*calls FSB major*
Yo! You don't know who I am, and I'm not sure how I got your number, but there's this thing going down in the internal networks of a few dozen hospitals here, and we're tracing it back to a site in your country. Our expert will soon be on it (god willing, assuming we can find them and brief them and give them access to the binaries) but the code obfuscation and anti-reversing features are like acts of god almighty, and amusingly treated as such by the insurance companies. Could you please help us catch these crazy bastards for interrogation about the stopping key... pulling the plug? That won't work, it's a self-contained virus, bricking shit like a startled soviet-era comedian. Talk to my boss? Well, I'm not sure he knows how to deal with this... or for that matter which one of my bosses I'm supposed to call...
As (potentially) opposed to:
*calls the kr3ml1n h4x0r bünk3r (actual official name) from the American Cyber Command (actual official name)*:
Hello, we've got a massive self-replicating attack on our internal networked hospital equipment, much like the scenario we discussed a few months ago. We can't break the obfuscation, and IDA Pro gets eaten up from the inside by trying to analyze it, but you guys might have more luck with the binaries we've managed to capture. Also, some versions of the code communicates with a site in Russia - it's probably botnet nodes, but the "scary men in helicopters" protocol you spoke about using internally might work anyway.
Not to talk about the difference in reaction speed between the two.
So you're the guy they hire to fill in where the script says [tech]!
The best defense against info-warfare is to have a good alternate strategy. Twitter may not need backups, but Wall Street does. Industrial plants and the electrical grid need air gaps (and obviously a lot more protection than they have today.) The armed services need an isolated network. So does the intelligence community. The first, second, and third jobs of cybercommand should be creation of these defense plans.
They need all those things and also a good, well-enforced policy to keep defense/intelligence employees' ad hoc sneakernet from de-isolating the isolated networks. Witness the recent near-destruction of Iran's nuclear program at the hands of Stuxnet, which is believed to have been brought into the nuclear facility's isolated network by a scientist using a thumb drive to take work home with him.
But I fail to see any fundamental flaws with X that would require it's removal. Can you point to any?
I don't know enough about the X architecture to speak to fundamental flaws, all I really know about is the user experience. On my laptop, killing X (whether by logging out or by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) randomly causes the screen to freeze with streaks on it and become completely unresponsive until rebooted, but only some of the time. On my work machine, switching to another virtual console to do text work and then back to the one running X causes the colors to invert, which is only fixed by killing the X session and starting a new one. It's also a pain in the ass to increase the resolution if it doesn't auto-detect your monitor, requiring at least three separate commands on the command line, all of which are long and involve redundant typing. Maybe these things have nothing to do with the X protocol and are simply implementation errors. I don't know, but I don't really care; I just want my graphics to work. If Wayland does a better job, I welcome it.
And I assume the former market is so small compared to the latter that throwing that grey-haired baby out finally might be a good move.
A grey-haired baby? Laozi, is that you??
Remote rendering might be a unique advantage of X but how many users (and potential users) *need* or even know about it? 0.01%?
In this day and age, I wonder if 0.01% of Ubuntu users even know what X is.
Ubuntu can't be everything for everyone. I'd be totally happy with Ubuntu moving forward this way and Debian and Fedora and everyone else staying with that baby.
Amen to that. There's a reason my wife and my dad use Ubuntu. Moving away from X will make this reason even more compelling.
Perhaps it's rooted in a confusion in the use of "Operating System," or perhaps from your misunderstanding of what an OS is in general...the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there)...they aren't experiencing the Linux OS...
Ummm...you know that Linux, not GNU, is the kernel, and GNU, not Linux, is the remainder of the OS, right? Who's the one misunderstanding what an OS is again?
I can see where it would be useful in a server situation, but I would imagine no sane sysadmin would use Ubuntu in the server room.
I use Ubuntu in the server room. Our file servers, web servers and backup servers run Debian and our calculation machines run Ubuntu. Granted, I inherited the setup, but it seems to work quite adequately. Calculation servers are sometimes also used as desktops, whereas we all tend to avoid logging in to the other servers directly, preferring to ssh in. I often tunnel X over ssh on the servers because certain tools like synaptic are easier to use on my laptop than the text-based equivalents. Even so, I welcome the coming of Wayland and Unity because GNOME and X are too buggy, and I can always run an X server on top of Wayland for remote access purposes if necessary.
Every time I've seen someone ask the Wayland devs how they plan to support remote rendering, their response seems to be 'we don't. go away'.
Wait, seriously? They're replacing X Windows with something which doesn't support remote displays?
Correction: They're replacing X with something which doesn't support remote displays yet. If it's stable and efficient, I'll take that now and worry about extra features later. Let's not put the cart before the horse.
WTF??? Is that true? That makes no sense whatsoever... one of the best things about X is being able to have display from multiple sources.
It's only one of the best things because X is so crappy. Don't get me wrong, X was ahead of its time...when it came out in the '80s. It's long past time to try something new, which will finally fix the things X got wrong.
Yes, because in normal "client-server" nomenclature, the user (or his machine) is the client, and the thing he connects to is the server. With X11, this is basically reversed - the user is the server, and the other things are the clients.
With X11, the remote machine is requesting access to the display, which is provided by the server. It's totally straightforward if you think of it in terms of the server as the part that runs the hardware to which remote access is being requested, and the client as the part that requests access to the hardware. It's only backwards if you think in terms like "client is what I see, server is what's on the other end from me" which was never an accurate way to think of the client/server relationship anyway.
"he executive can order the non-enforcement of that law."
Are you sure about that one? I mean, saying this means, the president could issue an executive order saying not to enforce rape laws, and this would have the force of law around the country???
No, rape laws are state laws and we have a federal system, wherein the president is only the executive at the national level. If the governor of a particular state ordered the rape laws not to be enforced, then yes, that would have the force of law throughout that state.
I don't believe the SCOTUS has the right to nullify laws. Certainly there's not a word in the Constitution that gives them power to negate what the Legislature duly-passed and the Executive signed. They can decide CASES but never were they given power to unmake laws.
Nullification is a reserved power of the Member States.
Ok genius, you tell me how the supreme court should rule when looking at a piece of legislation and a piece of the Constitution which directly contradict one another. Should they decide the piece of legislation, which after all was much easier to pass than a constitutional amendment, overrides the Constitution itself, or just call it a wash and declare that nobody knows what the law is?
The point is, slapping a bunch of DCMA charges on this guy sets some dangerous precedents that can be used against the rest of us...
I think you have your laws confused. He was charged under the DMCA, or "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". The DCMA, or "Digital Cock-Mongering Act" is what they used to go after Chatroullette.
But this will also let the heirs (sometimes the ones intended by the deceased, often the ones who win in court) learn all sort of private things about the deceased's relationships, preferences, beliefs, likely passwords, etc. And those of others, still living. It will be an absolute bonanza for attorneys and other scumbags.
How is that any different from inheriting someone's letters and diaries? People act like this is a whole new world because it's online but the issues seem to be basically the same as they've always been.
The main stumbling block I can think of is how to set up a procedure for handing off an account. You have to verify that the person in question really is authorized to execute the deceased's estate, and that procedure might vary from state to state or country to country, which might cause some administrative hassles for Facebook.
How is this any different from handing off a bank account? Somehow brick and mortar institutions have managed to handle this "stumbling block" for centuries. Facebook doesn't have to handle any more administrative hassles than any bank with the same number of customers would.
Interesting, but an account is a contract, and contracts cannot be continued by a non-living person...
False. This is true for some types of contracts (like employment in your example) but not for all types. Specifically, contracts to pay out money continue after death and bind the estate. IANAL but I am a law student and I have taken Contracts.
Instead of telling us 'Gizmodo was right', like we all read Gizmodo and keep constantly up to date about what's going on over there, how about TELLING US THE ACTUAL THING THAT HAPPENED.
The actual event was that Gizmodo got something right. That's big news these days. Such big news, in fact, that even the discovery of arsenic-linked DNA working in a living organism pales in comparison.
...so in a sense, this is a bit like the much more exciting Carbon -> Silicon change which might get you talking rocks on lava worlds breathing vaporized sand and other badass shit. But it's only a tiny bit similar to that...
So breathing vaporized sand is badass, but breathing rat poison isn't? I beg to differ.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, "I'd think of an argument but I'm hungry" is never a valid line of reasoning.
*calls FSB major* Yo! You don't know who I am, and I'm not sure how I got your number, but there's this thing going down in the internal networks of a few dozen hospitals here, and we're tracing it back to a site in your country. Our expert will soon be on it (god willing, assuming we can find them and brief them and give them access to the binaries) but the code obfuscation and anti-reversing features are like acts of god almighty, and amusingly treated as such by the insurance companies. Could you please help us catch these crazy bastards for interrogation about the stopping key... pulling the plug? That won't work, it's a self-contained virus, bricking shit like a startled soviet-era comedian. Talk to my boss? Well, I'm not sure he knows how to deal with this... or for that matter which one of my bosses I'm supposed to call... As (potentially) opposed to: *calls the kr3ml1n h4x0r bünk3r (actual official name) from the American Cyber Command (actual official name)*: Hello, we've got a massive self-replicating attack on our internal networked hospital equipment, much like the scenario we discussed a few months ago. We can't break the obfuscation, and IDA Pro gets eaten up from the inside by trying to analyze it, but you guys might have more luck with the binaries we've managed to capture. Also, some versions of the code communicates with a site in Russia - it's probably botnet nodes, but the "scary men in helicopters" protocol you spoke about using internally might work anyway. Not to talk about the difference in reaction speed between the two.
So you're the guy they hire to fill in where the script says [tech]!
What exactly is a stockpile of cyber weapons? A room full of nerds and a case of Mountain Dew?
Yes. Although with only one case, that qualifies as a "small stockpile".
The best defense against info-warfare is to have a good alternate strategy. Twitter may not need backups, but Wall Street does. Industrial plants and the electrical grid need air gaps (and obviously a lot more protection than they have today.) The armed services need an isolated network. So does the intelligence community. The first, second, and third jobs of cybercommand should be creation of these defense plans.
They need all those things and also a good, well-enforced policy to keep defense/intelligence employees' ad hoc sneakernet from de-isolating the isolated networks. Witness the recent near-destruction of Iran's nuclear program at the hands of Stuxnet, which is believed to have been brought into the nuclear facility's isolated network by a scientist using a thumb drive to take work home with him.
But I fail to see any fundamental flaws with X that would require it's removal. Can you point to any?
I don't know enough about the X architecture to speak to fundamental flaws, all I really know about is the user experience. On my laptop, killing X (whether by logging out or by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) randomly causes the screen to freeze with streaks on it and become completely unresponsive until rebooted, but only some of the time. On my work machine, switching to another virtual console to do text work and then back to the one running X causes the colors to invert, which is only fixed by killing the X session and starting a new one. It's also a pain in the ass to increase the resolution if it doesn't auto-detect your monitor, requiring at least three separate commands on the command line, all of which are long and involve redundant typing. Maybe these things have nothing to do with the X protocol and are simply implementation errors. I don't know, but I don't really care; I just want my graphics to work. If Wayland does a better job, I welcome it.
This might be the beginning of the end for Ubuntu as everyone leaves in droves for a more traditional and stable distribution.
How is keeping X/GNOME more stable? Almost every bug I encounter in Ubuntu ends up ultimately being a GNOME bug or X.org bug of some sort.
Unity Unity Unity Unity! Come on!!
...Developers Developers Developers Developers! Yes!!
So if I use this unity 3d engine on ubuntu unity using VMware unity, do I get a trilogy?
No, that would be a trifecta.
And I assume the former market is so small compared to the latter that throwing that grey-haired baby out finally might be a good move.
A grey-haired baby? Laozi, is that you??
Remote rendering might be a unique advantage of X but how many users (and potential users) *need* or even know about it? 0.01%?
In this day and age, I wonder if 0.01% of Ubuntu users even know what X is.
Ubuntu can't be everything for everyone. I'd be totally happy with Ubuntu moving forward this way and Debian and Fedora and everyone else staying with that baby.
Amen to that. There's a reason my wife and my dad use Ubuntu. Moving away from X will make this reason even more compelling.
Perhaps it's rooted in a confusion in the use of "Operating System," or perhaps from your misunderstanding of what an OS is in general...the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there)...they aren't experiencing the Linux OS...
Ummm...you know that Linux, not GNU, is the kernel, and GNU, not Linux, is the remainder of the OS, right? Who's the one misunderstanding what an OS is again?
I can see where it would be useful in a server situation, but I would imagine no sane sysadmin would use Ubuntu in the server room.
I use Ubuntu in the server room. Our file servers, web servers and backup servers run Debian and our calculation machines run Ubuntu. Granted, I inherited the setup, but it seems to work quite adequately. Calculation servers are sometimes also used as desktops, whereas we all tend to avoid logging in to the other servers directly, preferring to ssh in. I often tunnel X over ssh on the servers because certain tools like synaptic are easier to use on my laptop than the text-based equivalents. Even so, I welcome the coming of Wayland and Unity because GNOME and X are too buggy, and I can always run an X server on top of Wayland for remote access purposes if necessary.
Wait, seriously? They're replacing X Windows with something which doesn't support remote displays?
Correction: They're replacing X with something which doesn't support remote displays yet. If it's stable and efficient, I'll take that now and worry about extra features later. Let's not put the cart before the horse.
WTF??? Is that true? That makes no sense whatsoever ... one of the best things about X is being able to have display from multiple sources.
It's only one of the best things because X is so crappy. Don't get me wrong, X was ahead of its time...when it came out in the '80s. It's long past time to try something new, which will finally fix the things X got wrong.
Confusing?
Yes, because in normal "client-server" nomenclature, the user (or his machine) is the client, and the thing he connects to is the server. With X11, this is basically reversed - the user is the server, and the other things are the clients.
With X11, the remote machine is requesting access to the display, which is provided by the server. It's totally straightforward if you think of it in terms of the server as the part that runs the hardware to which remote access is being requested, and the client as the part that requests access to the hardware. It's only backwards if you think in terms like "client is what I see, server is what's on the other end from me" which was never an accurate way to think of the client/server relationship anyway.
If he can jailbreak a phone so easily, why can't he just jailbreak himself?
"he executive can order the non-enforcement of that law."
Are you sure about that one? I mean, saying this means, the president could issue an executive order saying not to enforce rape laws, and this would have the force of law around the country???
No, rape laws are state laws and we have a federal system, wherein the president is only the executive at the national level. If the governor of a particular state ordered the rape laws not to be enforced, then yes, that would have the force of law throughout that state.
I don't believe the SCOTUS has the right to nullify laws. Certainly there's not a word in the Constitution that gives them power to negate what the Legislature duly-passed and the Executive signed. They can decide CASES but never were they given power to unmake laws.
Nullification is a reserved power of the Member States.
Ok genius, you tell me how the supreme court should rule when looking at a piece of legislation and a piece of the Constitution which directly contradict one another. Should they decide the piece of legislation, which after all was much easier to pass than a constitutional amendment, overrides the Constitution itself, or just call it a wash and declare that nobody knows what the law is?
The point is, slapping a bunch of DCMA charges on this guy sets some dangerous precedents that can be used against the rest of us...
I think you have your laws confused. He was charged under the DMCA, or "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". The DCMA, or "Digital Cock-Mongering Act" is what they used to go after Chatroullette.
But this will also let the heirs (sometimes the ones intended by the deceased, often the ones who win in court) learn all sort of private things about the deceased's relationships, preferences, beliefs, likely passwords, etc. And those of others, still living. It will be an absolute bonanza for attorneys and other scumbags.
How is that any different from inheriting someone's letters and diaries? People act like this is a whole new world because it's online but the issues seem to be basically the same as they've always been.
The main stumbling block I can think of is how to set up a procedure for handing off an account. You have to verify that the person in question really is authorized to execute the deceased's estate, and that procedure might vary from state to state or country to country, which might cause some administrative hassles for Facebook.
How is this any different from handing off a bank account? Somehow brick and mortar institutions have managed to handle this "stumbling block" for centuries. Facebook doesn't have to handle any more administrative hassles than any bank with the same number of customers would.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I am a law student who has taken Contracts and you are correct.
Interesting, but an account is a contract, and contracts cannot be continued by a non-living person...
False. This is true for some types of contracts (like employment in your example) but not for all types. Specifically, contracts to pay out money continue after death and bind the estate. IANAL but I am a law student and I have taken Contracts.
Slashdot, you have outdone yourself in your inability to actually convey news.
Slashdot: Wild goose chases for nerds, stuff that confirms earlier stuff.
See, this is why I hate slashdot.
Instead of telling us 'Gizmodo was right', like we all read Gizmodo and keep constantly up to date about what's going on over there, how about TELLING US THE ACTUAL THING THAT HAPPENED.
The actual event was that Gizmodo got something right. That's big news these days. Such big news, in fact, that even the discovery of arsenic-linked DNA working in a living organism pales in comparison.
They also mentioned it was more than just DNA (ATP was also mentioned, although they implied more).
So it uses ATA? Is there a gene for that?
Maybe not, but there's an app for that...
...so in a sense, this is a bit like the much more exciting Carbon -> Silicon change which might get you talking rocks on lava worlds breathing vaporized sand and other badass shit. But it's only a tiny bit similar to that...
So breathing vaporized sand is badass, but breathing rat poison isn't? I beg to differ.