Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.
Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.
As if the acid test for a format is legal, it is just one of many factors:
- consumer demand
- sound quality
- compression factor
- support
- adoption in the field (installed base of files)
- licensing fees
- legal encumbrance
If all of those are comparable or equal (more or less) to the existing commercial codecs then you won't see much deployment, not a lot of deployment will hamper critical mass and so on.
MP3 is not the best format, nor was it the first, but it was the first that offered reasonable compression and it was free to make 'software implementations' (according to the original license) because Fraunhofer could not envision a world in which a software version would run fast enough to work well.
Whether or not a small or large company or FOSS group supports a codec is a small item.
OGG is unfortunately the linux of the codec world (no real consumer advantage over commercial variations), it works pretty good, gives good compression, is not encumbered but it does not have sufficient demand because it was a pretty late entrant, and as a result never achieved critical mass to be included 'by default' in the lineup of most parties.
Second that. I've had plenty of Nokia phones and I'm really quite tired of the sloppy workmanship (3rd headset in as many months, menu key just sort of dropped off the phone, and really all I do is have it in my pocket) as well as the lousy software.
The first series nokias are why people are still buying them today, those things were indestructible and reliable. It takes a while to destroy a brand of that size, but they'll get there.
THe openmoko is the most interesting thing happening in the telco space in 10 years, far more interesting than the iphone (to me at least).
I agree with you that in the case of a breakup you'd be doing that for nothing if you did not include a 'chinese walls' provision in there.
In what way the actual services would be impacted by having them as individual corporations instead of one mega corp is something to be researched, off the top of my head I think the biggest impact would be 'single signon' (which is something google has only recently moved towards with their 'google account'), what other real impact there would be on the quality of the services is not immediately apparent but I can not imagine that it would be very large (but then again, I could very well be wrong in that).
Avoiding the use of googles various services is getting harder and harder, especially with the way they've been buying up competitors to their own offerings. (Youtube is the biggest example of this, but doubleclick definitely figures in there).
The reason why I think that this needs oversight rather than individual or 'market driven' decisions is because people usually don't care about their privacy until there is a big enough breach and by then it is (much) too late, and because a corporation would never take such steps voluntarily.
I've done a demo of such an attack *long* ago, but I've never actually seen one in the wild. High profile because that means it would have likely been documented in the media.
Banks and such are notoriously tight lipped about their breaches, if one got mentioned at all it would likely be a serious breach.
A prime candidate to me would seem to be the ATM machines that are sitting in stores, they're much less secured than the bank variety and it would not be too hard to replace their innards with something 'custom made', but that's not on the web, so it does not really qualify.
More and more people do their banking online, that's a pretty hot target.
There's one more factor, monocultures are very susceptible to diseases, for virus writers/bot herders to have to choose limits the impact of their deeds.
As a rule they'll go for the lowest hanging fruit first, the more diversity there is the harder it will get for them to make a living.
I'm not stopping you from getting on with your life or using/enjoying googles free services, far from it, I wish you great enjoyment:)
To label me a 'paranoid freak' for not being 100% gullible about what google is going to do with all that data, and noting that you do not speak for more people than yourself (even though plenty might agree with your, but then again, they might agree with me too) is not exactly friendly.
I've worked for some a big corporation that was datamining the hell out of whatever information they had in order to improve their sales, privacy be damned. I was young and ignorant then, and didn't even realize how wrong it was, but I've gotten a bit more skeptical since then.
I doubt google is much different, the bottom line is what matters to them. The product of google is not search or applications like email or maps, the product is their knowledge about you, the user and to capitalize on that knowledge.
And the double click acquisition as well as the amount of pressure that had to be put on google to get them to (finally!) place a privacy policy on their site.
So, how about we do a little wager, say 1,000 euros that before 2015 there will be some major (say > 1000 accounts) breach of privacy that will have googles accumulated user data at its core ?
This would include inadvertent leaks, disclosure of such records to authorities, outright data theft, identity theft and such.
Since I'm just a 'paranoid freak' and you're speaking for 'the rest of us' and you're pretty sure that google is collecting that data in a responsible manner with no chance of mishap whatsoever that should not be a hard decision.
ah yes, you're right about that, I got my windows version numbers mixed up, 3.11 and '95 versus '95 and '98.
It's been a while:)
So, you think Microsoft and Netscape caused the wave, I think they just rode the wave, and that it would have happened regardless of their contributions.
Google is becoming more and more like a christmas tree, the main trunk of which seems to be interconnecting information about all the users they've got in their various services.
Pretty soon they'll know your current location, what you've been searching for all your life, who you've been talking to and what you had for breakfast, as well as the contents of your email and your various documents.
That much information in the hands of one party is asking for trouble, either because they'll have a breach sooner or later (hopefully later) or because they find new 'creative' uses for all that data about you.
It definitely is, but right now what we (or actually the farmers) do is use pretty broad spectrum poisons to get rid of weeds (or genetically modified food that is more resistant against the poison).
So a mechanical solution based on correctly identifying the species that is selected to remain would be *much* more environmentally friendly than the current methods.
Every year vast quantities of poisonous stuff makes it into the aquifer, that could be changed.
Yes, it does, but without checking all the certificates that were signed with that root we have no idea how many (and which!) other certificates they issued were bogus and that is very important information.
It will give people that were using these certificates a chance to review their records to see if anything bad happened to them.
The only other alternative is to mark all the parties that bought their certificates there as untrustworthy, but since there is probably nothing wrong with 99 % of the parties that would be using too broad a brush. The remaining 1% (probably much less, but it *could* be 1%!) will need very thorough inspection indeed, and if you've ever used any of them you know your data has probably been compromised. That would be an excellent time to order new credit cards and such.
The costs of this verification process should be borne by the - now presumably defunct - CA that messed up.
Shutting them down is stopping short, all the certificates issued by them need to be revoked as well and reissued by another CA after thorough checking.
If there is one documented case there are likely to be many more undocumented cases.
I know that there are some people that are very clever at doing these man in the middle attacks, but they usually happen in an academic setting as proof of concept.
Have there been documented cases of (successful) mitm attacks on banks or other high profile targets ?
Slashdot Mirror
thank you!
I'll definitely give it a spin to see how well it stacks up to 64 bit linux on opterons (that's what we're running for the most part).
I have a feeling that won't last much longer ;)
There is also 'glusterfs', which has some pretty impressive specs.
Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.
Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.
As if the acid test for a format is legal, it is just one of many factors:
- consumer demand
- sound quality
- compression factor
- support
- adoption in the field (installed base of files)
- licensing fees
- legal encumbrance
If all of those are comparable or equal (more or less) to the existing commercial codecs then you won't see much deployment, not a lot of deployment will hamper critical mass and so on.
MP3 is not the best format, nor was it the first, but it was the first that offered reasonable compression and it was free to make 'software implementations' (according to the original license) because Fraunhofer could not envision a world in which a software version would run fast enough to work well.
Whether or not a small or large company or FOSS group supports a codec is a small item.
OGG is unfortunately the linux of the codec world (no real consumer advantage over commercial variations), it works pretty good, gives good compression, is not encumbered but it does not have sufficient demand because it was a pretty late entrant, and as a result never achieved critical mass to be included 'by default' in the lineup of most parties.
gmail ? wasn't that some german company ;) ?
Second that. I've had plenty of Nokia phones and I'm really quite tired of the sloppy workmanship (3rd headset in as many months, menu key just sort of dropped off the phone, and really all I do is have it in my pocket) as well as the lousy software.
The first series nokias are why people are still buying them today, those things were indestructible and reliable. It takes a while to destroy a brand of that size, but they'll get there.
THe openmoko is the most interesting thing happening in the telco space in 10 years, far more interesting than the iphone (to me at least).
From a Joe Jackson song: "I'm so free it's driving me insane" :)
I agree with you that in the case of a breakup you'd be doing that for nothing if you did not include a 'chinese walls' provision in there.
In what way the actual services would be impacted by having them as individual corporations instead of one mega corp is something to be researched, off the top of my head I think the biggest impact would be 'single signon' (which is something google has only recently moved towards with their 'google account'), what other real impact there would be on the quality of the services is not immediately apparent but I can not imagine that it would be very large (but then again, I could very well be wrong in that).
Avoiding the use of googles various services is getting harder and harder, especially with the way they've been buying up competitors to their own offerings. (Youtube is the biggest example of this, but doubleclick definitely figures in there).
The reason why I think that this needs oversight rather than individual or 'market driven' decisions is because people usually don't care about their privacy until there is a big enough breach and by then it is (much) too late, and because a corporation would never take such steps voluntarily.
I've done a demo of such an attack *long* ago, but I've never actually seen one in the wild. High profile because that means it would have likely been documented in the media.
Banks and such are notoriously tight lipped about their breaches, if one got mentioned at all it would likely be a serious breach.
A prime candidate to me would seem to be the ATM machines that are sitting in stores, they're much less secured than the bank variety and it would not be too hard to replace their innards with something 'custom made', but that's not on the web, so it does not really qualify.
More and more people do their banking online, that's a pretty hot target.
There's one more factor, monocultures are very susceptible to diseases, for virus writers/bot herders to have to choose limits the impact of their deeds.
As a rule they'll go for the lowest hanging fruit first, the more diversity there is the harder it will get for them to make a living.
hello again,
I'm not stopping you from getting on with your life or using/enjoying googles free services, far from it, I wish you great enjoyment :)
To label me a 'paranoid freak' for not being 100% gullible about what google is going to do with all that data, and noting that you do not speak for more people than yourself (even though plenty might agree with your, but then again, they might agree with me too) is not exactly friendly.
I've worked for some a big corporation that was datamining the hell out of whatever information they had in order to improve their sales, privacy be damned. I was young and ignorant then, and didn't even realize how wrong it was, but I've gotten a bit more skeptical since then.
I doubt google is much different, the bottom line is what matters to them. The product of google is not search or applications like email or maps, the product is their knowledge about you, the user and to capitalize on that knowledge.
I remember this episode:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/08/google-research-prototypes-ambient-audio-contextual-content/
And the double click acquisition as well as the amount of pressure that had to be put on google to get them to (finally!) place a privacy policy on their site.
So, how about we do a little wager, say 1,000 euros that before 2015 there will be some major (say > 1000 accounts) breach of privacy that will have googles accumulated user data at its core ?
This would include inadvertent leaks, disclosure of such records to authorities, outright data theft, identity theft and such.
Since I'm just a 'paranoid freak' and you're speaking for 'the rest of us' and you're pretty sure that google is collecting that data in a responsible manner with no chance of mishap whatsoever that should not be a hard decision.
take it ?
greetings,
Jacques Mattheij
ah yes, you're right about that, I got my windows version numbers mixed up, 3.11 and '95 versus '95 and '98.
It's been a while :)
So, you think Microsoft and Netscape caused the wave, I think they just rode the wave, and that it would have happened regardless of their contributions.
Second that, the ':' convention really sucks. I never got why they thought it was the way to go with expanding the address space.
It's a bit like this, if you are counting from 0 to 100 you end at 99, after that you're going to use '100', not '1:00'.
(and that would have been a logical alternative as well, simply making the individual fields in the dotted quad addresses 16 bits).
You speak for yourself, not for the 'rest of us', just like I do.
a couple of hundred bucks, less if you live near a junkyard :)
it can even happen by chance, in nature
insightful was the new funny right ? but this is an AC ... so he doesn't have karma ... *head explodes*
I disagree about the cad side of linux dying, and these folks would probably do the same.
No work is being done, so therefore no energy consumption is required.
By the same token glue would be producing energy by making two things stick to each other...
Google is becoming more and more like a christmas tree, the main trunk of which seems to be interconnecting information about all the users they've got in their various services.
Pretty soon they'll know your current location, what you've been searching for all your life, who you've been talking to and what you had for breakfast, as well as the contents of your email and your various documents.
That much information in the hands of one party is asking for trouble, either because they'll have a breach sooner or later (hopefully later) or because they find new 'creative' uses for all that data about you.
It definitely is, but right now what we (or actually the farmers) do is use pretty broad spectrum poisons to get rid of weeds (or genetically modified food that is more resistant against the poison).
So a mechanical solution based on correctly identifying the species that is selected to remain would be *much* more environmentally friendly than the current methods.
Every year vast quantities of poisonous stuff makes it into the aquifer, that could be changed.
Yes, it does, but without checking all the certificates that were signed with that root we have no idea how many (and which!) other certificates they issued were bogus and that is very important information.
It will give people that were using these certificates a chance to review their records to see if anything bad happened to them.
The only other alternative is to mark all the parties that bought their certificates there as untrustworthy, but since there is probably nothing wrong with 99 % of the parties that would be using too broad a brush. The remaining 1% (probably much less, but it *could* be 1%!) will need very thorough inspection indeed, and if you've ever used any of them you know your data has probably been compromised. That would be an excellent time to order new credit cards and such.
The costs of this verification process should be borne by the - now presumably defunct - CA that messed up.
Shutting them down is stopping short, all the certificates issued by them need to be revoked as well and reissued by another CA after thorough checking.
If there is one documented case there are likely to be many more undocumented cases.
I know that there are some people that are very clever at doing these man in the middle attacks, but they usually happen in an academic setting as proof of concept.
Have there been documented cases of (successful) mitm attacks on banks or other high profile targets ?