selling something that where the market isn't that saturated because there isn't as high a demand for it in the first place?
Yeah, that makes sense.
The key phrase here is the notion of "private home viewing"... and where works are licensed for such, if the viewing is occurring inside of a privately owned residence that is not being used in sort of commercial, public, or communal capacity, then the phrase is applicable, and if the work is licensed for viewing as such, then the number of people that may happen to be in attendance is irrelevant. Typically, dvds or other movie media that you might buy from a store are licensed for such viewing, and so the terms would apply, regardless of how many people are in your home.
If the information is public, then there is no way to even necessarily know it was obtained in the first place from a website, let alone that a scraper may have been used.
As I said, I know what the CFAA is, but I don't see how it prevents people from doing otherwise lawful research for instance... At most, it only prevents you from doing research with someone else's data.... but then a good researcher that was not being lazy would collect their own data, and not rely on data that did not belong to them anyways.
Things like that have no lawful basis for certain types of discrimination, but it is wholly erroneous to say they have no lawful basis in concrete reality.
One example of a legal type of discrimination based on sex would be one's right to discriminate on the gender of a person that they may want in a roommate, when the roommate shares any of either a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen with the other person. One is obviously not required to discriminate based on sex for those reasons, of course, but it is but one example of where it is entirely legal to discriminate based on gender.
Of course you can.... if you do a proper survey of other people, and compare their results... with their permission, of course.
Obviously you don't own the information on someone else's website though... even if they made the information public.
My question remains... how does this law prevent lawful research?
Or does it just prevent lazy research?
No... they are giving a *DISCOUNT*... it is not paying for it, let alone paying me to actually use it.
It doesn't have to make exceptions.... the law prohibits *UNAUTHORIZED* access to a computer system. If you own the computer system yourself, then who else is supposedly supposed to be authorizing you to access it? If someone else controls authorization to access to some piece of property, then by definition that property belongs to THEM. Unless there is another law that also prohibits private people from owning personal computers, the CFAA does absolutely nothing to stop anyone from accessing anything that they want on the devices that they have purchased for themselves. As a secondary point, how the hell would they supposedly even know, anyway?
I read the article... it says that the CFAA somehow prevents people from doing legitimate research, but fails to even give a single example of actually how this happens. How does the law that is supposed prevent computer fraud stop a person from doing research, exactly?
I will consider having a phone with ads on its lock screen when a company is paying me to own it, and that is over and above fully paying for the data plan necessary to deliver such ads to the phone.