The problem with nearly every single encryption technology, or initiative for securing and improving Internet communication, is that it tries to solve too many problems at once. History has proven over and over again that it's the small, easy steps that move progress forward, not giant ones.
PGP, HTTPS, S/MIME and countless other 'standards' have all made the same mistake in trying to force users to adopt multiple new rules. What's wrong with just providing encryption, without any of the additional burdens of establishing identity? Countless transfers are sent unencrypted every day because the cost of a web server certificate - which is only expensive because it establishes identity - is so high. Anyone can make a server that provides encryption, but such a server is useless with today's browsers. And yet, I'm supposed to have faith that the people Microsoft, AOL and Opera choose to trust are the people that I want to trust?
It is obvious where email will change next, no matter how much money and time is spent on projects like this one. More and more people will use 'virtual receptionist' services that require you to return an auto-reply message to prove that you're real. Eventually, email clients will develop a way to autodetect and autoreply to these messages, until some sort of system is hammered out. You'll write your message, it will be delivered, the receiving server will connect back to you to verify that you're real, and your system will confirm it, all transparently. Someday, it'll happen in real-time, maybe. Spammers won't be able to use this, because of the increased load on a server that must stay online as long as they want their mail delivered.
That's how change happens. Not because of a bunch of idealists get together and tell me to start PGP-signing my mail. You know what? I started doing that 3 years ago. I haven't once found a single person who even knew how to verify my messages. Not to mention the pathetic state that the keyservers are in, full of expired and forgotten keys, and easily corrupted (again, I know from experience - I corrupted my own keys in an attempt to remove them permanently).
Most people here must not ever drive in big cities. Especially in the parts of big cities that are frequently used for 'cruising'. With cars that shock and awe using incredibly loud volumes (especially bass).
Is it so hard to believe that a spring could be kept from rolling off a slightly curved surface by, say, a single grain of sand? And that 16 speakers might serve to shift that grain of sand and start the spring rolling?
For that matter, the spring appears to be in the center of the glass initially, so it could just be balanced really well.
If I could change one thing about the commercial, it would be the end: In mine, the car would roll to a stop, and just as it did so, it would bump against a small cog on a wooden plank...
I debated mentioning that in my first post - Linux excels, is nearly unchallenged, as a server platform. But this article is about X, which has nothing to do with servers (well, maybe application servers for thin clients...) and everything to do with regular users. So my comment was aimed at Walmart PCs, Lindows, Red Hat 8.0 and similar distributions that are actually popular with regular users. In my opinion, the only reason those users are willing (and happy) to use Linux is because of the quality of the GUI.
At some point, creating choice for it's own sake becomes ludicrous. For example, you have a choice in the auto dealer you purchase from, the make of car you buy, what kind of fuel it uses, and so on. But you don't usually see two highways that follow the same route - you don't need a choice there, just one that can handle the traffic. Let the smaller roads get people where they want to be.
A windowing subsystem needs to provide enough framework to make application development easy and enough flexibility to allow developers to do what they want to do. Windows software is not mainstream today because the developers had a choice of subsystems - it is mainstream because they wrote for the one that was biggest and trusted Microsoft to provide compatibility in future versions. Brilliant move, that.
Unix has long been plagued with vendor-specific code that hinders broad development efforts. The **only** reason Linux is so popular today is because of the single windowing system. Average users don't care about how fast it can fork() or whether it's virtual memory management is superior - they want lots of apps, they want them to be pretty and they want them to all run on top of each other.
Forking X is a terrible idea. Perhaps if they go for it, they'll choose an appropriate name... Y?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere ( Op-Ed ) 1128 words MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: ''The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured.''
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's ''gassing its own people,'' specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen
David Brin is a big proponent of a "transparent society" in which everyone is watched by someone else. Although it has its pros and cons, this sort of software is a great tool for such a society. Amusingly, it's being used by conservatives while at the same time creating a society proposed by a liberal idealist.
As many posters have suggested, adult entertainment is not a problem in itself. But it is when a teenager steals a credit card and runs up many tens of thousands of dollays in debt! This kind of software is good because you get to pick someone that you trust (maybe an aunt, an uncle or a friend) and allow them to offer a second perspective on things that you do. Too many people are isolated from others and never learn to question their own actions.
If everyone's actions were known to someone else, our country would operate a lot more smoothly. Imagine making a small change to this software: Your actions are summarized for someone else to view, but anonymously. They can opt to suggest to you that you might benefit from help if they think that what you are doing is unusual. You can ignore it, but a reality check might help a lot of people, even if it's just a link to finding free porn instead of paying a ton of cash for it.
Install Spamassassin. Install, use, and report spam with Vipul's Razor, Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse and Pyzor so that only a few people have to read a message before the rest can skip it.
If nothing else, get a new email address and start telling all your friends. Once you are filtering out the spam, it's kind of fun to see how accurate you can get it...
I wrote a quick plugin for Becky! (my mail client most of the time) that connects to my imap server and empties my spam folder, sending it all through Spamassassin's reporting mechanism. So I just check my mail, scan for false-positives (none to date), move any spams that were missed, and run the plugin.
Actually, as my sole telephone has been a mobile phone for the past several years, I've learned that you _ARE_ required to have a landline phone for many things. As it turns out, you can't apply for anything involving a credit check without supplying a valid telephone number - and mobile numbers aren't valid.
I've ranted about it many times, and I've never had any success in gettinga around it. My mobile number causes an error, they can't process without any number at all, and using a friend's number works but doesn't help your credit score.
That's an excellent observation. Software *IS* an unlimited resource once it's created - just like music and movies, incidentally. And you can go out and buy CDs of your favorite bands, or you can listen to a radio station for free but get lower quality and advertising.
People want to own what they've paid for, and they don't think about their CD and DVD collections as just a bunch of licenses. The solution must lie between the extremes of having hardware to block our senses when confronted with material we haven't licensed, and forcing all non-scarce material to be free. Maybe if software/music/movies gracefully degraded into public domain after a reasonable lifetime (maybe a year for tax software, 5 years for movies and 10 years for music, etc.) or after interest had dropped below a certain point.
I wish I had the perfect solution. In the mean time, I assist open-source projects and try to only buy software from small, reasonable software companies.
Ford is not a homophone of fjord. Nor is it a homophone of fnord fnord. It's a homophone of phord, foured, fored and possibly Chevy.
*duck* Seriously, though, I'm sure words from other languages don't count toward determining homophones unless they're used in English, and even then, probably just the 'Great Middle American' dialect of English.
Ignoring the fact that other people probably do use the full boot sector area of their disks, there's an obvious reason why Intuit shouldn't do it: standards. Standards have defined the boot sector not as a DRM tool, but as the first place on the disk that gets executed at boot time. It's a critical piece of every (AFAIK) operating system's core design, and needs to be very reliable, because it's hard to fix if you can't load your operating system, and even harder without rescue media handy.
This is the same as all of the CD-ROM copy-protection schemes out there that write special "bad" sectors or mess with the table-of-contents in a non-standard way. Plenty of people have CD drives that are unable to use those forms of copy-protection, and some of the manufacturers end up patching the game to remove it. Anyone who wants to actually copy the game, of course, can easily download a utility to get around the problem. It only hurts unknowing consumers.
Microsoft frequently plays the "embrace and extend" game and has been called to task for it. So should Intuit, Sony, and everyone else who tries to violate a standard instead of playing by the rules.
--Elentar
Footnote: Consider that a laissez-faire economy results in prices that rise to what the market will bear. If, then, a piece of software is regularly pirated, copied, or used once and returned, doesn't that indicate that the price is too high, according to the market? Corporations should listen to the message consumers are sending and reduce the cost of their software, not impede upon the rights of consumers to use their own possessions.
As the owner of a Sony Clie, I do agree that sometimes hardware manufacturers forget about Mac owners. Of course, then someone steps in and creates the excelent program like TheMissingSync, which allows mac users to sync with their unsupported Clies.
Apple, in the meantime, realizes there is a problem with Palm support on the Mac, and creates iCal and iSync.
Imagine that - I have choices when syncing my Clie. I can use Palm Desktop (which I rather like) or I can use iCal/iSync.
Choices are good!
Actually, iSync uses the Palm Hotsync Manager, it just changes the conduits that are used. So the Mac still needs The Missing Sync to work with a CliÉ, but nobody can deny the coolness of being able to syncronize all your devices!
My personal triumph has been to create a process for uploading my Palm address book to my LDAP server, from which it's accessible by my email clients. Having a single place that I have to update information, that's always with me, is great!
A Jedi would use a Mac......Because they wouldn't dare be on the wrong side in the Clone Wars.
That aside, there's a simple reason (IMHO) why you'll never find many laptops sold without an OS:
Most computer hardware is not functional without software to interface with it. The laptop's warranty would be pointless if the hardware wasn't useable, so the vendor and the equipment manufacturers must all agree on a solution so that the device is useable when it is received.
"So what?" you say, "I don't want them to stop shipping Windows - just to ship mine without it. I've already got an OS that will work!" Well, how do you know it will work? What if there's hardware you can't use, but is guaranteed by the vendor to be functional?
Perhaps you're thinking, "Fine, I'll take mine without a warranty, and I'll write support myself or get a friend to do it if my OS doesn't have it yet." I don't think that getting rid of warranties is a good idea, do you? What do you suppose you would do if your hardware was bad? And perhaps you've never looked around at all the unsuccessful attempts to provide support in your OS for already existing hardware - very few hardware manufacturers make the information available that is needed to FULLY support their products. Most are only partially supported.
There are a few things working in favor of OS-independence. Standards help to create a level playing field, and the ingenuity of programmers working with each OS helps to bring attention (and thus consumers and manufacturers) if their work is good.
At least many manufacturers offer some level of support for other OSes. So, when you buy that laptop with the hardware that you really like, just remember that the software to use that hardware is a required part of it - and hardware makers have chosen Windows as the default.
Stop griping at the vendors, and go complain to the people making the keyboards, mobile processors, usb controllers, firewire ports, and sound chips. Ask them to develop their drivers and applications for a different OS first. Tell them you'll help pay for development, and that you'll give them a nifty 'designed for [your OS here]' logo if they do what you want.
In addition to establishing identity, certificates also allow the transmission of securely (for now) encrypted data. This is the feature everyone wants - the identity aspect is just something for Verisign to hype.
Self-signed certificates are ludicrous - it takes only a few moments longer to create your own CA (certificate authority, what Verisign is) and issue yourself a certificate. Then just link incoming clients to the CA certificate, which will be added to their CA list if they accept it, and after that your site will be free of certificate warnings.
Any benefit that 'root CA' lists may have had has been overridden by uninformed sysadmins. Too often are servers moved to new hostnames or domains, or certificates forgotten to be renewed, etc.
Users trust you to take their data and charge their credit cards, protect their personal information, send them material by delivery and provide information that is true. Why, then, wouldn't they trust you to generate a certificate yourself?
As mentioned above, the endorsement of an arbitrary company means nothing, but responsiblity and security awareness of sysadmins means everything. Owning a credit card does not prove the latter.
Sounds a bit like the way an Intellimouse behaves on the regular PS/2 protocol. Or when going through a not-so-good KVM.
One minute you're sailing along smoothly, you switch consoles, and suddenly the mouse has decided to rearrange many of your taskbar icons (how the heck does it manage to right-click, select 'move', and drag to a valid location so quickly?), launch a few apps, and switch workspaces (so that you just THINK that all your windows were closed).
Then it has the nerve to sit there, taunting you, quiet as a... mouse. "That was wierd," you think. "Must have been some noise from the KVM. I'll just log out to be safe."
Your hand reaches for the mouse...
-Elentar
Re:I like this movie and all, but where are the
on
Massive Two Towers Battle
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Anyone who has read Tolkien's works with half an eye open for cultural stereotypes was probably surprised at how much of the real world pops out in them.
It is important to understand that Tolkien was raised in a different culture, before racial equality (as opposed to simple racial tolerance) began to be accepted and widespread. I love his books as much as ever, and I can appreciate that he was writing using the cultural ideas of the time. It is not that he wished to be racist - but rather, he had learned that his readers would expect evil to be physically apparent in the form of dark skin and short stature.
Middle Earth is comprised of vast lands between the ever-shining light of the Uttermost West and the dark, lost lands of the East. Also, because the Elves travelled over the northern ice to reach Middle Earth, the areas to the south are also considered less enlightened.
The populations of the southern lands are described as 'swarthy' and untrustworthy, and the further east you go the shorter, darker, and less civilized the peoples of Middle Earth (also known as Europe) become. It takes little effort to realize that Numenor, from which the race of kings from which Aragorn is descended comes, is the Isle of Britain and that Eressea, the final stop before the Undying Lands, is Ireland.
In the Silmarillion, the world is bent from flat to spherical so that no mortal may ever sail the way to the divine lands again. So I'm not sure whether Valinor is America, or whether America is the easternmost land, furthest from the light and wisdom of the West.
Read your license agreement sometime. Microsoft forbids you from selling your license without permission and collects information on your activities. They support "Digital Rights" in as much as they would like to be the authority that decides what you can and cannot do with their products.
With the direction consumer rights are headed, you may as well assume that you do not own your CDs, DVDs, software, or books - only a license to use them (and if someone reads over your shoulder, you can be fined).
DNS is flawed. When designed, it no doubt made sense to limit the system to a fixed set of TLD's and root servers. Technology wasn't available at the time to allow for much else. Creating an artificially limited namespace was a necessity driven by the cost of implementation. And as a balance to that, there was no fee to register a domain.
That was a long time ago. Today, this artificially limited system has resulted in an entire commodity market driven solely by the decision to allow companies to profit by controlling the growth of the system.
It's privateering, plain and simple. Those administering the system have no incentive to expand it. ICANN and the other groups act as thugs enforcing the status quo, while users are forced to deal with the inflated costs created by artificially limited supply. The thugs occasionally throw a few improvements out to appear generous and justify their existence.
Let's review: The change to a laissez-faire market resulted in DNS being subject to normal economic pressures. With a focus on profit instead of service, DNS suppliers quickly recognized the potential in encouraging demand while not providing for any growth in supply.
Now, for a great many of you reading this, capitalism and democracy mean the same thing. A lot of you DO know the difference, however, and haven't really thought about whether you consider yourselves capitalists or not. And a few of you, who undoubtedly read Kuro5hin, have strong opinions one way or the other about capitalism.
Me, I hate it. While capitalism _is_ true to human nature, it does not encourage noble behavior. There is no incentive for suppliers to produce more simply because it serves the common good, and no incentive for purchasers to pay more money simply because the supplier's values are more respectable. The government attempts to simulate these things by taking money from everyone and using it to reward those individuals and organizations whose values coincide with those of the bureaucrats in power. Values like multiple children, home mortgages, a spouse without a career.
Enough ranting. If you actually read this far, then you can surely find more drivel like mine - just Google for 'Libertarian'...
Slashdot isn't The Drudge Report. I imagine that the editors attempt to corroborate every story with another news source, possibly from a standard list. Maybe they even do it like Google News, and filter submissions through an automated headline database.
So, it's rare to see news here first. Really, the reason we all read it is because it's a nice collection of "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
In an unrelated note, the moderation system is highly unusual. I've been getting mod points within 24 hours of spending them for the past few weeks without fail...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with nearly every single encryption technology, or initiative for securing and improving Internet communication, is that it tries to solve too many problems at once. History has proven over and over again that it's the small, easy steps that move progress forward, not giant ones.
PGP, HTTPS, S/MIME and countless other 'standards' have all made the same mistake in trying to force users to adopt multiple new rules. What's wrong with just providing encryption, without any of the additional burdens of establishing identity? Countless transfers are sent unencrypted every day because the cost of a web server certificate - which is only expensive because it establishes identity - is so high. Anyone can make a server that provides encryption, but such a server is useless with today's browsers. And yet, I'm supposed to have faith that the people Microsoft, AOL and Opera choose to trust are the people that I want to trust?
It is obvious where email will change next, no matter how much money and time is spent on projects like this one. More and more people will use 'virtual receptionist' services that require you to return an auto-reply message to prove that you're real. Eventually, email clients will develop a way to autodetect and autoreply to these messages, until some sort of system is hammered out. You'll write your message, it will be delivered, the receiving server will connect back to you to verify that you're real, and your system will confirm it, all transparently. Someday, it'll happen in real-time, maybe. Spammers won't be able to use this, because of the increased load on a server that must stay online as long as they want their mail delivered.
That's how change happens. Not because of a bunch of idealists get together and tell me to start PGP-signing my mail. You know what? I started doing that 3 years ago. I haven't once found a single person who even knew how to verify my messages. Not to mention the pathetic state that the keyservers are in, full of expired and forgotten keys, and easily corrupted (again, I know from experience - I corrupted my own keys in an attempt to remove them permanently).
-Elentar
Most people here must not ever drive in big cities. Especially in the parts of big cities that are frequently used for 'cruising'. With cars that shock and awe using incredibly loud volumes (especially bass).
Is it so hard to believe that a spring could be kept from rolling off a slightly curved surface by, say, a single grain of sand? And that 16 speakers might serve to shift that grain of sand and start the spring rolling?
For that matter, the spring appears to be in the center of the glass initially, so it could just be balanced really well.
If I could change one thing about the commercial, it would be the end: In mine, the car would roll to a stop, and just as it did so, it would bump against a small cog on a wooden plank...
-Elentar
It's Howard Buffet, Warren Buffet's son, that is the ConAgra representative.
-Elentar
I debated mentioning that in my first post - Linux excels, is nearly unchallenged, as a server platform. But this article is about X, which has nothing to do with servers (well, maybe application servers for thin clients...) and everything to do with regular users. So my comment was aimed at Walmart PCs, Lindows, Red Hat 8.0 and similar distributions that are actually popular with regular users. In my opinion, the only reason those users are willing (and happy) to use Linux is because of the quality of the GUI.
-Elentar
At some point, creating choice for it's own sake becomes ludicrous. For example, you have a choice in the auto dealer you purchase from, the make of car you buy, what kind of fuel it uses, and so on. But you don't usually see two highways that follow the same route - you don't need a choice there, just one that can handle the traffic. Let the smaller roads get people where they want to be.
A windowing subsystem needs to provide enough framework to make application development easy and enough flexibility to allow developers to do what they want to do. Windows software is not mainstream today because the developers had a choice of subsystems - it is mainstream because they wrote for the one that was biggest and trusted Microsoft to provide compatibility in future versions. Brilliant move, that.
Unix has long been plagued with vendor-specific code that hinders broad development efforts. The **only** reason Linux is so popular today is because of the single windowing system. Average users don't care about how fast it can fork() or whether it's virtual memory management is superior - they want lots of apps, they want them to be pretty and they want them to all run on top of each other.
Forking X is a terrible idea. Perhaps if they go for it, they'll choose an appropriate name... Y?
-Elentar
Reprinted without permission...
January 31, 2003, Friday
EDITORIAL DESK
A War Crime Or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere ( Op-Ed ) 1128 words
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking
smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of
the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion:
''The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons
has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own
citizens dead, blind or disfigured.''
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its
citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence
most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the
town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year
Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's ''gassing its
own people,'' specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam
Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were
bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any
certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not
the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence
Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war,
and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was
privy to much of the classified material that flowed through
Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed
a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war
against the United States; the classified version of the report went
into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came
about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq
used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the
town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The
Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that
exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United
States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a
classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence
community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was
Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the
battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies,
however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that
is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis,
who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known
to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily,
as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A
much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make
reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that
Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the
report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof,
that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq
in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He
has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But
accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of
genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have
goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These
were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq,
but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has
bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was
Iran so keen
David Brin is a big proponent of a "transparent society" in which everyone is watched by someone else. Although it has its pros and cons, this sort of software is a great tool for such a society. Amusingly, it's being used by conservatives while at the same time creating a society proposed by a liberal idealist.
As many posters have suggested, adult entertainment is not a problem in itself. But it is when a teenager steals a credit card and runs up many tens of thousands of dollays in debt! This kind of software is good because you get to pick someone that you trust (maybe an aunt, an uncle or a friend) and allow them to offer a second perspective on things that you do. Too many people are isolated from others and never learn to question their own actions.
If everyone's actions were known to someone else, our country would operate a lot more smoothly. Imagine making a small change to this software: Your actions are summarized for someone else to view, but anonymously. They can opt to suggest to you that you might benefit from help if they think that what you are doing is unusual. You can ignore it, but a reality check might help a lot of people, even if it's just a link to finding free porn instead of paying a ton of cash for it.
-Elentar
If nothing else, get a new email address and start telling all your friends. Once you are filtering out the spam, it's kind of fun to see how accurate you can get it...
I wrote a quick plugin for Becky! (my mail client most of the time) that connects to my imap server and empties my spam folder, sending it all through Spamassassin's reporting mechanism. So I just check my mail, scan for false-positives (none to date), move any spams that were missed, and run the plugin.
-Elentar
Actually, as my sole telephone has been a mobile phone for the past several years, I've learned that you _ARE_ required to have a landline phone for many things. As it turns out, you can't apply for anything involving a credit check without supplying a valid telephone number - and mobile numbers aren't valid.
I've ranted about it many times, and I've never had any success in gettinga around it. My mobile number causes an error, they can't process without any number at all, and using a friend's number works but doesn't help your credit score.
Stupid phone companies.
-Elentar
That's an excellent observation. Software *IS* an unlimited resource once it's created - just like music and movies, incidentally. And you can go out and buy CDs of your favorite bands, or you can listen to a radio station for free but get lower quality and advertising.
People want to own what they've paid for, and they don't think about their CD and DVD collections as just a bunch of licenses. The solution must lie between the extremes of having hardware to block our senses when confronted with material we haven't licensed, and forcing all non-scarce material to be free. Maybe if software/music/movies gracefully degraded into public domain after a reasonable lifetime (maybe a year for tax software, 5 years for movies and 10 years for music, etc.) or after interest had dropped below a certain point.
I wish I had the perfect solution. In the mean time, I assist open-source projects and try to only buy software from small, reasonable software companies.
-Elentar
Ford is not a homophone of fjord. Nor is it a homophone of fnord fnord. It's a homophone of phord, foured, fored and possibly Chevy.
*duck* Seriously, though, I'm sure words from other languages don't count toward determining homophones unless they're used in English, and even then, probably just the 'Great Middle American' dialect of English.
-Elentar
Ignoring the fact that other people probably do use the full boot sector area of their disks, there's an obvious reason why Intuit shouldn't do it: standards. Standards have defined the boot sector not as a DRM tool, but as the first place on the disk that gets executed at boot time. It's a critical piece of every (AFAIK) operating system's core design, and needs to be very reliable, because it's hard to fix if you can't load your operating system, and even harder without rescue media handy.
This is the same as all of the CD-ROM copy-protection schemes out there that write special "bad" sectors or mess with the table-of-contents in a non-standard way. Plenty of people have CD drives that are unable to use those forms of copy-protection, and some of the manufacturers end up patching the game to remove it. Anyone who wants to actually copy the game, of course, can easily download a utility to get around the problem. It only hurts unknowing consumers.
Microsoft frequently plays the "embrace and extend" game and has been called to task for it. So should Intuit, Sony, and everyone else who tries to violate a standard instead of playing by the rules.
--Elentar
Footnote: Consider that a laissez-faire economy results in prices that rise to what the market will bear. If, then, a piece of software is regularly pirated, copied, or used once and returned, doesn't that indicate that the price is too high, according to the market? Corporations should listen to the message consumers are sending and reduce the cost of their software, not impede upon the rights of consumers to use their own possessions.
My personal triumph has been to create a process for uploading my Palm address book to my LDAP server, from which it's accessible by my email clients. Having a single place that I have to update information, that's always with me, is great!
-Elentar
A Jedi would use a Mac... ...Because they wouldn't dare be on the wrong side in the Clone Wars.
That aside, there's a simple reason (IMHO) why you'll never find many laptops sold without an OS:
Most computer hardware is not functional without software to interface with it. The laptop's warranty would be pointless if the hardware wasn't useable, so the vendor and the equipment manufacturers must all agree on a solution so that the device is useable when it is received.
"So what?" you say, "I don't want them to stop shipping Windows - just to ship mine without it. I've already got an OS that will work!" Well, how do you know it will work? What if there's hardware you can't use, but is guaranteed by the vendor to be functional?
Perhaps you're thinking, "Fine, I'll take mine without a warranty, and I'll write support myself or get a friend to do it if my OS doesn't have it yet." I don't think that getting rid of warranties is a good idea, do you? What do you suppose you would do if your hardware was bad? And perhaps you've never looked around at all the unsuccessful attempts to provide support in your OS for already existing hardware - very few hardware manufacturers make the information available that is needed to FULLY support their products. Most are only partially supported.
There are a few things working in favor of OS-independence. Standards help to create a level playing field, and the ingenuity of programmers working with each OS helps to bring attention (and thus consumers and manufacturers) if their work is good.
At least many manufacturers offer some level of support for other OSes. So, when you buy that laptop with the hardware that you really like, just remember that the software to use that hardware is a required part of it - and hardware makers have chosen Windows as the default.
Stop griping at the vendors, and go complain to the people making the keyboards, mobile processors, usb controllers, firewire ports, and sound chips. Ask them to develop their drivers and applications for a different OS first. Tell them you'll help pay for development, and that you'll give them a nifty 'designed for [your OS here]' logo if they do what you want.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
-Elentar
Or maybe he wasn't trying to be funny when answering a somber question.
In addition to establishing identity, certificates also allow the transmission of securely (for now) encrypted data. This is the feature everyone wants - the identity aspect is just something for Verisign to hype.
Self-signed certificates are ludicrous - it takes only a few moments longer to create your own CA (certificate authority, what Verisign is) and issue yourself a certificate. Then just link incoming clients to the CA certificate, which will be added to their CA list if they accept it, and after that your site will be free of certificate warnings.
Any benefit that 'root CA' lists may have had has been overridden by uninformed sysadmins. Too often are servers moved to new hostnames or domains, or certificates forgotten to be renewed, etc.
Users trust you to take their data and charge their credit cards, protect their personal information, send them material by delivery and provide information that is true. Why, then, wouldn't they trust you to generate a certificate yourself?
As mentioned above, the endorsement of an arbitrary company means nothing, but responsiblity and security awareness of sysadmins means everything. Owning a credit card does not prove the latter.
-Elentar
-Elentar
Massification? That's got to be the strangest real word I've seen on Slashdot in a long time.
-Elentar
Sounds a bit like the way an Intellimouse behaves on the regular PS/2 protocol. Or when going through a not-so-good KVM.
... mouse. "That was wierd," you think. "Must have been some noise from the KVM. I'll just log out to be safe."
One minute you're sailing along smoothly, you switch consoles, and suddenly the mouse has decided to rearrange many of your taskbar icons (how the heck does it manage to right-click, select 'move', and drag to a valid location so quickly?), launch a few apps, and switch workspaces (so that you just THINK that all your windows were closed).
Then it has the nerve to sit there, taunting you, quiet as a
Your hand reaches for the mouse...
-Elentar
Anyone who has read Tolkien's works with half an eye open for cultural stereotypes was probably surprised at how much of the real world pops out in them.
It is important to understand that Tolkien was raised in a different culture, before racial equality (as opposed to simple racial tolerance) began to be accepted and widespread. I love his books as much as ever, and I can appreciate that he was writing using the cultural ideas of the time. It is not that he wished to be racist - but rather, he had learned that his readers would expect evil to be physically apparent in the form of dark skin and short stature.
Middle Earth is comprised of vast lands between the ever-shining light of the Uttermost West and the dark, lost lands of the East. Also, because the Elves travelled over the northern ice to reach Middle Earth, the areas to the south are also considered less enlightened.
The populations of the southern lands are described as 'swarthy' and untrustworthy, and the further east you go the shorter, darker, and less civilized the peoples of Middle Earth (also known as Europe) become. It takes little effort to realize that Numenor, from which the race of kings from which Aragorn is descended comes, is the Isle of Britain and that Eressea, the final stop before the Undying Lands, is Ireland.
In the Silmarillion, the world is bent from flat to spherical so that no mortal may ever sail the way to the divine lands again. So I'm not sure whether Valinor is America, or whether America is the easternmost land, furthest from the light and wisdom of the West.
-Elentar
No, but that's just because some of us work with porn.
-Elentar
Read your license agreement sometime. Microsoft forbids you from selling your license without permission and collects information on your activities. They support "Digital Rights" in as much as they would like to be the authority that decides what you can and cannot do with their products.
With the direction consumer rights are headed, you may as well assume that you do not own your CDs, DVDs, software, or books - only a license to use them (and if someone reads over your shoulder, you can be fined).
-Elentar
DNS is flawed. When designed, it no doubt made sense to limit the system to a fixed set of TLD's and root servers. Technology wasn't available at the time to allow for much else. Creating an artificially limited namespace was a necessity driven by the cost of implementation. And as a balance to that, there was no fee to register a domain.
That was a long time ago. Today, this artificially limited system has resulted in an entire commodity market driven solely by the decision to allow companies to profit by controlling the growth of the system.
It's privateering, plain and simple. Those administering the system have no incentive to expand it. ICANN and the other groups act as thugs enforcing the status quo, while users are forced to deal with the inflated costs created by artificially limited supply. The thugs occasionally throw a few improvements out to appear generous and justify their existence.
Let's review: The change to a laissez-faire market resulted in DNS being subject to normal economic pressures. With a focus on profit instead of service, DNS suppliers quickly recognized the potential in encouraging demand while not providing for any growth in supply.
Now, for a great many of you reading this, capitalism and democracy mean the same thing. A lot of you DO know the difference, however, and haven't really thought about whether you consider yourselves capitalists or not. And a few of you, who undoubtedly read Kuro5hin, have strong opinions one way or the other about capitalism.
Me, I hate it. While capitalism _is_ true to human nature, it does not encourage noble behavior. There is no incentive for suppliers to produce more simply because it serves the common good, and no incentive for purchasers to pay more money simply because the supplier's values are more respectable. The government attempts to simulate these things by taking money from everyone and using it to reward those individuals and organizations whose values coincide with those of the bureaucrats in power. Values like multiple children, home mortgages, a spouse without a career.
Enough ranting. If you actually read this far, then you can surely find more drivel like mine - just Google for 'Libertarian'...
-Elentar
Slashdot isn't The Drudge Report. I imagine that the editors attempt to corroborate every story with another news source, possibly from a standard list. Maybe they even do it like Google News, and filter submissions through an automated headline database.
So, it's rare to see news here first. Really, the reason we all read it is because it's a nice collection of "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
In an unrelated note, the moderation system is highly unusual. I've been getting mod points within 24 hours of spending them for the past few weeks without fail...
-Elentar
Yes, but unlike a RealDoll or any porn star I've heard of, it sucks, blows, *and* cleans the rug all at the same time.
All while wearing a rubber hose. Kinky.
-Elentar