...don't put yourself into position where you can be accused.
Your post boils down to "if you want never to be accused of rape, don't EVER make the acquaintance of ANY women". Following your way of thinking, if I don't want to risk lung cancer, then I should simply stop breathing.
The purpose of civilized society is to allow us to go peacefully about our day-to-day activities, not to have us always looking over our shoulders and acting out of fear and distrust.
That depends. If the security flaws were previously unknown outside my company, I'd expect to lose my job. But if I was pointing out what the whole world already knew, I wouldn't expect reprisals. Then again, I've always worked for at-least-somewhat-reasonable companies, not the 'batshit insane', (as one other poster put it), US government.
Wow. Airport 'security' is a joke, and almost everyone knows it; a Google search for "security theater" turns up over a half-million results. Yet this guy tells us something that we're all aware of already, and gets put throught the mill because of it. It's bad enough when people get crucified for revealing some hidden truth, but when it happens to someone who is simply stating the obvious, that's just sad.
Just what ARE we paying these clowns for anyway? They should go back to allowing knitting needles on planes; pissed off Grandmas would probably deal with terrorists a whole lot more effectively than these clueless idiots.
...Some kind of search engine where I type in words and the search engine returns only pages that contain those words. Can Google work on that next?
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm sick and tired of getting hundreds of totally irrelevant search results because Google can't follow its own 'allintext:' directive, and it just plain pisses me off that there's no way of forcing the engine to perform an EXACT character match, i.e. one that matches punctuation and case. And don't get me started on Google's assumption that I MUST have wanted different search criteria than I entered, forcing me to click again to search for what I damned-well entered in the first place. Google really needs to get the basics right, instead of working hard to make results even less useful than they already are.
I used to say of Microsoft "They always just know what I want, and they're almost always wrong". Lately, I've started saying the same thing about Google.
...the geeks hear him, and keep merrily on with technological progress. Not that his concerns are never valid, but he has become the Chicken Little of geekdom.
Perhaps the rest of us have the task of making sure it's not just 'the geeks' who hear him. Stallman has a valid and important point here, and I suspect most Slashdotters agree with him. But the non-geeks are the ones who most need to hear the message, and they'll only hear it above the din of Google's grand pronouncements if we all scream it out loud, long, and often.
RTFA folks! The summary is, at best, misleading. From TFA:
"He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government."
The request is to not PROPAGATE the material; note that there isn't even a suggestion to not READ the material.
I support Wikileaks, but under the circumstances the State Department's position in this matter seems reasonable.
There are a number of basic logistical concerns. It would be nice to have a freight tunnel system, but it is fraught with a number of issues.
With slight re-wording, ALL of the issues you mentioned apply to the Internet. Yet in spite of 'basic logistical concerns' and 'fraught with a number of issues', we're still using it to carry on this discussion.
Never underestimate man's ingenuity, tenacity, and persistence. If it's a worthwhile concept, it will probably be built, and (eventually) it will probably work just fine, TYVM.
Whenever I see family/friends/co-workers using external drives for "backup" I have to repress the urge to launch into a lecture on the absurdity of relying on a local, always mounted backup.
So just tell them to unmount/disconnect after backing up! While you're at it, counsel them to get at least one additional drive to put into backup rotation. As far as offsite backup, a 32GB stick with the really critical data copied to it may be better than trusting your data to a third party.
External drives, along with memory sticks, are very effective when used properly.
Barnes and Noble is, first and foremost, a book retailer, dependant on and beholden to publishers. Since rooting is the first step towards defeating Digital Restrictions Management, I suspect that B&N will fight rooting as hard as they can for as long as they can, regardless of the Nook's pricing model.
Although your comment was modded up as 'Funny', I suspect that wasn't your intent.
There's an important idea here; not the suing part, but the patenting part. The FOSS community should organize itself to patent EVERYTHING it does that's even remotely patentable. Everyone who wanted to use the software commercially would then have to sign a "For one dollar received and other valuable considerations" licensing agreement that, while effectively keeping the software free, would explicitly support the FOSS licence, making it easier to pursue legal action against violators.
Where would the money for this come from? Well, I think a good chunk of it would come from the greed-headed businesses that would patent blue sky and green grass if they could do so. Because preventing your competitiors from having a patent that locks you out of key technological innovations, is almost as good as locking them out of those same innovations yourself. If a corporation can't gain exclusivity over a patent, it will support a 'level playing field' approach just to ensure that none of their competitors can gain exclusivity.
Oh so true! And further to this point, Janet Napolitano says "I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful." Gee, Janet, do you think forcing your citizenry to live in constant fear while they're being x-rayed, poked, prodded, and humiliated, all while having their last vestiges of privacy, dignity, and autonomy destroyed, might just cause more than a few someones to become terrorists?
Freedom is NOT won by finding loopholes around laws but by fighting bad laws.
I agree, but bad laws must be fought on multiple fronts. One of these fronts should be the widespread use of strong encryption, both because it makes the law ineffective and because it protects people's privacy while we're waiting out the (probably long, possibly infinite) time for the law to be repealed. In fact, this may be the only effective way of fighting the law: as a Canadian I can tell you that our governments are largely unresponsive to public pressure, and the police agencies care even less about the will of the people.
Unfortunately, history has shown that the majority of my fellow Canadians are blissfully, and often willfully, ignorant of and/or indifferent to the eventual consequencess of letting our government get away with this crap.
When my father was alive we commented on how similar our ears were, right down to the same congenital ripples on the upper edges of our respective right ears. When he died, I inherited his custom-fitted hearing aids, and although I have no need for them, (yet), I put them into my ears just for a lark. They fit me PERFECTLY - no gap, no looseness, no discomfort, and no visible gaps or aberrations in shape.
So maybe ears aren't as close to being unique as has been suggested.
Right on brother! I've just spent about 18 months using Linux almost exclusively, (there are a few things that I can't run even under Wine or VirtualBox), and I'm now preparing to return to Windows. I hate Micro$oft, I love the idea of Linux and FOSS, and yet I'm going back to the evil empire. Why?
First I should explain that I'm quite capable of using the CLI to issue commands, configure stuff, etc. And I've successfully edited more config files than I really wanted to, (often piecing together bits of info from the web because I couldn't find all the relevant info in one place). The point being that I'm not a technophobe or a dufus. I'm primarily a hardware designer, but I've written some software, I've used computers heavily since DOS 3.0, and I'm a fairly sophisticated user. But, I really DON'T WANT TO SPEND MY LIFE figuring out why Wine doesn't work any more, or figuring out a workaround for the fact that the structure of CUPS doesn't allow cups-pdf to give me the opportunity to specify my own filename and destination directory on-the-fly. I don't want to waste my time launching a separate app to search for files because Nautilus doesn't have an integrated search function, only to find that the search program doesn't allow me to change file properties. I don't want to waste time installing Dolphin with all its aesthetic ugliness and K-bloat in order to have a decent file manager, only to discover that Dolphin doesn't do partial filename searches and doesn't TELL me that it can't do them. I don't want to have to chase around my system trying to find icons to reassociate with binaries because an update broke the associations somehow.
And I could go on and on in this vein, but I think I've made my point. I use my computer largely for work, and the more time I spend trying to make it functional, the less time I have for either work or recreation. A little bit of dicking around with my computer is fun and educational, (and in fact I did a lot more than 'a little bit' when I first adopted Linux), but beyond that it just gets tiresome and frustrating. I'm much more interested in doing things WITH my computer than I am in doing things TO my computer. When I first started using computers, they were fascinating in and of themselves. Now I want them to be like my car; know a little bit about how they work and how to fix them, expect to do some maintenance and repairs occasionally, but mostly just hop in and drive without a second thought. And as frustrating and far-from-perfect as I've found Windows to be, in my experience it's a lot closer to that ideal than Linux is.
Seriously, it's not that hard. Why the hell are they making it so complicated?
Hard or not, it IS Digital Restrictions Management, and it WILL be defeated, probably in less time than it takes to implement it in the first place.
Like it or not, the 'digitalization' of content has irretrievably altered the businesses of producing, providing, and distributing music, books, pictures, and movies. DRM, and attempts at legislating people's behaviour vis-a-vis sharing or copying content, are wasteful, fruitless, and ultimately doomed efforts to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Moral arguments are beside the point here, because they simply won't change people's behaviour. Besides, so many 'guardians of the moral high ground' have themselves been caught infringing, that the arguments they make have no force anyway.
It's probably been said a million times, but it bears repeating: digital technologies and the Internet have made the old content creation, ownership, and business models obsolete. Efforts to enforce 'correct' behaviour through DRM, legislation, social pressure, etc., are only diverting precious resources from the necessary task of finding new ways to conduct the business of creativity.
... but most surveillance seems not to be done by the government any more but by corporations.
Implicit in that statement is the silly idea that the government and the corporations are separate entities. Where have you been for the last few decades?
because it will shortly result in major advances in image recognition/parsing technology. I foresee a Firefox addon that will hide the 'ad-CAPTCHA', substituting a button for the user to click on. The CAPTCHA recognition process will happen transparently. Of course this will break CAPTCHA altogether, but we can lay that one at the feet of the advertising industry.
Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off programmer when faced with the 'all your eyeballs are belong to us' attitude of some arrogant advertising wonk.
Thanks for providing a stepping-off point for my favourite rant of late. Speaking of Nautilus usability issues, how about fixing the following file browser deficiencies?
- Click-and-drag to select files does not exist - No integrated file search feature - The separate file search program provided in Gnome doesn't allow for even viewing, much less editing, a file's properties - User date format preferences are not honoured in file open/save dialogs - When a user clicks on a soft-link to open the file browser, Nautilus reports the soft-link path rather than the target path - The whole mime-types mess that doesn't readily allow the user to assign an icon based on file extension
I hear a lot lately about all of the 'improvements' that are coming for the Gnome UI. Hey guys, how about fixing the kind of basic stuff that Micro$oft got right 12 years ago, before you give us more whizzbang eye candy that has us all re-training ourselves on where to move the mouse cursor in order to minimize, maximize, or close a damned window?
I'm not much of a programmer, but as a Debian user I agree whole-heartedly. I use Gnome, and I really don't like the seemingly superfluous K-bloat I get stuck with when installing some packages. If this proposal is adopted, then anything Qt-related will bring in still more unnecessary bloat.
BTW, this kind of bloat seems to be on the increase throughout Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
...don't put yourself into position where you can be accused.
Your post boils down to "if you want never to be accused of rape, don't EVER make the acquaintance of ANY women". Following your way of thinking, if I don't want to risk lung cancer, then I should simply stop breathing.
The purpose of civilized society is to allow us to go peacefully about our day-to-day activities, not to have us always looking over our shoulders and acting out of fear and distrust.
The result? A win/win/win situation.
Don't you mean a 'lin/lin/lin situation'?
That depends. If the security flaws were previously unknown outside my company, I'd expect to lose my job. But if I was pointing out what the whole world already knew, I wouldn't expect reprisals. Then again, I've always worked for at-least-somewhat-reasonable companies, not the 'batshit insane', (as one other poster put it), US government.
Wow. Airport 'security' is a joke, and almost everyone knows it; a Google search for "security theater" turns up over a half-million results. Yet this guy tells us something that we're all aware of already, and gets put throught the mill because of it. It's bad enough when people get crucified for revealing some hidden truth, but when it happens to someone who is simply stating the obvious, that's just sad.
Just what ARE we paying these clowns for anyway? They should go back to allowing knitting needles on planes; pissed off Grandmas would probably deal with terrorists a whole lot more effectively than these clueless idiots.
...Some kind of search engine where I type in words and the search engine returns only pages that contain those words. Can Google work on that next?
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm sick and tired of getting hundreds of totally irrelevant search results because Google can't follow its own 'allintext:' directive, and it just plain pisses me off that there's no way of forcing the engine to perform an EXACT character match, i.e. one that matches punctuation and case. And don't get me started on Google's assumption that I MUST have wanted different search criteria than I entered, forcing me to click again to search for what I damned-well entered in the first place. Google really needs to get the basics right, instead of working hard to make results even less useful than they already are.
I used to say of Microsoft "They always just know what I want, and they're almost always wrong". Lately, I've started saying the same thing about Google.
...the geeks hear him, and keep merrily on with technological progress. Not that his concerns are never valid, but he has become the Chicken Little of geekdom.
Perhaps the rest of us have the task of making sure it's not just 'the geeks' who hear him. Stallman has a valid and important point here, and I suspect most Slashdotters agree with him. But the non-geeks are the ones who most need to hear the message, and they'll only hear it above the din of Google's grand pronouncements if we all scream it out loud, long, and often.
RTFA folks! The summary is, at best, misleading. From TFA:
"He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government."
The request is to not PROPAGATE the material; note that there isn't even a suggestion to not READ the material.
I support Wikileaks, but under the circumstances the State Department's position in this matter seems reasonable.
There are a number of basic logistical concerns. It would be nice to have a freight tunnel system, but it is fraught with a number of issues.
With slight re-wording, ALL of the issues you mentioned apply to the Internet. Yet in spite of 'basic logistical concerns' and 'fraught with a number of issues', we're still using it to carry on this discussion.
Never underestimate man's ingenuity, tenacity, and persistence. If it's a worthwhile concept, it will probably be built, and (eventually) it will probably work just fine, TYVM.
...I'd say we must be progressing nicely towards a total worldwide fascist corporate police state...
You mean we're not there already?
Whenever I see family/friends/co-workers using external drives for "backup" I have to repress the urge to launch into a lecture on the absurdity of relying on a local, always mounted backup.
So just tell them to unmount/disconnect after backing up! While you're at it, counsel them to get at least one additional drive to put into backup rotation. As far as offsite backup, a 32GB stick with the really critical data copied to it may be better than trusting your data to a third party.
External drives, along with memory sticks, are very effective when used properly.
Gee - is that, like, 10 kilovolts?
Barnes and Noble is, first and foremost, a book retailer, dependant on and beholden to publishers. Since rooting is the first step towards defeating Digital Restrictions Management, I suspect that B&N will fight rooting as hard as they can for as long as they can, regardless of the Nook's pricing model.
Although your comment was modded up as 'Funny', I suspect that wasn't your intent.
There's an important idea here; not the suing part, but the patenting part. The FOSS community should organize itself to patent EVERYTHING it does that's even remotely patentable. Everyone who wanted to use the software commercially would then have to sign a "For one dollar received and other valuable considerations" licensing agreement that, while effectively keeping the software free, would explicitly support the FOSS licence, making it easier to pursue legal action against violators.
Where would the money for this come from? Well, I think a good chunk of it would come from the greed-headed businesses that would patent blue sky and green grass if they could do so. Because preventing your competitiors from having a patent that locks you out of key technological innovations, is almost as good as locking them out of those same innovations yourself. If a corporation can't gain exclusivity over a patent, it will support a 'level playing field' approach just to ensure that none of their competitors can gain exclusivity.
Oh so true! And further to this point, Janet Napolitano says "I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful." Gee, Janet, do you think forcing your citizenry to live in constant fear while they're being x-rayed, poked, prodded, and humiliated, all while having their last vestiges of privacy, dignity, and autonomy destroyed, might just cause more than a few someones to become terrorists?
Gee - we can't use 'Face', and we can't use 'book'. I know! Let's call the world's most popular social networking site 'Fecebag'!
Freedom is NOT won by finding loopholes around laws but by fighting bad laws.
I agree, but bad laws must be fought on multiple fronts. One of these fronts should be the widespread use of strong encryption, both because it makes the law ineffective and because it protects people's privacy while we're waiting out the (probably long, possibly infinite) time for the law to be repealed. In fact, this may be the only effective way of fighting the law: as a Canadian I can tell you that our governments are largely unresponsive to public pressure, and the police agencies care even less about the will of the people.
Unfortunately, history has shown that the majority of my fellow Canadians are blissfully, and often willfully, ignorant of and/or indifferent to the eventual consequencess of letting our government get away with this crap.
When my father was alive we commented on how similar our ears were, right down to the same congenital ripples on the upper edges of our respective right ears. When he died, I inherited his custom-fitted hearing aids, and although I have no need for them, (yet), I put them into my ears just for a lark. They fit me PERFECTLY - no gap, no looseness, no discomfort, and no visible gaps or aberrations in shape.
So maybe ears aren't as close to being unique as has been suggested.
(Firefox, sadly not Chrome (yet?)).
AdBlock on Chrome? Not gonna happen man. Think about it - where does the provider of Chrome get most of its revenue from?
Right on brother! I've just spent about 18 months using Linux almost exclusively, (there are a few things that I can't run even under Wine or VirtualBox), and I'm now preparing to return to Windows. I hate Micro$oft, I love the idea of Linux and FOSS, and yet I'm going back to the evil empire. Why?
First I should explain that I'm quite capable of using the CLI to issue commands, configure stuff, etc. And I've successfully edited more config files than I really wanted to, (often piecing together bits of info from the web because I couldn't find all the relevant info in one place). The point being that I'm not a technophobe or a dufus. I'm primarily a hardware designer, but I've written some software, I've used computers heavily since DOS 3.0, and I'm a fairly sophisticated user. But, I really DON'T WANT TO SPEND MY LIFE figuring out why Wine doesn't work any more, or figuring out a workaround for the fact that the structure of CUPS doesn't allow cups-pdf to give me the opportunity to specify my own filename and destination directory on-the-fly. I don't want to waste my time launching a separate app to search for files because Nautilus doesn't have an integrated search function, only to find that the search program doesn't allow me to change file properties. I don't want to waste time installing Dolphin with all its aesthetic ugliness and K-bloat in order to have a decent file manager, only to discover that Dolphin doesn't do partial filename searches and doesn't TELL me that it can't do them. I don't want to have to chase around my system trying to find icons to reassociate with binaries because an update broke the associations somehow.
And I could go on and on in this vein, but I think I've made my point. I use my computer largely for work, and the more time I spend trying to make it functional, the less time I have for either work or recreation. A little bit of dicking around with my computer is fun and educational, (and in fact I did a lot more than 'a little bit' when I first adopted Linux), but beyond that it just gets tiresome and frustrating. I'm much more interested in doing things WITH my computer than I am in doing things TO my computer. When I first started using computers, they were fascinating in and of themselves. Now I want them to be like my car; know a little bit about how they work and how to fix them, expect to do some maintenance and repairs occasionally, but mostly just hop in and drive without a second thought. And as frustrating and far-from-perfect as I've found Windows to be, in my experience it's a lot closer to that ideal than Linux is.
Rabbitman, Rabbitman! Does whatever a rabbit can!...
Seriously, it's not that hard. Why the hell are they making it so complicated?
Hard or not, it IS Digital Restrictions Management, and it WILL be defeated, probably in less time than it takes to implement it in the first place.
Like it or not, the 'digitalization' of content has irretrievably altered the businesses of producing, providing, and distributing music, books, pictures, and movies. DRM, and attempts at legislating people's behaviour vis-a-vis sharing or copying content, are wasteful, fruitless, and ultimately doomed efforts to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Moral arguments are beside the point here, because they simply won't change people's behaviour. Besides, so many 'guardians of the moral high ground' have themselves been caught infringing, that the arguments they make have no force anyway.
It's probably been said a million times, but it bears repeating: digital technologies and the Internet have made the old content creation, ownership, and business models obsolete. Efforts to enforce 'correct' behaviour through DRM, legislation, social pressure, etc., are only diverting precious resources from the necessary task of finding new ways to conduct the business of creativity.
... but most surveillance seems not to be done by the government any more but by corporations.
Implicit in that statement is the silly idea that the government and the corporations are separate entities. Where have you been for the last few decades?
because it will shortly result in major advances in image recognition/parsing technology. I foresee a Firefox addon that will hide the 'ad-CAPTCHA', substituting a button for the user to click on. The CAPTCHA recognition process will happen transparently. Of course this will break CAPTCHA altogether, but we can lay that one at the feet of the advertising industry.
Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off programmer when faced with the 'all your eyeballs are belong to us' attitude of some arrogant advertising wonk.
Thanks for providing a stepping-off point for my favourite rant of late. Speaking of Nautilus usability issues, how about fixing the following file browser deficiencies?
- Click-and-drag to select files does not exist
- No integrated file search feature
- The separate file search program provided in Gnome doesn't allow for even viewing, much less editing, a file's properties
- User date format preferences are not honoured in file open/save dialogs
- When a user clicks on a soft-link to open the file browser, Nautilus reports the soft-link path rather than the target path
- The whole mime-types mess that doesn't readily allow the user to assign an icon based on file extension
I hear a lot lately about all of the 'improvements' that are coming for the Gnome UI. Hey guys, how about fixing the kind of basic stuff that Micro$oft got right 12 years ago, before you give us more whizzbang eye candy that has us all re-training ourselves on where to move the mouse cursor in order to minimize, maximize, or close a damned window?
I'm not much of a programmer, but as a Debian user I agree whole-heartedly. I use Gnome, and I really don't like the seemingly superfluous K-bloat I get stuck with when installing some packages. If this proposal is adopted, then anything Qt-related will bring in still more unnecessary bloat.
BTW, this kind of bloat seems to be on the increase throughout Linux.