I. The third party tries to find all pirates, so it tries to connect & track all users of one or more torrents. Then they might find your real address somehow and blackmail/sue you. This is a violation of privacy, no one is allowed to just snoop traffic or probe everyones computer just to stir something up. I can not believe such evidence would hold up in court. The only one who might take such action is the police (or other gov organisation), but they need some previous evidence and most likely a warrent.
I don't think this will hold up in many countries as snooping. Snooping would include you being a MITM, or information that you gather monitoring a conversation between two parties. However, in our case, the malicious party is actually your peer. You are communicating with him and sending him the data as intended for him.
II) The malicious client just knows your IP and wants to find out what you serve or if you serve illegal files. I assume you have set your bittorrent client to only allow encrypted c2c communication. If you use HTTPS to download the.torrent files, the malicious client does not know which file the torrent hash belongs to. If you use a Proxy or HTTPS trackers (do they exist?), the malicious client does not even know the hashs. So your bittorrent client will deny serving the malicious client because of a hash mismatch.
It doesn't work like this in practice. I'll explain, assuming you are familiar with the.torrent file format, and protocols for Bittorrent tracker and peer communication.
Most torrents that entities such as RIAA are interested in investigating _are_ public. Supposing there is a website like the Pirate Bay that hosts "Britney-Spears-Songs.torrent". That provides the hashes and points to a bunch of trackers. The malicious party's software gets the torrent file, and connects to the tracker, from where it gets peer addresses. The malicious party connects to peers, requests pieces for the hashes and it is the peers that supply it with content that matches the hashes.
Once the malicious party has downloaded the torrent fully, it knows that all peer addresses it downloaded from were interested/involved in the content distribution (and had parts of this content, if not seeds that had all of it).
Of course, if your torrent and tracker are not public, but restricted to a secluded group of people, you don't have to worry.. but then, most people don't use Bittorrent like this.
Encryption without any kind of authentication makes no difference if the malicious client is in the pool. Bittorrent's encryption made sense for working around ISP throttling (which involved actual snooping btw).
1. If you don't use Tor for the client-to-client traffic, you would have to reveal your real IP to the tracker, so other clients (including malicious ones) can connect to your client.
2. What when you serve the content in question when a malicious peer using that tracker connects to your client, encrypted or not?
[muks@misha ~]$ dig +short rs.dns-oarc.net txt rst.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net. rst.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net. rst.x490.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net. "178.63.21.2 DNS reply size limit is at least 490" "178.63.21.2 lacks EDNS, defaults to 512" "Tested at 2010-04-30 13:41:05 UTC"
This seems to say dnscache lacks EDNS. Can anyone with more knowledge of DNS comment whether djbdns is affected?
If the phone company recorded every single phone call, and allowed the phone owner to play them from a web interface whenever they wanted, the average telephone owner's head would explode:)
I guess what I wrote didn't come off right. I am not questioning your intelligence. You do that yourself. I meant to write "Think. [Ask yourself,] are you being intelligent if you still use Facebook after all this?"
VirtualBox = desktop Xen=server completely different products, comparing them is nonsense
By this, you either mean:
1. VirtualBox doesn't support 'server' guest operating systems -- This would be incorrect as VirtualBox does support server guest operating systems. In fact, if your guest OS is Linux, it doesn't matter if the distro is a 'server' distro or a 'desktop' distro.. the OS packages are the same, except for their versions and distro-specific patches.
OR
2. VirtualBox doesn't have features typically used by admins who deploy server operating systems -- While this may have been correct years ago, it is not so today. VirtualBox can be controlled from the commandline, has an API if you want to control it from scripts, supports snapshots, live migration, remote desktop, web console, and a range of networking configurations. Maybe you can find some specific feature it doesn't have when compared to another product, but this is like comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL. If 90% of admins are happy with the features that VirtualBox provides, that's good enough for that 90%.
I understand where you are coming from. You are right, but I disagree that things are very bad.
POSIX is a relatively old and established environment, which you get out of the box with most operating systems. My POSIX project works properly on Fedora, on old versions of RHEL, on BSDs, on Solaris, on embedded platforms such as iPhone, on several routers that run embedded Linux and BSDs, etc. We run into issues and quirks from time to time that we fix, but then this can be said of any maintained software project. We didn't handle several issues (similar to the cases you mention) in many years of our project. Then some user ran into a bug that had existed in so many releases, and we slapped our heads and fixed it. Wasn't it Dijkstra who wanted software to be like televisions, where you ship it and it's done? No version 1.1, etc.:)
There are many POSIX things to keep in mind.. implementation bugs, quirks, and there are even issues in the standard. In my career, I've had similar problems with many higher-level libraries I've used too. Software is difficult like that. You must be aware that there are higher level abstraction libraries such as glib, gnet2 in the GNOME family, Apache's apr, etc. And other things such as libsoup, libcurl, etc. if you want higher level protocol handlers which even hide the socket interface. These have their own issues, quirks, etc. Some problems go away in newer versions, and there may be new ones introduced. This is not to say that such libraries are not useful. I'm just replying to point out that this is not unique to POSIX. Your program evolves to handle various cases.
I think it's beautiful that a project works on various platforms, on different operating systems and on hardware which are large to very tiny. This is due to POSIX.
Objects exist in different forms in different codebases. C libraries which let you create a struct and various functions accept an opaque pointer to it. On the other hand, libraries such as GObject provide the whole OO experience, with loadable dynamic types, signals, properties, etc. Then there are people who love using languages with support for generics, operator overloading, templates, etc. How much you want to use is up to you.. different people wrap their brains around it differently:)
I'd be happy with just C structs and the odd macros, knowing how to use them well. As I said in the parent comment, I think programming using the methods, and in an environment that you are productive in is better than learning many languages and falling into a hole where you can't make up your mind as to which language/framework you want to implement something with. There are many many things to know about programming methodologies today. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
if you know C and bring yourself to write some programs to get up to speed again, then you are very well off already. The POSIX environment is available on almost all modern operating systems, and you can do all kinds of things with various C libraries including graphics, sound, web programming, etc. In the case of web applications where you have to work with and manipulate strings mainly and interface with databases, languages such as PHP, Perl, etc. are better. You can achieve the same things in C, but you will end up writing a lot more code.
You do not have to learn a new language such as C++ to do object oriented programming. Old raccoons like me will tell you how terrible a language C++ is. C is enough to implement object oriented programming, and you can use a library such as GObject to help you with it. Learn object oriented programming concepts though. There are these books on 'design patterns' that you can read. Browsing through the source code of some large C application such as GIMP (written in C) is useful to see the design of an object oriented app.
Many people in the pursuit of learning languages miss out on doing useful stuff. If you write a program in Visual Basic that is useful, it's still worth a lot more than knowing 20 languages and not doing anything. [E.g., Richard Feynman only knew BASIC. He went to work at Thinking Machines and analyzed distributed algorithms, and wrote implementations in a BASIC-like language because that was the only programming language he was proficient in.]
C is a fine language, as long as you know it well. Join a free software project to practice your C skills. Happy hacking.
One thing that many people don't seem to get right: Using these "NoSQL" databases doesn't mean that you don't get ACID. Many key-value databases support ACID just fine:
You've got to remember that (simplifying drastically,) SQL is a query language layered on top of a "NoSQL" style database (whether built into the SQL DBMS implementation, or a 3rd party one). Such "NoSQL" databases have to be ACID capable in their native API and implementation first.
You don't let me export my data directly. You play games threatening to disable my account if I try to export the data by using a 3rd party script. Your employees are able to access my private information easily. I just hate logging into your website these days.
I'm going to delete my Facebook account. I can hear how my friends are doing by calling them once in a while.
The Slashdot title is very general, considering this is just about the theme. Lots of scientific decisions go into free software design (take any flamewar on LKML for instance). In many cases, the majority of the public may not even have the skills to understand the best solution for a problem.
Roger Penrose said it well in his book Road to Reality.. something like democratic vote makes sense for popular government but not for scientific acceptability.
Majority opinion is opinion alone and it doesn't reflect on scientific truth, which has always existed and is correct regardless.
In the 1980s, most of India had just 1 TV channel whereas the metros had 2. We waited for the weekends for a movie, local language on Saturday and national language (Hindi) on Sunday. TV programs actually stopped at night and started in the morning. There were no soap operas in this country which everyone glued their eyes to for 2 hours come 7 PM. There was no public internet. People spent plenty of time time talking with their family and friends, reading, going out on walks, playing cricket outside with others in the colony and worked normal hours without tension.
Today, you wake up and even before the toothpaste has dissolved in your mouth, you have logged into Facebook. Every person is on an island most of the time. Pretty much all of the stuff above has changed for the worse.
Something tells me Israeli strikes are a bit more precise than your average Hizbollah rocket launched blindly into Israel.
I guess you meant to say 'accurate' instead of 'precise'. You probably do not want to compare the proportions of civilian deaths from Israeli strikes vs. Hezbollah rocket attacks, so your argument is lost there. See the 2006 Lebanon war.
I'm not saying Hezbollah is right or justified. Their rocket attacks are horrible.. even if their rocket attacks miss any targets, they do scare people which is terror. I'm saying that the Israeli targeted killings (through car bombs, helicopter gunships, etc.) are not justified because they cause civilian deaths, and even one is too many. You will understand this better if you put yourself in the place of the family of a civilian who was killed.
Oh jesus christ, get a life. YOU go over there and spend a year on the ground, and see if you come back with that same attitude. Really? You expect us to not shoot at the guy that just shot an RPG at us, run over there and put him in handcuffs, and hope his buddies don't shoot us in the face?
If you are talking about Iraq, I bet Bush didn't get a bunch of letters from ordinary Iraqi citizens asking him to come and wage war in Iraq. I have a life. I didn't go kill people in Iraq. Nobody asked you to "go over there and spend a year on the ground".
But I wasn't talking about wars alone. Killings by drones and missiles launched from helicopters are happening in peace time in many countries, such as Palestine, Somalia and Yemen. These are enough.. they set a precedent.
Yes, some of these asshats may have been "citizens" at one point, but when you pick up arms against your own fucking country, all bets are off.
How is using a UAV any different than using an aircraft to drop bombs, other than the fact that it's a more accurate and reliable platform, and the guys running it get a lot more rest, and are a lot more clear headed to make those decisions?
Both are bad. Both cause extra deaths of civilian passers-by, who are not involved. Take any recent Israeli taretted-killing in Gaza as an example, or recent US strikes in Somalia. In a non-war situation, how do you really know if the target of a strike is guilty? You may have evidence, but there's a reason why we have courts. Plenty of people will claim to have war crimes evidence against Bush, but any action against him would have to start with prosecution in a court of law. Any other course would seem absurd, and rightly so. The same applies to every other person.
WAR IS NOT FAIR! it is not nice, it is not a time where soldiers only fight soldiers. We used to fight like that, soldiers would line up across from eachother on a battlefield and shoot at the enemy. And we know how that worked out.
As I said in a different comment, this is happening where there's no declared war too.
Oh, and you remember a little thing called the bombing of the twin towers? how many innocents died then? I pray for the souls of those innocents lost when Zarqawi was taken out, but i believe it was worth it to remove him.
The bombing of the twin towers was a terrible act of terrorism, and it touched people because civilians such as you and me were the targets. If civilian lives are worth sacrificing, then there's no good vs. evil happening. No need of specially branding them 'terrorists', when our govt does the very same thing in the act.
I'll listen to you believe "it's worth it", when one of your own children is involved.
Look at all the individual targeting that Israel does. There's no war going on. These are terrorists, but typically they are killed in in public where several passers-by die too. So it isn't just your typical missile silo.
You'd have to put yourself in the place of the victim's family to understand how it'd feel. Imagine if your child were to die (god forbid) just cause Israel targeted some terrorist and your kid happened to be walking by. The same applies to every human being.
I have always felt this method of targeting individuals illegal at best. It may be legal to use force when there is a declared war happening and this is among soldiers.
But such targeted killing of individuals has happened in many countries now, without any trial. In several cases, surrounding civilians also become causalities, even though they may just be passers-by. WTF?
Before al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq, nobody wanted him alive. But that bombing which caused his death also killed civilians including children in that building, who may have had no choice but to be there.
How is a government any better than the terrorists then? Like many say, if such things happen where there is no due process and no care about collateral damage, then the terrorists have already won and there's no difference between us and them.
OTOH, reading Bellard's FAQ on his latest result does seem like he was interested more in fast algorithms and not in Pi. So I stand corrected. Still.. he's not some random programmer to us.:P Following links from his FAQ, I found two cool books:
Slashdot Mirror
Good comeback :) Here are my replies:
I.
The third party tries to find all pirates, so it tries to connect & track all users of one or more torrents. Then they might find your real address somehow and blackmail/sue you. This is a violation of privacy, no one is allowed to just snoop traffic or probe everyones computer just to stir something up. I can not believe such evidence would hold up in court. The only one who might take such action is the police (or other gov organisation), but they need some previous evidence and most likely a warrent.
I don't think this will hold up in many countries as snooping. Snooping would include you being a MITM, or information that you gather monitoring a conversation between two parties. However, in our case, the malicious party is actually your peer. You are communicating with him and sending him the data as intended for him.
II) The malicious client just knows your IP and wants to find out what you serve or if you serve illegal files. I assume you have set your bittorrent client to only allow encrypted c2c communication. If you use HTTPS to download the .torrent files, the malicious client does not know which file the torrent hash belongs to. If you use a Proxy or HTTPS trackers (do they exist?), the malicious client does not even know the hashs.
So your bittorrent client will deny serving the malicious client because of a hash mismatch.
It doesn't work like this in practice. I'll explain, assuming you are familiar with the .torrent file format, and protocols for Bittorrent tracker and peer communication.
Most torrents that entities such as RIAA are interested in investigating _are_ public. Supposing there is a website like the Pirate Bay that hosts "Britney-Spears-Songs.torrent". That provides the hashes and points to a bunch of trackers. The malicious party's software gets the torrent file, and connects to the tracker, from where it gets peer addresses. The malicious party connects to peers, requests pieces for the hashes and it is the peers that supply it with content that matches the hashes.
Once the malicious party has downloaded the torrent fully, it knows that all peer addresses it downloaded from were interested/involved in the content distribution (and had parts of this content, if not seeds that had all of it).
Of course, if your torrent and tracker are not public, but restricted to a secluded group of people, you don't have to worry.. but then, most people don't use Bittorrent like this.
Encryption without any kind of authentication makes no difference if the malicious client is in the pool. Bittorrent's encryption made sense for working around ISP throttling (which involved actual snooping btw).
1. If you don't use Tor for the client-to-client traffic, you would have to reveal your real IP to the tracker, so other clients (including malicious ones) can connect to your client.
2. What when you serve the content in question when a malicious peer using that tracker connects to your client, encrypted or not?
This is with a stock dnscache from djbdns-1.05:
[muks@misha ~]$ dig +short rs.dns-oarc.net txt
rst.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net.
rst.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net.
rst.x490.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net.
"178.63.21.2 DNS reply size limit is at least 490"
"178.63.21.2 lacks EDNS, defaults to 512"
"Tested at 2010-04-30 13:41:05 UTC"
This seems to say dnscache lacks EDNS. Can anyone with more knowledge of DNS comment whether djbdns is affected?
I self-host everything too.. $69 a month here. ;)
I guess you see the point I tried to make though.
If the phone company recorded every single phone call, and allowed the phone owner to play them from a web interface whenever they wanted, the average telephone owner's head would explode :)
Yet everyone is fine with web based email.
Such is the irony.
I guess what I wrote didn't come off right. I am not questioning your intelligence. You do that yourself. I meant to write "Think. [Ask yourself,] are you being intelligent if you still use Facebook after all this?"
You still use Facebook? Call me a troll, but think. Are you being intelligent if you still use Facebook after all this?
After my last Slashdot comment, I deleted my profile. One of the sub-comments explains how to delete it instead of just disabling it.
VirtualBox = desktop Xen=server completely different products, comparing them is nonsense
By this, you either mean:
1. VirtualBox doesn't support 'server' guest operating systems -- This would be incorrect as VirtualBox does support server guest operating systems. In fact, if your guest OS is Linux, it doesn't matter if the distro is a 'server' distro or a 'desktop' distro.. the OS packages are the same, except for their versions and distro-specific patches.
OR
2. VirtualBox doesn't have features typically used by admins who deploy server operating systems -- While this may have been correct years ago, it is not so today. VirtualBox can be controlled from the commandline, has an API if you want to control it from scripts, supports snapshots, live migration, remote desktop, web console, and a range of networking configurations. Maybe you can find some specific feature it doesn't have when compared to another product, but this is like comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL. If 90% of admins are happy with the features that VirtualBox provides, that's good enough for that 90%.
Try VirtualBox. It performs well, even when not using hardware virtualization support.
This ash cloud from the Iceland volcano has caused engine damage. I wonder if airlines are throwing caution away to avoid the daily loss in business.
I understand where you are coming from. You are right, but I disagree that things are very bad.
POSIX is a relatively old and established environment, which you get out of the box with most operating systems. My POSIX project works properly on Fedora, on old versions of RHEL, on BSDs, on Solaris, on embedded platforms such as iPhone, on several routers that run embedded Linux and BSDs, etc. We run into issues and quirks from time to time that we fix, but then this can be said of any maintained software project. We didn't handle several issues (similar to the cases you mention) in many years of our project. Then some user ran into a bug that had existed in so many releases, and we slapped our heads and fixed it. Wasn't it Dijkstra who wanted software to be like televisions, where you ship it and it's done? No version 1.1, etc. :)
There are many POSIX things to keep in mind.. implementation bugs, quirks, and there are even issues in the standard. In my career, I've had similar problems with many higher-level libraries I've used too. Software is difficult like that. You must be aware that there are higher level abstraction libraries such as glib, gnet2 in the GNOME family, Apache's apr, etc. And other things such as libsoup, libcurl, etc. if you want higher level protocol handlers which even hide the socket interface. These have their own issues, quirks, etc. Some problems go away in newer versions, and there may be new ones introduced. This is not to say that such libraries are not useful. I'm just replying to point out that this is not unique to POSIX. Your program evolves to handle various cases.
I think it's beautiful that a project works on various platforms, on different operating systems and on hardware which are large to very tiny. This is due to POSIX.
How painful it was reading that book :)
Objects exist in different forms in different codebases. C libraries which let you create a struct and various functions accept an opaque pointer to it. On the other hand, libraries such as GObject provide the whole OO experience, with loadable dynamic types, signals, properties, etc. Then there are people who love using languages with support for generics, operator overloading, templates, etc. How much you want to use is up to you.. different people wrap their brains around it differently :)
I'd be happy with just C structs and the odd macros, knowing how to use them well. As I said in the parent comment, I think programming using the methods, and in an environment that you are productive in is better than learning many languages and falling into a hole where you can't make up your mind as to which language/framework you want to implement something with. There are many many things to know about programming methodologies today. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
Borongo,
if you know C and bring yourself to write some programs to get up to speed again, then you are very well off already. The POSIX environment is available on almost all modern operating systems, and you can do all kinds of things with various C libraries including graphics, sound, web programming, etc. In the case of web applications where you have to work with and manipulate strings mainly and interface with databases, languages such as PHP, Perl, etc. are better. You can achieve the same things in C, but you will end up writing a lot more code.
You do not have to learn a new language such as C++ to do object oriented programming. Old raccoons like me will tell you how terrible a language C++ is. C is enough to implement object oriented programming, and you can use a library such as GObject to help you with it. Learn object oriented programming concepts though. There are these books on 'design patterns' that you can read. Browsing through the source code of some large C application such as GIMP (written in C) is useful to see the design of an object oriented app.
Many people in the pursuit of learning languages miss out on doing useful stuff. If you write a program in Visual Basic that is useful, it's still worth a lot more than knowing 20 languages and not doing anything. [E.g., Richard Feynman only knew BASIC. He went to work at Thinking Machines and analyzed distributed algorithms, and wrote implementations in a BASIC-like language because that was the only programming language he was proficient in.]
C is a fine language, as long as you know it well. Join a free software project to practice your C skills. Happy hacking.
One thing that many people don't seem to get right: Using these "NoSQL" databases doesn't mean that you don't get ACID. Many key-value databases support ACID just fine:
You've got to remember that (simplifying drastically,) SQL is a query language layered on top of a "NoSQL" style database (whether built into the SQL DBMS implementation, or a 3rd party one). Such "NoSQL" databases have to be ACID capable in their native API and implementation first.
Thanks for the tip :)
You don't let me export my data directly. You play games threatening to disable my account if I try to export the data by using a 3rd party script. Your employees are able to access my private information easily. I just hate logging into your website these days.
I'm going to delete my Facebook account. I can hear how my friends are doing by calling them once in a while.
The Slashdot title is very general, considering this is just about the theme. Lots of scientific decisions go into free software design (take any flamewar on LKML for instance). In many cases, the majority of the public may not even have the skills to understand the best solution for a problem.
Roger Penrose said it well in his book Road to Reality.. something like democratic vote makes sense for popular government but not for scientific acceptability.
Majority opinion is opinion alone and it doesn't reflect on scientific truth, which has always existed and is correct regardless.
The parent is the best comment on Slashdot.
In the 1980s, most of India had just 1 TV channel whereas the metros had 2. We waited for the weekends for a movie, local language on Saturday and national language (Hindi) on Sunday. TV programs actually stopped at night and started in the morning. There were no soap operas in this country which everyone glued their eyes to for 2 hours come 7 PM. There was no public internet. People spent plenty of time time talking with their family and friends, reading, going out on walks, playing cricket outside with others in the colony and worked normal hours without tension.
Today, you wake up and even before the toothpaste has dissolved in your mouth, you have logged into Facebook. Every person is on an island most of the time. Pretty much all of the stuff above has changed for the worse.
Something tells me Israeli strikes are a bit more precise than your average Hizbollah rocket launched blindly into Israel.
I guess you meant to say 'accurate' instead of 'precise'. You probably do not want to compare the proportions of civilian deaths from Israeli strikes vs. Hezbollah rocket attacks, so your argument is lost there. See the 2006 Lebanon war.
I'm not saying Hezbollah is right or justified. Their rocket attacks are horrible.. even if their rocket attacks miss any targets, they do scare people which is terror. I'm saying that the Israeli targeted killings (through car bombs, helicopter gunships, etc.) are not justified because they cause civilian deaths, and even one is too many. You will understand this better if you put yourself in the place of the family of a civilian who was killed.
Oh jesus christ, get a life. YOU go over there and spend a year on the ground, and see if you come back with that same attitude. Really? You expect us to not shoot at the guy that just shot an RPG at us, run over there and put him in handcuffs, and hope his buddies don't shoot us in the face?
If you are talking about Iraq, I bet Bush didn't get a bunch of letters from ordinary Iraqi citizens asking him to come and wage war in Iraq. I have a life. I didn't go kill people in Iraq. Nobody asked you to "go over there and spend a year on the ground". But I wasn't talking about wars alone. Killings by drones and missiles launched from helicopters are happening in peace time in many countries, such as Palestine, Somalia and Yemen. These are enough.. they set a precedent.
Yes, some of these asshats may have been "citizens" at one point, but when you pick up arms against your own fucking country, all bets are off.
How is using a UAV any different than using an aircraft to drop bombs, other than the fact that it's a more accurate and reliable platform, and the guys running it get a lot more rest, and are a lot more clear headed to make those decisions?
Both are bad. Both cause extra deaths of civilian passers-by, who are not involved. Take any recent Israeli taretted-killing in Gaza as an example, or recent US strikes in Somalia. In a non-war situation, how do you really know if the target of a strike is guilty? You may have evidence, but there's a reason why we have courts. Plenty of people will claim to have war crimes evidence against Bush, but any action against him would have to start with prosecution in a court of law. Any other course would seem absurd, and rightly so. The same applies to every other person.
WAR IS NOT FAIR! it is not nice, it is not a time where soldiers only fight soldiers. We used to fight like that, soldiers would line up across from eachother on a battlefield and shoot at the enemy. And we know how that worked out.
As I said in a different comment, this is happening where there's no declared war too.
Oh, and you remember a little thing called the bombing of the twin towers? how many innocents died then? I pray for the souls of those innocents lost when Zarqawi was taken out, but i believe it was worth it to remove him.
The bombing of the twin towers was a terrible act of terrorism, and it touched people because civilians such as you and me were the targets. If civilian lives are worth sacrificing, then there's no good vs. evil happening. No need of specially branding them 'terrorists', when our govt does the very same thing in the act.
I'll listen to you believe "it's worth it", when one of your own children is involved.
Shit happens in war.
It happens nowadays without any war too. There's no declared war in Yemen or in the West Bank. Is the USA currently at war in Somalia?
Look at all the individual targeting that Israel does. There's no war going on. These are terrorists, but typically they are killed in in public where several passers-by die too. So it isn't just your typical missile silo.
You'd have to put yourself in the place of the victim's family to understand how it'd feel. Imagine if your child were to die (god forbid) just cause Israel targeted some terrorist and your kid happened to be walking by. The same applies to every human being.
I have always felt this method of targeting individuals illegal at best. It may be legal to use force when there is a declared war happening and this is among soldiers.
But such targeted killing of individuals has happened in many countries now, without any trial. In several cases, surrounding civilians also become causalities, even though they may just be passers-by. WTF?
Before al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq, nobody wanted him alive. But that bombing which caused his death also killed civilians including children in that building, who may have had no choice but to be there.
How is a government any better than the terrorists then? Like many say, if such things happen where there is no due process and no care about collateral damage, then the terrorists have already won and there's no difference between us and them.
OTOH, reading Bellard's FAQ on his latest result does seem like he was interested more in fast algorithms and not in Pi. So I stand corrected. Still.. he's not some random programmer to us. :P Following links from his FAQ, I found two cool books: