I don't know about you, but my ISP doesn't give my a nice ethernet connection to plug into. I have a DSL router which talks to the ISP and routes traffic from my local subnet (which is a real-world subnet) to the isp over the DSL. I know this varies from country to country, but here in the UK our DSL is entirely PPPoA which means that the DSL router really does need to understand the protocol you're using - most only understand IPv4 (i.e. noone has made a PPPoA bridge yet).
In fact, my ISP does give me a nice ethernet connection to plug into, and this is not extremely uncommon in Stockholm, Sweden, but I realize most aren't as fortunate. However, all DSL providers I know of here hand out DSL modems with ethernet connectors, so for the user, it's just one more box to put somewhere. If there is any authentication, the reason of which I cannot grasp, it's web-based. Given this configuration, the DSL modem doesn't need to know anything about layer 3 and above.
Infact a big problem with rolling out IPv6 naviely is that I am not aware of any consumer grade DSL routers that support IPv6, so the PC to ISP connection at least would have to be tunnelled.
If you receive real, globally routed IPv6 addresses and your ISP behaves as it should and gives you a/48 subnet or similar, you won't need a router of your own. Just connect all your machines to a switch and let them get their own addresses from your ISP's DHCP server. If you think you need a firewall, it should reside on each host anyway, where it does the least damage.
GRE stands for Gecko Runtime Environment, analogous to JRE, and it is (or is supposed to become one day) a set of shared libraries that can be loaded by applications that need an XHTML layout engine, XUL parser etc. It's not a service that needs to be started, especially not at boot time. That would just be weird.:)
How are you suppose to list Wikipedia as a source? You would have to list the date and exact time you accessed it.
If you read just about any guide to writing academic references, you'll find that listing at least the date is what you're supposed to do anyway, whenever referencing a web site. You know, any web site can change at the editor's whim at any time. With Wikipedia, at least you have the ability to go back and read previous versions of the article.
I'm not sure where you've seen this, but how do you propose one test for 100 % compatibility with a closed, undocumented file format that isn't even portable throughout the range of Word versions?
Some of you might have thought it somewhat weird to read the stance of Internet Society of China (ISC). I know I did. Well, it turns out that Internet Society of China isn't a chapter of Internet Society (ISOC), as the name might lead you to believe. Lynn St.Amour, President, CEO of ISOC writes in a letter to the editor of The Economist, in reply to a similarly confusing article:
Your September 5 [2002] story "Stop Your Searching" on censorship of the Internet in China referenced an organization backed by the Chinese government that calls itself the Internet Society of China. I would like to make it absolutely clear that this group is in no way affiliated with the Internet Society (ISOC), a global not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1991 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy development. ISOC has offices in Reston, Virginia, and Geneva, Switzerland, with chapters throughout the world.
The result is no different than if a company switches to an ISP that is known to be spam-friendly... they will usually get bounces stating "Your mail was refused because your subnet is blocked for spamming," or something similar. In which case, the company had best rethink its choice of ISP.
If you are bouncing spam you are just contributing to the problem. Spammers always fake the originating addresses, often using innocent peoples' addresses, who will find their mailboxes full of spam bounces. Can you tell this happened to me?:)
The correct way to do it is to deny the spam message on the SMTP level.
I would be more interested in running Linux proper (or some other free Unix-like operating system) on my Palm (or any other palmtop hardware, for that matter). The Palm apps are mostly good, though somewhat lacking in features, but the low-level parts of the operating system are a joke.
I want memory protection, pre-emptive multi-tasking and a real file system on my Palm, not an unorganized, opaque and flat bunch of random data and apps that can't run concurrently. What's with the arbitrary limits of PDBs? The limit of 2^16 "objects" (I'm not a Palm programmer and don't know the correct term) in a PDB is causing the people who are trying to package Wikipedia great troubles.
To continue the rant, I recently got the WLAN SDIO card for the T3, and the drivers and supplied software are the worst I have ever encountered. (And that after what, two years, of development?)
Some issues:
Whenever you insert the card into the slot you have to manually go to the Preferences app and turn it on. Since the card doesn't even fit in the device, you won't be running arround with it in the slot. When you insert the card, it's a fair assumption that you want to use it (without unnecessary hazzle).
The driver tries to connect to the last recently used access point ESSID, regardless of whether it is even present in the air. I don't know how others use it, but with a mobile device like this, the last access point tends to be the least likely one I'll want to use the next time (especially if it's not even available).
The card has problems with some Netgear access points, failing to get an IP address over DHCP 19 times out of 20.
I won't mention the bug (documented all over the web, but ignored by Palm) forcing me to reinstall all my software twice before it would even resolve hostnames.
I'm sick and tired of these excuses for operating systems we have to deal with on palmtops, and the T3 will probably be the last Palm I ever buy. Not that Pocket PC / Windows CE / whatever it's called this week seems any better, and Linux for the Pocket PC-style palmtops never seems to run on the latest devices.
If it was only possible to buy a Zaurus with built-in IEEE 802.11b and Bluetooth in Europe without hazzles...
When I got my IBM ThinkPad X31 about a year ago, I figured I might as well try to boot Windows just once to see what kind of hardware-specific tools IBM supplied. (Trying to get a refund for an operating system I did not want was not possible, since IBM made it clear, that if you did not agree to the licenses of all the supplied software, you were free to return the laptop, which, of course, was not an option.)
I didn't get very far, though. Before it would boot (acutally, install Windows from a restore parition) the software wanted my to agree to two click-through EULAs, one from Microsoft and one from IBM. The funny part is that the license texts, which would have required tens of pages each if printed for sure, was displayed in two tiny text areas, only three text lines high. There was no option to save or print the licenses, and, if I call correctly, there was even some music playing in the background.
The point is, noone is intended to read these texts. I'm not sure what implications that has for the validity of this kind of licenses in various jurisdictions (IANAL etc), but the whole situation is just weird.
(Needless to say, I powered off the machine at that point and net-booted a Debian installer.)
The discovery of differential cryptanalysis is generally attributed to Eli Biham and Adi Shamir in the late 1980s, who published a number of attacks against various block ciphers and hash functions, including a theoretical weakness in the Data Encryption Standard (DES). It was noted that DES is surprisingly resilient to differential cryptanalysis, in the sense that even small modifications make it much more susceptible; this suggested that the designers at IBM knew of this in the 1970s. Indeed, parties involved in the creation of DES have since admitted that defending against differential cryptanalysis was a design goal (Coppersmith, 1994). It would appear that the National Security Agency (NSA), who also had some input into the design, were well aware of the technique before its rediscovery at IBM, and did not want the attack to become public knowledge; this was the reason the design process was kept secret. Within IBM, differential cryptanalysis was known as the "T-attack", or "Tickling attack".
I would be careful with AES, myself. It was designed by the NSA... do you really think they would pioneer an initiative to keep themselves out of your information? No? Same here.
AES was not developed by NSA. The crypto, also known as Rijndael, was created by the Belgian cryptographers Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen (hence the name). It was selected in a public competition and adopted as the encryption standard to replace DES by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Remember that DES has some mysterious values in the so-called "S-Boxes". For years, no one knew why those values were chosen. As it turns out, those values made the cypher resistant to differential cryptanalysis, which was unknown to the public at the time. But maybe there's something in those values that let the NSA "easily" break it??
It is true that NSA discovered differential cryptanalysis before academia, but they wouldn't have had to tell the public not to use certain values for the S-boxes at all. By doing so they actually strengthened DES by making it less susceptible to differential cryptanalysis.
There is a reason why IBM isn't even really shipping Linux, ever, much less creating a distribution of their own. If you buy a system pre-installed with Linux from IBM, Linux will show up as a separate item on your bill. Basically, you buy the system without an operating system and have IBM consultants install Linux for you before the system is delivered. That way, Linux is never actually distributed by IBM.
Personally, I think this is because if IBM distributed an entire Linux distribution, most of which is covered by the GPL, it would invalidate a huge number of IBM's patents.
Glib doesn't have much to do with the rest of GNOME. The connection is historic, just like libxml. Glib only provides things (like data structures) that should probably have been a part of libc.
As you surely know, switched ethernet does not provide any real additional security, since you can do the same sniffing as on a hub using ARP spoofing. (Unless you have taken special precautions to detect ARP spoofing, that is.)
Even _counting_ to 2^128 is a daunting task. Actually, with current computers even counting to 2^64 takes practically forever if I'm not mistaken.
If you count one billion numbers per second it would take over 500 years. If you count at one billion times that speed it would take over 500 times the age of the universe to reach 2^128.
In the other hand, SuSE have some default selections or aggroupations of packages, where instead of selecting one by one you get in one category a lot of related programs (i.e. you can select KDE or gnome desktop, or development packages or things like that) selected in group but where you can deselect things from there. That helps dealing with such amount of programs.
Debian has two solutions which are similar: tasksel, which allows you to select certain tasks, and metapackages, which do nothing but depend on a large group of other packages, such as gnome, kde and x-window-system.
I think a main hope for Linux being able to track things like this is, it to be able to use windows drivers, codex, and programs, under Linux. MPlayer, I believe, has the ability to use Windows codecs, things like Wine/Crossover Office and such, allow using the programs.
That only works on i386. Linux is multi-platform.
Furthermore, that would make it impossible for distributors to ship a fully functional system.
As far as support, MS, IBM, Sun, and most telecoms favour SIP with SIMPLE for IM. I've no idea what the other entrenched IM players, AOL and Yahoo, want.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, my ISP does give me a nice ethernet connection to plug into, and this is not extremely uncommon in Stockholm, Sweden, but I realize most aren't as fortunate. However, all DSL providers I know of here hand out DSL modems with ethernet connectors, so for the user, it's just one more box to put somewhere. If there is any authentication, the reason of which I cannot grasp, it's web-based. Given this configuration, the DSL modem doesn't need to know anything about layer 3 and above.
If you receive real, globally routed IPv6 addresses and your ISP behaves as it should and gives you a /48 subnet or similar, you won't need a router of your own. Just connect all your machines to a switch and let them get their own addresses from your ISP's DHCP server. If you think you need a firewall, it should reside on each host anyway, where it does the least damage.
GRE stands for Gecko Runtime Environment, analogous to JRE, and it is (or is supposed to become one day) a set of shared libraries that can be loaded by applications that need an XHTML layout engine, XUL parser etc. It's not a service that needs to be started, especially not at boot time. That would just be weird. :)
If you read just about any guide to writing academic references, you'll find that listing at least the date is what you're supposed to do anyway, whenever referencing a web site. You know, any web site can change at the editor's whim at any time. With Wikipedia, at least you have the ability to go back and read previous versions of the article.
I'm not sure where you've seen this, but how do you propose one test for 100 % compatibility with a closed, undocumented file format that isn't even portable throughout the range of Word versions?
Some of you might have thought it somewhat weird to read the stance of Internet Society of China (ISC). I know I did. Well, it turns out that Internet Society of China isn't a chapter of Internet Society (ISOC), as the name might lead you to believe. Lynn St.Amour, President, CEO of ISOC writes in a letter to the editor of The Economist, in reply to a similarly confusing article:
Complete letter
Croaker wrote:
If you are bouncing spam you are just contributing to the problem. Spammers always fake the originating addresses, often using innocent peoples' addresses, who will find their mailboxes full of spam bounces. Can you tell this happened to me? :)
The correct way to do it is to deny the spam message on the SMTP level.
I would be more interested in running Linux proper (or some other free Unix-like operating system) on my Palm (or any other palmtop hardware, for that matter). The Palm apps are mostly good, though somewhat lacking in features, but the low-level parts of the operating system are a joke.
I want memory protection, pre-emptive multi-tasking and a real file system on my Palm, not an unorganized, opaque and flat bunch of random data and apps that can't run concurrently. What's with the arbitrary limits of PDBs? The limit of 2^16 "objects" (I'm not a Palm programmer and don't know the correct term) in a PDB is causing the people who are trying to package Wikipedia great troubles.
To continue the rant, I recently got the WLAN SDIO card for the T3, and the drivers and supplied software are the worst I have ever encountered. (And that after what, two years, of development?)
Some issues:
I won't mention the bug (documented all over the web, but ignored by Palm) forcing me to reinstall all my software twice before it would even resolve hostnames.
I'm sick and tired of these excuses for operating systems we have to deal with on palmtops, and the T3 will probably be the last Palm I ever buy. Not that Pocket PC / Windows CE / whatever it's called this week seems any better, and Linux for the Pocket PC-style palmtops never seems to run on the latest devices.
If it was only possible to buy a Zaurus with built-in IEEE 802.11b and Bluetooth in Europe without hazzles...
Sorry about the rant!
When I got my IBM ThinkPad X31 about a year ago, I figured I might as well try to boot Windows just once to see what kind of hardware-specific tools IBM supplied. (Trying to get a refund for an operating system I did not want was not possible, since IBM made it clear, that if you did not agree to the licenses of all the supplied software, you were free to return the laptop, which, of course, was not an option.)
I didn't get very far, though. Before it would boot (acutally, install Windows from a restore parition) the software wanted my to agree to two click-through EULAs, one from Microsoft and one from IBM. The funny part is that the license texts, which would have required tens of pages each if printed for sure, was displayed in two tiny text areas, only three text lines high. There was no option to save or print the licenses, and, if I call correctly, there was even some music playing in the background.
The point is, noone is intended to read these texts. I'm not sure what implications that has for the validity of this kind of licenses in various jurisdictions (IANAL etc), but the whole situation is just weird.
(Needless to say, I powered off the machine at that point and net-booted a Debian installer.)
Speaking of Wal-Mart and IT, here is an interesting Salon article on Wal-Mart and RFID.
And you can use other servers as gateways (or transports), even if your own doesn't support it. Look here: http://www.jabber.org/user/userguide/ar01s12.html.
Speaking of Wikipedia, it turn out that there is a good article on differential cryptanalysis there as well. I quote:
AES was not developed by NSA. The crypto, also known as Rijndael, was created by the Belgian cryptographers Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen (hence the name). It was selected in a public competition and adopted as the encryption standard to replace DES by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
See the Wikipedia article about AES for more information on AES and its origin.
It is true that NSA discovered differential cryptanalysis before academia, but they wouldn't have had to tell the public not to use certain values for the S-boxes at all. By doing so they actually strengthened DES by making it less susceptible to differential cryptanalysis.
There is a reason why IBM isn't even really shipping Linux, ever, much less creating a distribution of their own. If you buy a system pre-installed with Linux from IBM, Linux will show up as a separate item on your bill. Basically, you buy the system without an operating system and have IBM consultants install Linux for you before the system is delivered. That way, Linux is never actually distributed by IBM.
Personally, I think this is because if IBM distributed an entire Linux distribution, most of which is covered by the GPL, it would invalidate a huge number of IBM's patents.
The Bugzilla administrators seem to have removed the HTTP referer check, so now you can link to Bugzilla bugs from Slashdot again.
Firefox also uses Gtk+ components:
Glib doesn't have much to do with the rest of GNOME. The connection is historic, just like libxml. Glib only provides things (like data structures) that should probably have been a part of libc.
As you surely know, switched ethernet does not provide any real additional security, since you can do the same sniffing as on a hub using ARP spoofing. (Unless you have taken special precautions to detect ARP spoofing, that is.)
Sorry, for some reason Slashdot mangled the URL. Here it is: rtsp://rm2.novell.com/04/brainshare/lord_of_the_ne t_real.rm
While you're at it -- check out this Lord of the Rings-based Novell commercial!
If you count one billion numbers per second it would take over 500 years. If you count at one billion times that speed it would take over 500 times the age of the universe to reach 2^128.
Debian has two solutions which are similar: tasksel, which allows you to select certain tasks, and metapackages, which do nothing but depend on a large group of other packages, such as gnome, kde and x-window-system.
That only works on i386. Linux is multi-platform.
Furthermore, that would make it impossible for distributors to ship a fully functional system.
Are you aware of any free, public Web Map Servers that are available?
Sun includes (and advertises) a Jabber client (Gaim) in the Java Desktop System.