Thing 1: Now there's a movie with a CGI creature that's worse than Lost in Space.
Thing 2: The M&M's are the new variety, not the old 1999/2000 versions! In the future they're made with Dwarf Star Alloy (1tsp = 100 tons). Really really lasts a long time when you eat them. Their mutual gravity allows them to orbit a common center of mass, so you get a rotating helix in a non- or low-gravity environment! (Not available on Earth or planets with crappy CGI creatures)
It sounds like there's a lot of heavy-hitters on the panel (AOL, PSInet). It would be in their best interests to fund the panel to keep Al Gore's baby "self-regulating" and "self-policing". They make enough cash to buy little toys like, say, Time-Warner, why not fund it themselves (tax deduction!) aso they can use it to thump their chests and say "We are the dreamers of dreams, and we care enough about Al Gore's invention to make it free of smut and A-bomb plans and unbiased news... oops, scratch the last one."
Sounds like a big ole' slap in the face (with hot grits and beer). Geez, I'm crazy for not posting this anonymously...
I hope Linux never becomes the average desktop OS. The average Joe (or possibly in your case, Mom) needs a lot of handholding and overhead when it comes to computers. Folks who don't want to see what's happening under the hood, don't care that they can tweak and update to their heart's content. They want, as my wife says, "push play, Yay!" Linux is amazingly configurable, and I do hope it becomes the average business or cubical OS. If Linux gets so bogged down with the 'point and click' mentality, it'll end up being another bloatware. I'd personally rather it were a goodly percentage of the market (say 30%). We'd get the ports needed to keep us happy.
As for the folks who shell out the bucks for Win apps and the Linux guys get freebies, I think that they're testing the waters. If a huge sum of folks download it, it's a good indication that they'd want to buy the 'new-and-improved' version when it came out. If it were used heavily, and if the update had new features that I needed, I'd update by buying.
I think that the Linux average will go for the easy and quick higher user base, then bemoan the lack of open source. I think it'll hurt the open source versions in development. Why work on a Linux version of Quicken when Intuit does it for you? Why put out a vector graphics program when Canvas is available, and it's free (beer)? Maybe that's their goal, to discourage open source projects in their areas of expertise.
Say, can't you say that since it's encoded on the drive, it's protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, since you cannot access it without getting around the encoding scheme (which is totally weak since slapping it to any IDE port will allow access). Hmmm.... maybe I gave the White House an easy out!
Well, yes, you are totally correct in that anyone can truly kill a HDD so noone can recover it. My favorite is the belt sander then Davey Jones locker approach. Most folks, however, want to save the HDD if it works, so they'll think that they can get away with just reformatting/U and reloading opsys. Those are the ones who get caught:)
Zapping it with huge mag fields will usually kill the drive, at least that's my experience when killing drives with confidential info. Spark-gapping it also works, but kills the drive. When trying to re-use the drive, start with encrypted and stay with it if it's something you want to keep secret, unless you live in the United Kingdom, where it'll now be illegal to not turn over the decryption key (even if you really forgot it).
Secondly, the NSA can recover data 16 rewrites or formats deep on a HDD. I know firsthand of eight layers, while in the Navy we had a HDD with data from two crash investigations stolen by a contractor, who used it for 2 months before it was recovered. We sent it in (I was told later to the NSA labs), and the data was recovered through 8 format/rewrites. Has to do with track edges and the head mechanism not tracking perfectly every time. Remember, encryption of drives works better if you don't want to be caught.
So... if drives were reformatted, they could have the data recovered. More emails about illegal crap. Hell, you'd think Gore would've thought of this, since he did invent the internet:)
I wonder if they will ever get to going through the emails to find the real dirt. If they do, it'll get classified as secret so it won't get released to the press. They'll stand by the "it's about national security, stupid" approach, so we'll never get the real story.
I hope the lady who was fired sues, at least she'll get some vindication.
One thing I find is interesting is just how many people knew nothing about 1201. How many knew about spectrum allocation at the FCC? I think that if the word were better distributed, there would be a much better showing. I have links for the EFF and the OpenDVD initiative on my website. I wrote two stories for zines on it. If the folks who did care about it treated it like a distributed-net project and networked their friends, there'd be a better turnout. Yes, it's a pain in the ass to write a coherent and cogent letter, but it's worse when you need to be familiar with the requirements for submitting your letter! It's worth it to me, anyway.
Comments are actually taken into consideration, especially if well-written and follow the questions posed by the agency. I participated in several commentary proceedings for the FCC concerning ham radio. The comments were used and they were debated. The ham radio folks ended up winning. One thing that helped was the American Radio Relay League, an organized member-society for amateur radio. If we could get some heavy hitters (EFF, Linux businesses), in addition to thousands of folks, writing in to oppose DMCA and allow circumvention of encryption for media access, for example, they will listen. Figure 100 citizens against one Time-Warner, and it helps balance it out. I thought that 2600.com would get more support by folks writing in, but I was disappointed. But... there's still time to participate. Put in your two cents.
The item up for discussion is exemptions. You are right, the DMCA was passed, but the LoC can make exceptions, such as media access (DVD) and length of copyright protection (if an item is encrypted, it will still be unavailable after the expiration of copyright).
Most of the comments concern DeCSS. While the initial comments are no longer being accepted, you still have time to reply to comments (March 20th). If you have any input, you can rebut and reply to any of the comments posted. Mine is up there. Several issues concern most of the visitors to/., including DVDs, encryption, reverse-engineering (how about not being able to make your new hardware work on Linux because it was illegal), and other copyright issues.
Comment #224 has notes about one computer association's concern with DMCA, #209 concerns the input from the MPAA, and #43 is the yacking of Time-Warner. Some very interesting notes were posted by Universities and Museums.
If you want to play DVDs on your Linux box, and you have an interest in how Linux continues to develop, make your voice heard. Post replies to comments. Some of the comments are very well written and thoughtful.
Technical info on sats + ham radio
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 5
Someone was interested in Ham Radio use of the sats (like the Phase 3D or Oscars). There's a lot of them up there (66 Iridium sats), but they're out of frequency. Also, they're right in the LEOsat hotspots for spectrum use, so I don't doubt that they'll re-farm them out or resell them.
Satellites: 66 Orbital Planes: 6 Orbit Height: 780 km (these are LEOsats) Inclination of Orbital Planes: 86.4 Orbital Period: 100 min. 28 sec. Lifetime: 5 to 8 years Frequencies and Rates Telephone and Messaging Service Links are 1616 - 1626.5 MHz (L-Band) Intersatellite Links are 23.18 - 23.38 GHz (Ka-Band) Ground Segment Links: Downlinks: 19.4 - 19.6 GHz (Ka-Band) Uplinks: 29.1-29.3 GHz (Ka-Band) Digital Voice, Fax, and Data are transmitted at 2.4 Kbps
Thanks for the replies, George. 1. I missed the note about still crashing Galileo. Thanks for pointing it out. 2. Yes, they had bigger budgets, but they were coming up with a lot of the items from scratch. The more stuff builds on what came before, the more inexpensive it should be. Also, newer tech should be cheaper, better and faster. I guess that's why I'm a retro-computer fan, it may not be pretty, but it works more reliably. 3. I really meant that more as a joke, but yes, it probably does not have CMa to allow it to slingshot. Also, yes, you can adjust orbit but you can't escape the gravity well without the DV. (I think you meant that). So, thanks for the intelligent reply, I appreciated it.
I thought that they were thinking of crashing Galileo so it wouldn't contaminate any of the moons (esp. Europa/Io).
Yes, it's great to hear good news coming from NASA. I think that they should re-hire and un-retire the folks who churned out Voyager and Galileo for the next Mars probe. It seems the older crowd were more hands-on oriented and the newer guys more theory-oriented.
Why not slingshot Galileo back to Mars? It's old, it's not the most technologically-advanced hunk of metal floating around, but by Gawd it works!
BTW, great line from the poster about V-ger, gave me quite a chuckle.
Two of my domains are hosted by a company that does not have Python capability. All of the hosts I use have PERL. Therefore, I use PERL.
Does that mean I will avoid Python? No, since I enjoy learning new things and when I have a use for learning Python, I will. PERL is just more prevalant right now. Should there be a huge upswing towards Python, we'll all learn it.
Choosing between the two, at this juncture, is like choosing what distro you want to use. All are good, but there's just something about one that gets your attention. The folks who visit here are not idiots, for the most part. If scripting is your bag, you'll choose what's more comfortable for you.
I'm downloading it so I can see what's changed. If noone uses it, it can't improve or get bugs ironed out.
First off, thanks to J-L and/. for another informative interview.
Compression algorithms should be patentable, but for a 2-year period. This way, the company that develops a new one will have a temporary monopoly to make their money, but it can be included in other programs and libs after it is opened to public use. Developing new algorithms is great, but useless if they're not used because of a 20-year lock on them.
I think that Mandrake is pushing RH to innovate. Remember, RH is used more by the newbies because it is more 'commercial' and it does some of their work for them. No, I'm not slamming RH, I'm just saying it's probably the most used by newcomers who, after they get used to Linux, can then either stay with RH or try the other flavors.
I'm also quite pleased that J-L released the gz lib to Winzip. Even though he's allowing them to make money from his work, he is actually pushing the acceptability and openness of Linux. The man is to be commended for looking at the whole picture and truly accepting open-source GPL.
While old laws can be used to prosecute, what does need to happen is the laws need to be made uniform and not at the mercy of uninformed technophobes. If Johnny gets nabbed running script kiddie files on Corporate Server, then the punishment should be relatively uniform and reasonable.
I hate using a cliche, but take the Mitnik case. He got nabbed doing nasty things or having someone else's data. Yes, he should've gotten his peepee slapped. 3 years probation, requirement that he goes to school or secures gainful employment, and maybe 30 days in the local slammer. 4 years? Imbecilic.
I noticed that Ryan said he and his colleagues in the Information Technology Association of America are committed to working with the government "to balance the privacy interests" of users with the need to find "those who seek to abuse it." What about privacy abuses like Doubleclick's tactics? How about companies like Symantec secretly sending out data about your computer? (See previous story about Peacefire for details)
Someone up the thread noted that the FBI won't get involved when the theoretical loss was less than $40K. No wonder the losses are artificially inflated! I bet, though, that these companies that scream they lost millions will 'forget' to include the loss when they report their data to the FTC or shareholders, which is also illegal and against FTC regulations. As an example, I give you Sun Corporation... They said Mitnik ripped off millions, but did not report it to the FTC or shareholders. What happened? Not a damn thing.
As an aside, I am not a Mitnik fanatic, I just used the examples because I was familiar with them.
Well, that's one of the better interviews I've seen. To the point, off the cuff. I think Loki has the right idea right now... porting games to Linux will work great for now, and be profitable. Easier than each game company hiring new Linux programmers anyway. When the game companies realize that the market is lucrative, the programmers working at Loki will be worth their weight in gold... years of porting games to Linux experience. I think, though, that when Loki is done in the porting arena, they'll have some of the best programmers to produce new games. All they'll need is some designers with experience, or some of their internal folks with vision. Game design is a bitch, but in the era of Nintendo and Sony, it'll make them a pretty penny.
And... as I have continually stated, any app or name-recognition game that appears for Linux helps nudge it towards acceptability by the public. It'll also push some more development on Linux, and some standardation of its APIs.
automatically detect objects and track their movement in real time, according to Buereau d'Etudes Vision (BEV). They claim that a full-blown vision processing system/application could be built for less than $50 that rivals current state-of-the-art $10,000 systems. Sounds pretty cool It looks like we're in for a slew of good-and-bad things to come. This silicon eye is so cheap that we'll end up seeing it installed in the oddest of places. Everything from the (1984-inspired) eyeball-in-the-TV (gives new meaning to the CBS logo) to anti-collision systems in vehicles. For $50 you can put one on your kid and see what they do (Here, Honey, it's a pendant from Aunt Huxley). Worried about which neighbor's pooch is pooping on your lawn? A few modules can be used to watch and track it home. I guess I'm a pessimist. I see more bad things, particularly in the area of privacy loss, than I see good.
The new Linsider site seems to boil new Linux information down to it's essence. While/. does report Linux information, they have a broader net to cast (and a cast of crazies to keep me coming back). Linsider looks like it can be the spot for Linux news. I wonder how this new site will impact the smaller, non-commercial sites run by Linux fans. We'll see how it goes.
Great! Having Delphi for Linux will introduce more folks who program/use Delphi to produce apps for Linux. More talented folks entering the Linux camp! Anything that creates more apps for Linux should be welcome news. Hopefully, the R&D division will get it right. Sounds promising, anyway.
What a shame. I used to like some of Symantec's products. But... I cannot support a company that secretly steals information against their own privacy policy. It doesn't matter if the company they bought disclosed it or not, it is Symantec's responsibility to go through their purchased property before plastering their name on it. Sorta like a Captain is responsible for his crews' actions.
I want to go through the banned sites to see if any of my domains are in it. What are the legalities if your site is included? Can one sue because of mistakes made by Symantec? Isn't that lost revenue, the same as if someone cracked into your web server and deleted the site? The results are similar.
As far as threatening Peacefire, they are now in the league of bullying companies that threaten rather than fix. It's surely easier (and cheaper) to threaten lawsuits than it would be to fix the problem. Distributed-checking the URLs, as someone here has already suggested, would allow blocking of real porn sites from kids yet not have stupid blocks against items like Latin language texts. Hell, have URL's checked by at least 5 independent folks to eliminate biased censorship. This would give Symantec an edge over the other censorwares (we check so you don't have to, and we can PROVE it). If their encryption was poor, fix it... but why censor their lists? Is it because they're afraid that bona-fide non-offensive sites will sue? Open the lists. Put in seeded fakes so they can check if other companies are stealing their work.
As an aside, I've always supported Peacefire. I've had a link off of warpedreality.com since I put it online. Isn't it worth a line if text off of your page too?
It seems to me that the old folks running the patent office and the copyright office are well behind the times. Digital processes available today require the copyright office to have the antique laws and information brought up to today's standards, yet not have the laws written by the same people that want the copyrights. The same goes for patents. New technology is spinning patent rights on its ear, and patents need to have it's rules and thinking updated by knowledgeable folks. The old way of awarding patents will not work in the virtual world.
Since Mozilla most likely will be the browser of the future Joe Desktop Linux system, I would suggest to those folks who have 'white-hat hack' in their blood to start to look for ways around the encryption, such as forcing a known encrypt key using trojans or BO or something of the sort. With open-source, you can bet the crackers will be looking for ways into the system. Mozilla needs to be ripped apart to work on its vulnerabilities. White-hatters can help secure it probably better than the programmers. Open-source can adapt far more quickly. Mozilla is the future for Linux. Aesthetics aside (pretty looks come after functionality), I'm looking for more security and stability than what IE and NS offers.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing 1: Now there's a movie with a CGI creature that's worse than Lost in Space.
Thing 2: The M&M's are the new variety, not the old 1999/2000 versions! In the future they're made with Dwarf Star Alloy (1tsp = 100 tons). Really really lasts a long time when you eat them. Their mutual gravity allows them to orbit a common center of mass, so you get a rotating helix in a non- or low-gravity environment! (Not available on Earth or planets with crappy CGI creatures)
Bwahahaha... good thinking...
"We will now hear from the Beastiality committee, and after the coffee break, we'll have a movie submitted by the S&M committee."
It sounds like there's a lot of heavy-hitters on the panel (AOL, PSInet). It would be in their best interests to fund the panel to keep Al Gore's baby "self-regulating" and "self-policing". They make enough cash to buy little toys like, say, Time-Warner, why not fund it themselves (tax deduction!) aso they can use it to thump their chests and say "We are the dreamers of dreams, and we care enough about Al Gore's invention to make it free of smut and A-bomb plans and unbiased news... oops, scratch the last one."
Sounds like a big ole' slap in the face (with hot grits and beer). Geez, I'm crazy for not posting this anonymously...
Nice post, zaius
I hope Linux never becomes the average desktop OS. The average Joe (or possibly in your case, Mom) needs a lot of handholding and overhead when it comes to computers. Folks who don't want to see what's happening under the hood, don't care that they can tweak and update to their heart's content. They want, as my wife says, "push play, Yay!" Linux is amazingly configurable, and I do hope it becomes the average business or cubical OS. If Linux gets so bogged down with the 'point and click' mentality, it'll end up being another bloatware. I'd personally rather it were a goodly percentage of the market (say 30%). We'd get the ports needed to keep us happy.
As for the folks who shell out the bucks for Win apps and the Linux guys get freebies, I think that they're testing the waters. If a huge sum of folks download it, it's a good indication that they'd want to buy the 'new-and-improved' version when it came out. If it were used heavily, and if the update had new features that I needed, I'd update by buying.
I think that the Linux average will go for the easy and quick higher user base, then bemoan the lack of open source. I think it'll hurt the open source versions in development. Why work on a Linux version of Quicken when Intuit does it for you? Why put out a vector graphics program when Canvas is available, and it's free (beer)? Maybe that's their goal, to discourage open source projects in their areas of expertise.
Again, good post zaius.
Say, can't you say that since it's encoded on the drive, it's protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, since you cannot access it without getting around the encoding scheme (which is totally weak since slapping it to any IDE port will allow access). Hmmm.... maybe I gave the White House an easy out!
Well, yes, you are totally correct in that anyone can truly kill a HDD so noone can recover it. My favorite is the belt sander then Davey Jones locker approach. Most folks, however, want to save the HDD if it works, so they'll think that they can get away with just reformatting /U and reloading opsys. Those are the ones who get caught :)
Zapping it with huge mag fields will usually kill the drive, at least that's my experience when killing drives with confidential info. Spark-gapping it also works, but kills the drive. When trying to re-use the drive, start with encrypted and stay with it if it's something you want to keep secret, unless you live in the United Kingdom, where it'll now be illegal to not turn over the decryption key (even if you really forgot it).
First off, that pic of Gore is a riot...
:)
Secondly, the NSA can recover data 16 rewrites or formats deep on a HDD. I know firsthand of eight layers, while in the Navy we had a HDD with data from two crash investigations stolen by a contractor, who used it for 2 months before it was recovered. We sent it in (I was told later to the NSA labs), and the data was recovered through 8 format/rewrites. Has to do with track edges and the head mechanism not tracking perfectly every time. Remember, encryption of drives works better if you don't want to be caught.
So... if drives were reformatted, they could have the data recovered. More emails about illegal crap. Hell, you'd think Gore would've thought of this, since he did invent the internet
I wonder if they will ever get to going through the emails to find the real dirt. If they do, it'll get classified as secret so it won't get released to the press. They'll stand by the "it's about national security, stupid" approach, so we'll never get the real story.
I hope the lady who was fired sues, at least she'll get some vindication.
I can always hope thousands...
One thing I find is interesting is just how many people knew nothing about 1201. How many knew about spectrum allocation at the FCC? I think that if the word were better distributed, there would be a much better showing. I have links for the EFF and the OpenDVD initiative on my website. I wrote two stories for zines on it. If the folks who did care about it treated it like a distributed-net project and networked their friends, there'd be a better turnout. Yes, it's a pain in the ass to write a coherent and cogent letter, but it's worse when you need to be familiar with the requirements for submitting your letter! It's worth it to me, anyway.
Comments are actually taken into consideration, especially if well-written and follow the questions posed by the agency. I participated in several commentary proceedings for the FCC concerning ham radio. The comments were used and they were debated. The ham radio folks ended up winning. One thing that helped was the American Radio Relay League, an organized member-society for amateur radio. If we could get some heavy hitters (EFF, Linux businesses), in addition to thousands of folks, writing in to oppose DMCA and allow circumvention of encryption for media access, for example, they will listen. Figure 100 citizens against one Time-Warner, and it helps balance it out. I thought that 2600.com would get more support by folks writing in, but I was disappointed. But... there's still time to participate. Put in your two cents.
The item up for discussion is exemptions. You are right, the DMCA was passed, but the LoC can make exceptions, such as media access (DVD) and length of copyright protection (if an item is encrypted, it will still be unavailable after the expiration of copyright).
Most of the comments concern DeCSS. While the initial comments are no longer being accepted, you still have time to reply to comments (March 20th). If you have any input, you can rebut and reply to any of the comments posted. Mine is up there. Several issues concern most of the visitors to /., including DVDs, encryption, reverse-engineering (how about not being able to make your new hardware work on Linux because it was illegal), and other copyright issues.
Comment #224 has notes about one computer association's concern with DMCA, #209 concerns the input from the MPAA, and #43 is the yacking of Time-Warner. Some very interesting notes were posted by Universities and Museums.
If you want to play DVDs on your Linux box, and you have an interest in how Linux continues to develop, make your voice heard. Post replies to comments. Some of the comments are very well written and thoughtful.
Someone was interested in Ham Radio use of the sats (like the Phase 3D or Oscars). There's a lot of them up there (66 Iridium sats), but they're out of frequency. Also, they're right in the LEOsat hotspots for spectrum use, so I don't doubt that they'll re-farm them out or resell them.
Satellites: 66
Orbital Planes: 6
Orbit Height: 780 km (these are LEOsats)
Inclination of Orbital Planes: 86.4
Orbital Period: 100 min. 28 sec.
Lifetime: 5 to 8 years
Frequencies and Rates
Telephone and Messaging Service Links are 1616 - 1626.5 MHz (L-Band)
Intersatellite Links are 23.18 - 23.38 GHz (Ka-Band)
Ground Segment Links:
Downlinks: 19.4 - 19.6 GHz (Ka-Band)
Uplinks: 29.1-29.3 GHz (Ka-Band)
Digital Voice, Fax, and Data are transmitted at 2.4 Kbps
Thank you for the insite. I stand corrected, and I will try and purchase better technical books :)
Thanks for the replies, George.
1. I missed the note about still crashing Galileo. Thanks for pointing it out.
2. Yes, they had bigger budgets, but they were coming up with a lot of the items from scratch. The more stuff builds on what came before, the more inexpensive it should be. Also, newer tech should be cheaper, better and faster. I guess that's why I'm a retro-computer fan, it may not be pretty, but it works more reliably.
3. I really meant that more as a joke, but yes, it probably does not have CMa to allow it to slingshot. Also, yes, you can adjust orbit but you can't escape the gravity well without the DV. (I think you meant that).
So, thanks for the intelligent reply, I appreciated it.
I thought that they were thinking of crashing Galileo so it wouldn't contaminate any of the moons (esp. Europa/Io).
Yes, it's great to hear good news coming from NASA. I think that they should re-hire and un-retire the folks who churned out Voyager and Galileo for the next Mars probe. It seems the older crowd were more hands-on oriented and the newer guys more theory-oriented.
Why not slingshot Galileo back to Mars? It's old, it's not the most technologically-advanced hunk of metal floating around, but by Gawd it works!
BTW, great line from the poster about V-ger, gave me quite a chuckle.
PERL and Python have their uses and strongpoints.
Two of my domains are hosted by a company that does not have Python capability. All of the hosts I use have PERL. Therefore, I use PERL.
Does that mean I will avoid Python? No, since I enjoy learning new things and when I have a use for learning Python, I will. PERL is just more prevalant right now. Should there be a huge upswing towards Python, we'll all learn it.
Choosing between the two, at this juncture, is like choosing what distro you want to use. All are good, but there's just something about one that gets your attention. The folks who visit here are not idiots, for the most part. If scripting is your bag, you'll choose what's more comfortable for you.
I'm downloading it so I can see what's changed. If noone uses it, it can't improve or get bugs ironed out.
First off, thanks to J-L and /. for another informative interview.
Compression algorithms should be patentable, but for a 2-year period. This way, the company that develops a new one will have a temporary monopoly to make their money, but it can be included in other programs and libs after it is opened to public use. Developing new algorithms is great, but useless if they're not used because of a 20-year lock on them.
I think that Mandrake is pushing RH to innovate. Remember, RH is used more by the newbies because it is more 'commercial' and it does some of their work for them. No, I'm not slamming RH, I'm just saying it's probably the most used by newcomers who, after they get used to Linux, can then either stay with RH or try the other flavors.
I'm also quite pleased that J-L released the gz lib to Winzip. Even though he's allowing them to make money from his work, he is actually pushing the acceptability and openness of Linux. The man is to be commended for looking at the whole picture and truly accepting open-source GPL.
While old laws can be used to prosecute, what does need to happen is the laws need to be made uniform and not at the mercy of uninformed technophobes. If Johnny gets nabbed running script kiddie files on Corporate Server, then the punishment should be relatively uniform and reasonable.
I hate using a cliche, but take the Mitnik case. He got nabbed doing nasty things or having someone else's data. Yes, he should've gotten his peepee slapped. 3 years probation, requirement that he goes to school or secures gainful employment, and maybe 30 days in the local slammer. 4 years? Imbecilic.
I noticed that Ryan said he and his colleagues in the Information Technology Association of America are committed to working with the government "to balance the privacy interests" of users with the need to find "those who seek to abuse it." What about privacy abuses like Doubleclick's tactics? How about companies like Symantec secretly sending out data about your computer? (See previous story about Peacefire for details)
Someone up the thread noted that the FBI won't get involved when the theoretical loss was less than $40K. No wonder the losses are artificially inflated! I bet, though, that these companies that scream they lost millions will 'forget' to include the loss when they report their data to the FTC or shareholders, which is also illegal and against FTC regulations. As an example, I give you Sun Corporation... They said Mitnik ripped off millions, but did not report it to the FTC or shareholders. What happened? Not a damn thing.
As an aside, I am not a Mitnik fanatic, I just used the examples because I was familiar with them.
Well, that's one of the better interviews I've seen. To the point, off the cuff. I think Loki has the right idea right now... porting games to Linux will work great for now, and be profitable. Easier than each game company hiring new Linux programmers anyway. When the game companies realize that the market is lucrative, the programmers working at Loki will be worth their weight in gold... years of porting games to Linux experience. I think, though, that when Loki is done in the porting arena, they'll have some of the best programmers to produce new games. All they'll need is some designers with experience, or some of their internal folks with vision. Game design is a bitch, but in the era of Nintendo and Sony, it'll make them a pretty penny.
And... as I have continually stated, any app or name-recognition game that appears for Linux helps nudge it towards acceptability by the public. It'll also push some more development on Linux, and some standardation of its APIs.
automatically detect objects and track their movement in real time, according to Buereau d'Etudes Vision (BEV). They claim that a full-blown vision processing system/application could be built for less than $50 that rivals current state-of-the-art $10,000 systems. Sounds pretty cool It looks like we're in for a slew of good-and-bad things to come. This silicon eye is so cheap that we'll end up seeing it installed in the oddest of places. Everything from the (1984-inspired) eyeball-in-the-TV (gives new meaning to the CBS logo) to anti-collision systems in vehicles. For $50 you can put one on your kid and see what they do (Here, Honey, it's a pendant from Aunt Huxley). Worried about which neighbor's pooch is pooping on your lawn? A few modules can be used to watch and track it home. I guess I'm a pessimist. I see more bad things, particularly in the area of privacy loss, than I see good.
The new Linsider site seems to boil new Linux information down to it's essence. While /. does report Linux information, they have a broader net to cast (and a cast of crazies to keep me coming back). Linsider looks like it can be the spot for Linux news. I wonder how this new site will impact the smaller, non-commercial sites run by Linux fans. We'll see how it goes.
Great! Having Delphi for Linux will introduce more folks who program/use Delphi to produce apps for Linux. More talented folks entering the Linux camp! Anything that creates more apps for Linux should be welcome news. Hopefully, the R&D division will get it right. Sounds promising, anyway.
What a shame. I used to like some of Symantec's products. But... I cannot support a company that secretly steals information against their own privacy policy. It doesn't matter if the company they bought disclosed it or not, it is Symantec's responsibility to go through their purchased property before plastering their name on it. Sorta like a Captain is responsible for his crews' actions.
I want to go through the banned sites to see if any of my domains are in it. What are the legalities if your site is included? Can one sue because of mistakes made by Symantec? Isn't that lost revenue, the same as if someone cracked into your web server and deleted the site? The results are similar.
As far as threatening Peacefire, they are now in the league of bullying companies that threaten rather than fix. It's surely easier (and cheaper) to threaten lawsuits than it would be to fix the problem. Distributed-checking the URLs, as someone here has already suggested, would allow blocking of real porn sites from kids yet not have stupid blocks against items like Latin language texts. Hell, have URL's checked by at least 5 independent folks to eliminate biased censorship. This would give Symantec an edge over the other censorwares (we check so you don't have to, and we can PROVE it). If their encryption was poor, fix it... but why censor their lists? Is it because they're afraid that bona-fide non-offensive sites will sue? Open the lists. Put in seeded fakes so they can check if other companies are stealing their work.
As an aside, I've always supported Peacefire. I've had a link off of warpedreality.com since I put it online. Isn't it worth a line if text off of your page too?
It seems to me that the old folks running the patent office and the copyright office are well behind the times. Digital processes available today require the copyright office to have the antique laws and information brought up to today's standards, yet not have the laws written by the same people that want the copyrights. The same goes for patents. New technology is spinning patent rights on its ear, and patents need to have it's rules and thinking updated by knowledgeable folks. The old way of awarding patents will not work in the virtual world.
Since Mozilla most likely will be the browser of the future Joe Desktop Linux system, I would suggest to those folks who have 'white-hat hack' in their blood to start to look for ways around the encryption, such as forcing a known encrypt key using trojans or BO or something of the sort. With open-source, you can bet the crackers will be looking for ways into the system. Mozilla needs to be ripped apart to work on its vulnerabilities. White-hatters can help secure it probably better than the programmers. Open-source can adapt far more quickly. Mozilla is the future for Linux. Aesthetics aside (pretty looks come after functionality), I'm looking for more security and stability than what IE and NS offers.