I have nearly 300 passwords to different web sites, nearly all of which are randomly generated. I save them in a password manager, where they are encrypted. You'll note that at the bottom of his article, Schneier recommends using a program like this. If you Google "password manager" you'll find lots of alternatives.
I've tried the IBM ultraportable (no CD/DVD) and the Dell, and wound up liking my Sony Vaio TX Series the best. It's extremely light (2.84 lbs), 11" WXGA screen at 1366x768, and a keyboard that is only slightly smaller than normal and very usable. It's one of the few ultraportables with a builtin DVD, which is important for me because I hate carrying around an external drive. I get about 3.5 hours on the battery, and since I have a spare I have plenty of power when I'm on the plane. I haven't seen anything else (include the new Mac or the new IBM) that would make me give it up. Runs Gentoo beautifully.
I basically use it all day, every day, not just when I travel, that's how much I like it. It's so light that I have to double-check to make sure I have it with me.
No, all we need to do is use common sense and not visit sites we don't want to see. How can someone make a choice without knowing in advance that the site may host pornography? It is not always obvious, especially to a child. A.xxx domain is effectively a label that helps someone to know that a site contains pornography. In this sense, the domain will help people make a choice regarding the sites they don't want to see. A filter just automates this choice, for convenience.
If the.com points to a.xxx with a CNAME DNS record, then it would be quite easy for (a) the company to keep its.com while (b) allowing filters to easily screen out the content based on DNS record for the.com.
Let's cram more stuff on your screen
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"As [displays] get bigger and bigger, you can get more information to the user," says Mary Czerwinski, principal researcher at Microsoft Research. But the current desktop GUI, which simply extends the same desktop across multiple screens, doesn't scale well. With more screen real estate available, computers will begin monitoring and presenting more information to the user.
This seems incredibly divorced from reality. Lots of people use multiple screens, and extending the same desktop across those screens works really well to manage the available space. The answer from Microsoft Research -- waste all that space by monitoring more information. So we should just take that extra screen and fill it up with pretty desklets? And this will make me a more productive person?
Come move to Utah, home of the open and publicly-owned Utopia high-speed network. It is open to any ISP that wants to provide service on the network. $44 a month gets you 15 Mbps download AND upload.
The Internet providers need to recoup their investments and one way is to charge a premium for managing bandwidth content differently. The need for this is self-evident: Data from a video or phone conversation has to be prioritized differently than data from a standard Web site access.
If this was really about deploying QoS, I think there would be far fewer arguments. The technology for QoS is well defined, short of the mechanism needed to charge individual customers and distribute the revenue to ISPs. This is actually harder than one might think because your data for a QoS-enhanced video conference would usually traverse multiple ISPs. If the ISPs were serious about figuring out how to do this, and then giving customers a better video-call for a per-call charge, I think most of us would be happy for the extra service.
Instead of going through the trouble setting this up, ISPs want to do something far easier -- filter based on the source or destination of a packet and put packets indiscriminately into a different queue based on who it is coming from or going to. Then they simply charge people who want to put large numbers of packets into the high priority queue, namely the large content providers. Of course, the resulting service might not be any better. To get priority service for all its users, a company like Google would have to pay all ISPs who play this game along all paths between it and any customer -- essentially all ISPs in the entire Internet.
Even if an ISP is only interested in prioritizing its own traffic (to give itself a competitive advantage), it might not get very far. ISPs do not typically carry traffic end-to-end from user to user, so the priority they give their traffic may be wasted once the traffic gets to a competitor's ISP!
I'm tempted to let the ISPs hang themselves on this one -- if large content providers refuse to pay, and the high priority queues stay empty, then what? They get blamed for artificially slowing down all Internet traffic? Not pretty.
One scenario: In a competitive environment, rival ISPs (in the backbone) will end up fighting each other to offer the best possible price for the best possible non-tiered service, and those offering more expensive tiered service will end up losing their customers.
And this is exactly the right decision. Gnome is aiming to have things "just work" for the average user (per Jeff Waugh's comment), not to provide ultimate configurability for the power user. This is exactly the reason why I use Gnome and not KDE, even though I fit any reasonable definition of "power user." Having configured more window managers than I care to count, I am long past the point of caring what the minimizing animation looks like. Most users never even care. There are way more important things to worry about when building a usable desktop system, such as plugging in a printer and having it just show up in an already-open print dialog (also mentioned on the mailing list). Gnome's philosophy will make some people mad, but they are using the right design guidelines as far as I am concerned.
I agree with most of this except... I do appreciate the sentiment that games should be rated. As a Christian parent, I am not so much concerned about enforcing sales at the store. My kids won't be there without me, but even better my kids will learn their standards from me and voluntarily police themselves. What I am concerned about is accurate ratings so that my kids and I can make good choices about what we consume. This is not so different for me than asking for food labels to be accurate. The MediaFamily report does point out that the 'standard' being used by the ratings board changes from year to year, so that games rated 'M' contain far more violence than before. I would simply like to have an objective ratings standard that is clear and consistent, and I agree with MediaFamily that this is probably not going to be accomplished by a ratings board run by the industry itself.
For me, the answer is to rely on independent ratings before I ever make a purchase.
This is the case of a comment (from Bill Gates) that technically could be true, but in practice is not. There is a big difference between the two. Open source projects have a much better history of interoperability, particularly when the standards themselves are open. Heck, open source software even bends over backwards to interoperate with Microsoft stuff (e.g. Samba) without much help from Microsoft itself.
Because the conservative mentality says something like this: If it's us versus them (substitute Mother Earth, endandgered species, countries with different cultures/religions/politics), we better make sure we win. Don't sacrifice our standard of living to help out the earth or some other species or to get along with another country.
They often don't understand long-term consequences.
Clearly, you can't just give this database to a spammer and say "here, don't send these people email." What a great recipe for getting more spam.
Instead, the list would need to be secret, and a spammer could send a query: "Is joe@yahoo.com on the list?".
You need to avoid the naive solution, where the list-keeper says "yes" if the address is on the list and "no" if it is not on the list. Otherwise, a spammer could just do a dictionary-type attack on the list to discover as many email addresses as she could. "How about joeb@yahoo? joec?"
You need to instead say "yes" if the address is on the list and then randomly choose "yes" or "no" otherwise. This way if a spammer gets "yes" she doesn't know whether she has a real email address or not.
Ah, but more problems. If the response is truly random, then a spammer can make a repeat request for all the addresses that the list-owner said "yes" for. The ones that actually aren't on the list will have a chance of coming up "no" a second time. Repeat as many times as you want to get a higher certainty that you have obtained usable addresses.
So you instead need some history -- always say yes to "fooxyz@yahoo" even if it is not on the list. And now your memory requirement becomes infinite. Sure you could keep a cache of your most recent responses, but this just delays the time it takes for the spammer to find out who is on the list.
From this brief thought-exercise, I don't know if a "do-not-spam" list is doable. Maybe I'm missing something.
What is clearly much easier to implement is a "please-spam-me" list. The memory requirements would sure be smaller. And no problem making this a publicly-available list. Likewise, it would be easy to prove you are not on the list when you get some spam. And hey, if 90% of uses don't want spam, why should we force them to say "no"?
There's a big difference between an equipment donation, a curriculum grant, and a research grant. We're talking here about an equipment donation, which is usually made to a university or sometimes to a department, not to an individual professor. Moreover, if you're looking to get tenure -- at a research-oriented university -- you will be evaluated primarily based on your research grants. I don't know of any professors that go looking for donations from Microsoft because this will make their road to tenure easier.
What's really happening here is that Microsoft is looking to hold onto their dominating position in the marketplace, and the university is happy to take the money. With state funding of higher education at all-time lows, this is not unreasonable. I suspect the means by which the technology is going to be used has very little review, because after all everybody runs Windows, right?
(I use Linux for all my coursework, research, and personal work, but I'm in the minority.)
You mean to tell me there's something in this for me when I pick textbooks for my CS classes? All along I've been trying to choose the textbooks that I felt covered the material the best. And in many cases I've missed out on any kind of opportunity by forgoing a textbook and taking the time to select relevant research papers. What else am I missing out on?
OK, so why not take the SETI/P2P approach to the Turing Test? Everyone can donate some drive space to store "world knowledge". Volunteers input this knowledge a little at a time. Then (the hard part) build a P2P query that searches this massively parallel system and returns the most likely match.
Is that they refuse to provide rpms for upgraded software. You can only install/uninstall the software that comes with the distribution. If I want the latest greatest version of evolution (for example), I have to install it (and resolve dependencies) outside of their package manager.
What I really want is an easy way to take a stock RedHat distribution and then upgrade packages as they are released, rather than waiting for the next version of their distribution to come out.
Actually, IP version 5 was assigned to a protocol called STII, which tried to do resource reservation for IP (similar to RSVP) but was never adopted much (aside from some experiments in Germany).
So the next number really will be IPv7 -- it's just a question of who asks for it. Quick, go write an Internet Draft and then call for a BOF!
I write open source because I end up with better software. Whenever I used closed source software,
I am frustrated by some functionality it doesn't have or some feature that is broken. What I wouldn't give to hack MS Word so that the dumb
numbered lists worked properly!
Organized open source efforts enable us to collaborate, ending up with better software for
everyone.
Maybe what we need is some sort of watchdog group, to notice when Microsoft (or anyone else) doesn't play nice in the standards game. If this group could build some influence, get ink from the press, etc, then maybe enough public pressure would build to force people to work in the open. Imagine if the immediate reaction from CNN was to run a headline story on this development, with the same sort of attention the DOJ case is receiving... We need some way to sound the alarm to the general public.
Does such a group exist yet? Why not? This is exactly what an "open source society" needs.
Slashdot Mirror
http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/08/sopa-infographic/
I have nearly 300 passwords to different web sites, nearly all of which are randomly generated. I save them in a password manager, where they are encrypted. You'll note that at the bottom of his article, Schneier recommends using a program like this. If you Google "password manager" you'll find lots of alternatives.
I've tried the IBM ultraportable (no CD/DVD) and the Dell, and wound up liking my Sony Vaio TX Series the best. It's extremely light (2.84 lbs), 11" WXGA screen at 1366x768, and a keyboard that is only slightly smaller than normal and very usable. It's one of the few ultraportables with a builtin DVD, which is important for me because I hate carrying around an external drive. I get about 3.5 hours on the battery, and since I have a spare I have plenty of power when I'm on the plane. I haven't seen anything else (include the new Mac or the new IBM) that would make me give it up. Runs Gentoo beautifully.
I basically use it all day, every day, not just when I travel, that's how much I like it. It's so light that I have to double-check to make sure I have it with me.
If the .com points to a .xxx with a CNAME DNS record, then it would be quite easy for (a) the company to keep its .com while (b) allowing filters to easily screen out the content based on DNS record for the .com.
This seems incredibly divorced from reality. Lots of people use multiple screens, and extending the same desktop across those screens works really well to manage the available space. The answer from Microsoft Research -- waste all that space by monitoring more information. So we should just take that extra screen and fill it up with pretty desklets? And this will make me a more productive person?
Gotta love an article on graphical user interfaces with no ... graphics ... of the user interface.
Come move to Utah, home of the open and publicly-owned Utopia high-speed network. It is open to any ISP that wants to provide service on the network. $44 a month gets you 15 Mbps download AND upload.
http://www.utopianet.org/metronet/index.htm
This is a model for how municipalities ought to own their networks.
If this was really about deploying QoS, I think there would be far fewer arguments. The technology for QoS is well defined, short of the mechanism needed to charge individual customers and distribute the revenue to ISPs. This is actually harder than one might think because your data for a QoS-enhanced video conference would usually traverse multiple ISPs. If the ISPs were serious about figuring out how to do this, and then giving customers a better video-call for a per-call charge, I think most of us would be happy for the extra service.
Instead of going through the trouble setting this up, ISPs want to do something far easier -- filter based on the source or destination of a packet and put packets indiscriminately into a different queue based on who it is coming from or going to. Then they simply charge people who want to put large numbers of packets into the high priority queue, namely the large content providers. Of course, the resulting service might not be any better. To get priority service for all its users, a company like Google would have to pay all ISPs who play this game along all paths between it and any customer -- essentially all ISPs in the entire Internet.
Even if an ISP is only interested in prioritizing its own traffic (to give itself a competitive advantage), it might not get very far. ISPs do not typically carry traffic end-to-end from user to user, so the priority they give their traffic may be wasted once the traffic gets to a competitor's ISP!
I'm tempted to let the ISPs hang themselves on this one -- if large content providers refuse to pay, and the high priority queues stay empty, then what? They get blamed for artificially slowing down all Internet traffic? Not pretty.
One scenario: In a competitive environment, rival ISPs (in the backbone) will end up fighting each other to offer the best possible price for the best possible non-tiered service, and those offering more expensive tiered service will end up losing their customers.
And this is exactly the right decision. Gnome is aiming to have things "just work" for the average user (per Jeff Waugh's comment), not to provide ultimate configurability for the power user. This is exactly the reason why I use Gnome and not KDE, even though I fit any reasonable definition of "power user." Having configured more window managers than I care to count, I am long past the point of caring what the minimizing animation looks like. Most users never even care. There are way more important things to worry about when building a usable desktop system, such as plugging in a printer and having it just show up in an already-open print dialog (also mentioned on the mailing list). Gnome's philosophy will make some people mad, but they are using the right design guidelines as far as I am concerned.
I agree with most of this except ... I do appreciate the sentiment that games should be rated. As a Christian parent, I am not so much concerned about enforcing sales at the store. My kids won't be there without me, but even better my kids will learn their standards from me and voluntarily police themselves. What I am concerned about is accurate ratings so that my kids and I can make good choices about what we consume. This is not so different for me than asking for food labels to be accurate. The MediaFamily report does point out that the 'standard' being used by the ratings board changes from year to year, so that games rated 'M' contain far more violence than before. I would simply like to have an objective ratings standard that is clear and consistent, and I agree with MediaFamily that this is probably not going to be accomplished by a ratings board run by the industry itself.
For me, the answer is to rely on independent ratings before I ever make a purchase.
This is the case of a comment (from Bill Gates) that technically could be true, but in practice is not. There is a big difference between the two. Open source projects have a much better history of interoperability, particularly when the standards themselves are open. Heck, open source software even bends over backwards to interoperate with Microsoft stuff (e.g. Samba) without much help from Microsoft itself.
Because the conservative mentality says something like this: If it's us versus them (substitute Mother Earth, endandgered species, countries with different cultures/religions/politics), we better make sure we win. Don't sacrifice our standard of living to help out the earth or some other species or to get along with another country.
They often don't understand long-term consequences.
Clearly, you can't just give this database to a spammer and say "here, don't send these people email." What a great recipe for getting more spam.
Instead, the list would need to be secret, and a spammer could send a query: "Is joe@yahoo.com on the list?".
You need to avoid the naive solution, where the list-keeper says "yes" if the address is on the list and "no" if it is not on the list. Otherwise, a spammer could just do a dictionary-type attack on the list to discover as many email addresses as she could. "How about joeb@yahoo? joec?"
You need to instead say "yes" if the address is on the list and then randomly choose "yes" or "no" otherwise. This way if a spammer gets "yes" she doesn't know whether she has a real email address or not.
Ah, but more problems. If the response is truly random, then a spammer can make a repeat request for all the addresses that the list-owner said "yes" for. The ones that actually aren't on the list will have a chance of coming up "no" a second time. Repeat as many times as you want to get a higher certainty that you have obtained usable addresses.
So you instead need some history -- always say yes to "fooxyz@yahoo" even if it is not on the list. And now your memory requirement becomes infinite. Sure you could keep a cache of your most recent responses, but this just delays the time it takes for the spammer to find out who is on the list.
From this brief thought-exercise, I don't know if a "do-not-spam" list is doable. Maybe I'm missing something.
What is clearly much easier to implement is a "please-spam-me" list. The memory requirements would sure be smaller. And no problem making this a publicly-available list. Likewise, it would be easy to prove you are not on the list when you get some spam. And hey, if 90% of uses don't want spam, why should we force them to say "no"?
There's a big difference between an equipment donation, a curriculum grant, and a research grant. We're talking here about an equipment donation, which is usually made to a university or sometimes to a department, not to an individual professor. Moreover, if you're looking to get tenure -- at a research-oriented university -- you will be evaluated primarily based on your research grants. I don't know of any professors that go looking for donations from Microsoft because this will make their road to tenure easier.
What's really happening here is that Microsoft is looking to hold onto their dominating position in the marketplace, and the university is happy to take the money. With state funding of higher education at all-time lows, this is not unreasonable. I suspect the means by which the technology is going to be used has very little review, because after all everybody runs Windows, right?
(I use Linux for all my coursework, research, and personal work, but I'm in the minority.)
You mean to tell me there's something in this for me when I pick textbooks for my CS classes? All along I've been trying to choose the textbooks that I felt covered the material the best. And in many cases I've missed out on any kind of opportunity by forgoing a textbook and taking the time to select relevant research papers. What else am I missing out on?
OK, so why not take the SETI/P2P approach to the Turing Test? Everyone can donate some drive space to store "world knowledge". Volunteers input this knowledge a little at a time. Then (the hard part) build a P2P query that searches this massively parallel system and returns the most likely match.
Is that they refuse to provide rpms for upgraded software. You can only install/uninstall the software that comes with the distribution. If I want the latest greatest version of evolution (for example), I have to install it (and resolve dependencies) outside of their package manager.
What I really want is an easy way to take a stock RedHat distribution and then upgrade packages as they are released, rather than waiting for the next version of their distribution to come out.
Most software sucks.
Spend your time more wisely. Write your own.
Actually, IP version 5 was assigned to a protocol called STII, which tried to do resource reservation for IP (similar to RSVP) but was never adopted much (aside from some experiments in Germany).
So the next number really will be IPv7 -- it's just a question of who asks for it. Quick, go write an Internet Draft and then call for a BOF!
I write open source because I end up with better software. Whenever I used closed source software,
I am frustrated by some functionality it doesn't have or some feature that is broken. What I wouldn't give to hack MS Word so that the dumb
numbered lists worked properly!
Organized open source efforts enable us to collaborate, ending up with better software for
everyone.
Essentially, build me something like a customized version of Yahoo, based on my extended browsing history.
Does such a group exist yet? Why not? This is exactly what an "open source society" needs.