"the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travellers' wireless devices by the airport's free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period."
Like what? Mac addresses? Mac address + IPs it connected to?
"The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi "hot spots" in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports."
How? Did CSEC have a deal with companies providing wifi?
I guess that depends. I have a 7 year old Mac mini. It was a Core Duo. Over the years, i've put in more ram, an SSD and even found a Core 2 Duo cpu that works in it. I just ordered a newish mac mini, not because the hardware isn't good enough but because it'll only run 10.6 (10.7 with some haxing). It will however make a fine linux box.
Newer macs though aren't nearly as upgradable unfortunately.
I find it somewhat disappointing that despite the connectivity options we have today, we still so far from being able to access our own data in a secure and consistent manner that's easy for everyone. It's even more disappointing to see a company like Dropbox solving only the "consistent" and "easy" parts of it. I say it's disappointing because I have problems with the encryption scheme [1] and non-decentralized way they're currently doing things.
As it's been pointed out [2] and essentially beaten to death recently, these things may not matter a whole lot to most people now, I think you have be pretty optimistic to think they won't matter in the future.
I don't think anyone could argue that having skills in both areas isn't a good thing. I've been a sysadmin for 20 years and i've had to do basic development over the years (apache modules, ldap-ifying applications, etc). When it comes to troubleshooting complex problems as a sysadmin and the whole team is whiteboarding, you can tell pretty quickly who understands how systems work below the user interface. This is often only learned through writing code.
The opposite is true for coders too. With a few execeptions, the most competent developers I've worked with have had sysadmin duties at some point in their career. Not that long ago, I had to sit down with a Sr. (Java) developer and explain load balancers and TCP session state.
I understand that wikipedia is a non-profit and has limited resources, but why not just do it? This doesn't seem like a radical stance at all. This should be on their roadmap. Given wikipedia history of taking sides on issues like this, they should be pioneers in doing this sort of thing.
Plain text HTTP is on its way to becoming a legacy protocol.
I couldn't agree more. I've never experienced support like we get from MS. Just recently we had a 12GB.dmp file analyzed and in less than 36 hours they were able to tell us which shitty 3rd party driver was causing our boxes to BSOD. The vendor that shipped this driver (mentioned in the parent above) is so far, completely useless.
One of the big problems with any flavour of Linux that I've used is the laptop support. Even though I've always specifically bought laptops with very good linux compatibility, it's still hit and miss. A large chunk of the computers sold in retail stores now are laptops and they're getting more and more popular as the price of them continues to drop. Suspend and wifi needs to Just Work.
What I would like to see is a small core list of laptop models that are essentially "certified" to work. Pick the most popular lines, get them working 100% then add more and more models without breaking support for the laptops that worked previously. Ubuntu in particular seems to have a shockgun whack-a-mole approach to supporting laptops and it's maddening.
I'm in the same boat. I look after everything under the sun. Everything from shitty little 2 server ASP websites to 20 server clusters with TB's of backend disk.
I have java servlets used by over 2000 people 24x7. When was the last time I had to restart the JVM? Dec 2002. I also have 8 java (jsp) web applications used by 200,000 ISP customers 24x7. JVM uptimes range from 2 years to several months. On the flipside, i have applications that need to be restarted every week.
I really like OpenBSD, I buy most of the releases, I've donated hardware and I have a collection of shirts. It's very good software.
I normally stay out of the politics of this, but as a "customer" it annoys me to see a leader talk trash like this. This is one of the reasons why it's not more popular than it is. Honestly, it doesn't take a rocket appliance to learn some tact and basic diplomacy. You can still be candid without sounding like a school kid with a case of sour grapes.
One reason why I'm still using Window Maker....
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been a Window Maker user for 7 or 8 years and I've tried XFCE 4.0 and the RC's of 4.2. I used 4.0 for a good 2 weeks at home and at work and then 4.2 RC for another week but I'm back using Window Maker again. XFCE is very nice and the developers have done a great job making a nice light WM, but the reason I switched back is the same reason I don't use KDE or Gnome. They all redraw funny. The GUI doesn't feel "solid" like MS Windows, OS X or Window Maker does. I'm not talking about stability. I wish I could explain it better and I hope someone else can chime and explain it. Here's how I reproduce it:
When I have 4+ desktops (or even one loaded up with applications) and I switch desktops or alt-tab, with XFCE (or Gnome, KDE) it takes longer than it should to redraw the screen or window. I notice this even on fast machines with fast video cards running recent Xorg releases.
It is a stand alone package of rsync for windows. It even comes with an installer to make it run as a service. I use to it replicate web content on some faily major websites.
Jumpstart is great and speeds things up tremendously you can't run a solaris shop without it.
It's just an onerous job to maintain all those applications seperate from the OS. Comparing it to RHEL for example, it's a couple clicks or commands to update Apache.
Apache is just one example of the kind of stuff they should be including with the os. Often the gnu version of a utility has so many more features... everything from grep to df.
For the record I was once a Sun fanboy and I maintain several hundred sparc boxes for a largish ISP.
I think they are mixing up FOSS and Linux. I would guess that 95% of Sun's customers don't care about a kernel. Solaris as good as it is would be much more appealing if I didn't have to install a few dozen OSS packages in order to get the system usable. Give me Apache, Tomcat and all the good GNU stuff that comes with any standard Linux distro.
I believe it was Bruce Perens (maybe ESR?) in Revolution OS that said before Linux was around, he would spend days GNUifying Sun machines. It's the same damn thing 20 years later!
Oh and ditch sparc already. Give me a quad Opteron on a board that uses OpenBoot.
TV, movies and music make up a large part of our culture and here we have a corporation trying to railroad a standards commitee into accepting their product as the standard we will use preserve the sounds and images of our generation. That sounds pretty dorky, but it's true.
This makes with the BBC and Vorbis guys are doing seem a lot more important.
"When I read these things it kind of makes me wonder why it took this long."
I often wonder the same thing. With all the different worms that infect unpatced Windows machines, why hasn't someone wrote one that effectively deletes everything on the machine just short of rendering itself unable to propogate?
You don't need Rendevous to use DAAP. Rendezvous makes it easy to find stuff on a local network, but all you have to do is point your DAAP client at the host sharing the music and you can play it. It's just http.
There seems to be a handful of java DAAP clients that all look the same:
One2ohmygod: http://one2ohmygod.sourceforge.net/ jtunes4: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtunes4/ AppleRec ords: http://www.cdavies.org/applerecords.html and yet another called "Get It Together" http://www.deleet.de/projekte/daap/
They all look the same but have varying degrees of functionality.
If I can't spell, then I guess you also can't read apparently. I already have 17" LCD's displays. I don't need a 17" CRT monitor attached to a computer I can't stick a new video card in.
I like Apple products, I have an iPod mini and some older Macs, but their pricing on desktops is out of wack.
This has been said ten billion times I'm sure but...
Apple probably doesn't really care about catering to the lowest common denominator, but if they want more people to buy their computers, they have to make them sensibly priced. I'm not talking laptops here, desktops.
Here is a situation, I need a new desktop computer. I have a nice laptop already and I have 2 nice 17" LCD displays.
Ok, lets go to the Apple store and see what I can get. The cheapest desktop is $2,799.00 CAD. That is assinine. Dual 1.8, 256MB(?!!?!?) of RAM.
Yes, it's a sweet computer and yes it comes with nice unixy OS with a nice GUI, but it's about $1300 over my budget.
I guess Apple doesn't want to sell computers to guys like me. Whatever.
I come from Solaris/Veritas/Oracle and Redhat/Oracle RAC environments. One single system going down cannot take out the service. Database HA is somewhat complicated and expensive, but it's not rocket science, regardless of platform.
I find it very difficult to believe that they would have any single points of failure in a system of that importance. Blaming MS is the easy way out.
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
As a peon, what would influence you to work harder? Being told that you're the underdog and you're going to get stomped on by Sun, Apple and probably now Linux, or being told that you have a world wide monopoly in the desktop computing space and companies are throwing buckets of money at you every year despite the fact that your software is mediocre at best.
It seems like a logical thing to tell your employees. I guess they leave out the specifics of exactly where they would be classified as the underdog.
Slashdot Mirror
"the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travellers' wireless devices by the airport's free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period."
Like what? Mac addresses? Mac address + IPs it connected to?
"The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi "hot spots" in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports."
How? Did CSEC have a deal with companies providing wifi?
I guess that depends. I have a 7 year old Mac mini. It was a Core Duo. Over the years, i've put in more ram, an SSD and even found a Core 2 Duo cpu that works in it. I just ordered a newish mac mini, not because the hardware isn't good enough but because it'll only run 10.6 (10.7 with some haxing). It will however make a fine linux box.
Newer macs though aren't nearly as upgradable unfortunately.
I find it somewhat disappointing that despite the connectivity options we have today, we still so far from being able to access our own data in a secure and consistent manner that's easy for everyone. It's even more disappointing to see a company like Dropbox solving only the "consistent" and "easy" parts of it. I say it's disappointing because I have problems with the encryption scheme [1] and non-decentralized way they're currently doing things.
As it's been pointed out [2] and essentially beaten to death recently, these things may not matter a whole lot to most people now, I think you have be pretty optimistic to think they won't matter in the future.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/28/en
[2] https://medium.com/surveillance-state/b804de3b5b
I don't think anyone could argue that having skills in both areas isn't a good thing. I've been a sysadmin for 20 years and i've had to do basic development over the years (apache modules, ldap-ifying applications, etc). When it comes to troubleshooting complex problems as a sysadmin and the whole team is whiteboarding, you can tell pretty quickly who understands how systems work below the user interface. This is often only learned through writing code.
The opposite is true for coders too. With a few execeptions, the most competent developers I've worked with have had sysadmin duties at some point in their career. Not that long ago, I had to sit down with a Sr. (Java) developer and explain load balancers and TCP session state.
I understand that wikipedia is a non-profit and has limited resources, but why not just do it? This doesn't seem like a radical stance at all. This should be on their roadmap. Given wikipedia history of taking sides on issues like this, they should be pioneers in doing this sort of thing.
Plain text HTTP is on its way to becoming a legacy protocol.
I couldn't agree more. I've never experienced support like we get from MS. Just recently we had a 12GB .dmp file analyzed and in less than 36 hours they were able to tell us which shitty 3rd party driver was causing our boxes to BSOD. The vendor that shipped this driver (mentioned in the parent above) is so far, completely useless.
"Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [...] also stripped Zhao, from China, of her U.S. citizenship"
What the hell? I was unaware that there are different classes of citizenship. What if a person born as an American did this?
One of the big problems with any flavour of Linux that I've used is the laptop support. Even though I've always specifically bought laptops with very good linux compatibility, it's still hit and miss. A large chunk of the computers sold in retail stores now are laptops and they're getting more and more popular as the price of them continues to drop. Suspend and wifi needs to Just Work.
What I would like to see is a small core list of laptop models that are essentially "certified" to work. Pick the most popular lines, get them working 100% then add more and more models without breaking support for the laptops that worked previously. Ubuntu in particular seems to have a shockgun whack-a-mole approach to supporting laptops and it's maddening.
I'm in the same boat. I look after everything under the sun. Everything from shitty little 2 server ASP websites to 20 server clusters with TB's of backend disk.
I have java servlets used by over 2000 people 24x7. When was the last time I had to restart the JVM? Dec 2002. I also have 8 java (jsp) web applications used by 200,000 ISP customers 24x7. JVM uptimes range from 2 years to several months. On the flipside, i have applications that need to be restarted every week.
The difference? The developers.
I really like OpenBSD, I buy most of the releases, I've donated hardware and I have a collection of shirts. It's very good software.
I normally stay out of the politics of this, but as a "customer" it annoys me to see a leader talk trash like this. This is one of the reasons why it's not more popular than it is. Honestly, it doesn't take a rocket appliance to learn some tact and basic diplomacy. You can still be candid without sounding like a school kid with a case of sour grapes.
Finally it's done!
5 18
I've had this on my wall at work for 4 years!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12163&cid=229
I've been a Window Maker user for 7 or 8 years and I've tried XFCE 4.0 and the RC's of 4.2. I used 4.0 for a good 2 weeks at home and at work and then 4.2 RC for another week but I'm back using Window Maker again. XFCE is very nice and the developers have done a great job making a nice light WM, but the reason I switched back is the same reason I don't use KDE or Gnome. They all redraw funny. The GUI doesn't feel "solid" like MS Windows, OS X or Window Maker does. I'm not talking about stability. I wish I could explain it better and I hope someone else can chime and explain it. Here's how I reproduce it:
When I have 4+ desktops (or even one loaded up with applications) and I switch desktops or alt-tab, with XFCE (or Gnome, KDE) it takes longer than it should to redraw the screen or window. I notice this even on fast machines with fast video cards running recent Xorg releases.
Does anybody else experience this?
Check out cwrsync
It is a stand alone package of rsync for windows. It even comes with an installer to make it run as a service. I use to it replicate web content on some faily major websites.
Exactly. And they'll sell these products to massive emerging markets like China and India where they generally don't care about IP.
Jumpstart is great and speeds things up tremendously you can't run a solaris shop without it.
It's just an onerous job to maintain all those applications seperate from the OS. Comparing it to RHEL for example, it's a couple clicks or commands to update Apache.
Apache is just one example of the kind of stuff they should be including with the os. Often the gnu version of a utility has so many more features... everything from grep to df.
For the record I was once a Sun fanboy and I maintain several hundred sparc boxes for a largish ISP.
I think they are mixing up FOSS and Linux. I would guess that 95% of Sun's customers don't care about a kernel. Solaris as good as it is would be much more appealing if I didn't have to install a few dozen OSS packages in order to get the system usable. Give me Apache, Tomcat and all the good GNU stuff that comes with any standard Linux distro.
I believe it was Bruce Perens (maybe ESR?) in Revolution OS that said before Linux was around, he would spend days GNUifying Sun machines. It's the same damn thing 20 years later!
Oh and ditch sparc already. Give me a quad Opteron on a board that uses OpenBoot.
TV, movies and music make up a large part of our culture and here we have a corporation trying to railroad a standards commitee into accepting their product as the standard we will use preserve the sounds and images of our generation. That sounds pretty dorky, but it's true.
This makes with the BBC and Vorbis guys are doing seem a lot more important.
"When I read these things it kind of makes me wonder why it took this long."
I often wonder the same thing. With all the different worms that infect unpatced Windows machines, why hasn't someone wrote one that effectively deletes everything on the machine just short of rendering itself unable to propogate?
I kinda figured they were mostly forks of one original project, just didn't know which one.
I completely agree, there probably isn't need for 5 similar clients.
You don't need Rendevous to use DAAP. Rendezvous makes it easy to find stuff on a local network, but all you have to do is point your DAAP client at the host sharing the music and you can play it. It's just http.
There seems to be a handful of java DAAP clients that all look the same:
c ords: http://www.cdavies.org/applerecords.html
One2ohmygod: http://one2ohmygod.sourceforge.net/
jtunes4: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtunes4/
AppleRe
and yet another called "Get It Together"
http://www.deleet.de/projekte/daap/
They all look the same but have varying degrees of functionality.
If I can't spell, then I guess you also can't read apparently. I already have 17" LCD's displays. I don't need a 17" CRT monitor attached to a computer I can't stick a new video card in.
I like Apple products, I have an iPod mini and some older Macs, but their pricing on desktops is out of wack.
This has been said ten billion times I'm sure but...
.
Apple probably doesn't really care about catering to the lowest common denominator, but if they want more people to buy their computers, they have to make them sensibly priced. I'm not talking laptops here, desktops.
Here is a situation, I need a new desktop computer. I have a nice laptop already and I have 2 nice 17" LCD displays
Ok, lets go to the Apple store and see what I can get. The cheapest desktop is $2,799.00 CAD. That is assinine. Dual 1.8, 256MB(?!!?!?) of RAM.
Yes, it's a sweet computer and yes it comes with nice unixy OS with a nice GUI, but it's about $1300 over my budget.
I guess Apple doesn't want to sell computers to guys like me. Whatever.
They aren't telling the whole story.
I come from Solaris/Veritas/Oracle and Redhat/Oracle RAC environments. One single system going down cannot take out the service. Database HA is somewhat complicated and expensive, but it's not rocket science, regardless of platform.
I find it very difficult to believe that they would have any single points of failure in a system of that importance. Blaming MS is the easy way out.
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
As a peon, what would influence you to work harder? Being told that you're the underdog and you're going to get stomped on by Sun, Apple and probably now Linux, or being told that you have a world wide monopoly in the desktop computing space and companies are throwing buckets of money at you every year despite the fact that your software is mediocre at best.
It seems like a logical thing to tell your employees. I guess they leave out the specifics of exactly where they would be classified as the underdog.