When I get a new Firefox, and I hit a page with Flash embedded in it, Firefox doesn't offer to install GNASH. Even though GNASH (and klash) are plugins in my APT repo, which should be the first choice for install, not just some arbitrary.tgz from Adobe.
Well, of course this story is not about spies infiltrating Google, per se. It's about Google infiltrating the spies. The deals (AFAWCT) don't send any of Google's private operational data (eg. your searches, your GMail.com ID, etc) over to the spooks. The spooks are just using the same platforms as Google developed for itself.
But these are spooks. I doubt they'll let their agencies become dependent on Google without having some "leverage", like spies planted inside to be sure "business is operating according to plan". Or without being tempted by the fat intel score living inside Google's separate servers, regardless of how separate the immediate deal is.
But these deals (on their surface) don't mean Google (and, therefore, your privacy) is any more vulnerable. The spooks can plant people inside Google without these vendor contracts, and certainly already have.
What we need to hope, and really should be able to know, is whether Google's internal security is strong enough to protect our privacy from attacks by these spooks, whether or not they're "friendly" with Google's platform vendor business. And when we find out that Google is not secure enough, we have to figure out what to do about it, so we can use powerful services like Google without being at their mercy. Especially if Google goes through a period of "be evil" for a while.
Underlying it is a Berkeley-patented "collaborative filtering algorithm" dubbed Eigentaste , now on Version 5.0. The more people who use the system and rate jokes, the more data Berkeley researchers have to advance their understanding of recommendation systems, like those used by Amazon.com and other Web sites."
Yes, of course I want to give Berkeley researchers my time for free, so they can add that to the public subsidies that pay for their research, so they can patent the technology and charge me to use it later.
Well, it's "beta" vs "alpha" in the traditional sense: the alphas were test versions tested by the developer team, and the beta is released for testing to people outside the team for feedback. Which is really the distinction here: plenty of people outside the team tested the alphas, but the alphas didn't necessarily use that nonteam feedback. The betas' nonteam feedback is being used to refine the next version.
So this SW is "beta" the way it used to be before Netscape defined that down to "under construction". I've talked with Rob Savoye, who heads the GNASH project, and GNASH is in use all over the place on intranets in critical paths, including life support at hospitals, etc. I dunno about realtime apps, but GNASH's customized deployments are solid and reliable. That might not always be reflected in stability in the wild, with all the different platform specs, configs and random data consumed, but that's what beta is for.
What I really want to know is how well does the GNASH FOSS version of Adobe's FLEX compete with the "real" FLEX.
And doesn't offer alternatives like GNASH at that time. All media types are supposed to be that transparent, and install their handler plugin when data of that type is first downloaded. But if GNASH isn't offered, even though it's valid, that's not really "open": the preinstalled bundling of the "default" Adobe Flash handler makes a closed system.
GNASH also includes a FOSS version of Adobe's proprietary FLEX media streaming server, that's compatible with Adobe's Flash players. Now that is a FOSS product that doesn't suffer from the "not preinstalled" problem, because it uses the preinstalled Adobe Flash players as its target installed base. You can just install it on your server instead of installing FLEX.
But I haven't heard how good it is. Is it fully compatible with Adobe's Flash? Feature-competitive with FLEX? Have you heard anything?
AIR doesn't come preinstalled, so it's just another piece of software people can choose to use, not an existing platform to target with content.
Meanwhile, the GNU implementation of SWF is GNASH, which just released a new version. GNASH is also not preinstalled, but it's in some ways superior to Adobe's Flash, while remaining compatible (with practically all features found in the wild, and adding the rest) - and free, including not adding DRM you don't want. And GNASH was announced to be part of the new KDE, so it will in fact be preinstalled on lots of Linux machines.
Er, silicon dioxide is made of silicon (and oxygen): "Si02" is "silicon dioxide", as I said. So is this new "silicon resonator" (and everything else made of "silicon chips").
Traditional quartz crystals are also made of silicon (SiO2). Silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust, quartz the most abundant mineral. It's a lot cheaper than these new nanofabricated resonators, though the new ones are also made of silicon.
Because calling them just "people who support patents" doesn't tell the whole story, and is kinda tautological. Monopolies are a part of capitalism, though an extreme one. The problem with patents are they're capitalist monopolies, and some people who are OK with that forced the registration of secret atomic plans, which was idiotic. Monopoly capitalists are often that kind of self-threateningly idiotic. So it's worthwhile to connect those dots by calling them that.
Well, I can't blame "capitalism", because it's an economic system, not a person. But I can blame some capitalists, especially the monopoly capitalists who are the most extreme capitalists. They love a state-created (and defended) monopoly, which they don't even have to pay much to create or to defend.
A monopoly capitalist with the noose patent would try to stop you from hanging them by pricing the license out of reach, but if you could pay it they'd take it.
The most extreme capitalists hate a "free market" unless they've got all the freedom, and competitors have none. Sustainable capitalists (like me, and evidently like you) like a free market with government protecting it from monopolies of any kind, with the rarest exceptions.
164GB:day is only about 5TB:month. I pay $100 per month for up to 2TB. I could pay $400 for 5TB:mo on a single server, or $300 for 6TB on 3 servers, which would be cheaper and more redundantly reliable. $3-400 a month isn't very much for such a site, that also clearly has lots of expensive lawyers working to protect it. Even if they're not paying for the lawyers, those kinds of operations make a $400:mo expense look like chicken feed.
No, this outage is more likely the result of shortsighted planning. Either bad architecture in the network, HW or SW for handling spikes, or just renting the wrong hosting ISP. It's been a few weeks since the site started getting huge interest. The sysadmins/webmasters should have switched hosts a long time ago.
If I've got an atomic bomb, I'm not going to pay any attention to your patent lawsuit.
As should be pretty obvious from all the other people who got atomic bombs.
Obvious to anyone, except evidently the retarded capitalists, lawyers or bureaucrats who shared the most secret and dangerous info in the world with an office whose primary mission is publishing technical info, for no use whatsoever except increasing the risk of proliferating the weapons.
Patent dementia. The kind of thing communists mean when they say "capitalists will sell the rope for the nooses to hang them".
I'm surprised (and a little flattered) to learn I know French history better than a French person. But I do wonder from where you're getting what history you do know. Because France wasn't the dominant empire in the early 19th Century, despite Napoleon. France's dominance ended with the rise of first Spanish, then British power, along with the independence of Northern Europe from Catholicism. France's dominance at that later time was limited to military conquest. Which was short lived. And which was at the same time as the loss of much of France's colonial empire, specifically Haiti (which was 1/3 of France's economy) and Louisiana (which was 1/3 of what is now the US, and led to losing Quebec, which was 1/3 of Canada). A decade of conquest that you can't keep, which destroys the conquered territory's ability to deliver much value except for launching more wars, doesn't make for a "leading empire". The actual leading empire at the time was Britain, spanning the globe and centuries, raking in the booty, and keeping the rest of the world trying to catch up. I know it might be hard to convince someone from France that the British were "better", but there's really no arguing with the achievements of the British in creating the Industrial Revolution, with all the science, engineering, economics and politics that came with it.
But lack of a dominant empire didn't keep France from leading in innovation. Specificially in philosophy (which included science and economics in the 1700s and 1800s) and mathematics, France produced many of the main innovators, including evidently this phonographic pioneer this Slashdot story is about. But by the turn of the 20th Century, that cultural vigor of innovation had died out. France has clearly not lost its full cultural vigor, but it also seems to be focused on conserving the past more than creating the future. Britain, in turn, spent the time from the end of WWI until the 1990s in approximately that same boat.
The US too isn't really in the situation you're describing. The US is not really losing its dominance in innovation, or even in political or economic power, or military power (despite its failure to fight terrorists and guerrillas with massive militaries). Its lead is shrinking, certainly due to some losses by the US, and also by other countries finally catching up after rebuilding first from WWII, then from the Cold War. But the US is still well in the lead of all those competing countries. And the various economic crises looming in the US will affect foreign countries as well, many of them worse than the US. Because the US is so globalized, its crises are global crises. What is lost is the 1990s sense that the US was not just in the lead, but defined every category. Which was brief and always unrealistic.
Also, since France's fall from a frontrunner to an also-ran (still among the top, but towards the back of the upper pack, and mainly adopting innovation from elsewhere) seems linked to losing its colonial status (and getting definitively beaten in several wars that threatened France's entire existence, for 3/4 of a century), while the US didn't really have such an empire to lose (and can regain its market equivalent in any number of ways), they're not parallel.
Well, I guess Slashdot isn't the right place to look for historical insights. Unless It's the history of the phonograph, maybe:).
Well, like I said, I encourage the paranoia. But it must be tested by realism.
I would wait before introducing any OS into a secure critical path until after it has had the maximum review I can afford to wait for. Thre's no reason to believe that the NSA or other spooks haven't had their sticky fingers all over the insides of any popular OS, especially a closed one in so many sensitive operations like Solaris has been for so many years. Microsoft goes without saying, but there's no reason that say NetBSD contributors couldn't have been "agents" (witting or otherwise) of NSA or other spook tricks to insert code in that OS that often runs inside secured perimeters. So since the source for OpenSolaris is open for review, that seems like the most securable approach. Public announcements of the NSA participation will even encourage new scrutiny by others who compete directly with the NSA and its "customers", so I'd expect if, for example, the German government and HSBC uses the product that it is trustworthy.
So I'm not advocating an immediate adoption of the "NSA OpenSolaris". I'd say it's worth waiting maybe 6-8 months after release to analyze (and participate in) the open security analysis of the result. But even that is overestimating the safety of the position from which one is moving, because the NSA (and other untrustworthy actors) has had plenty of time to taint previous versions, just without admitting it. And this is true of any OS. If we want to use an OS in the world where NSA and others can manipulate with giant, secret budgets, teams of extremely smart and even evil people, and immunity from any law, we want their operations to go on as much as possible in the clear public view.
If we were talking about closed source, or binaries only, or some code so complex and hard that there aren't any qualified analysts for it outside the NSA, then we could have more grounds for worry. But since the code is open, and is under review by competing interests, it seems likely to produce an OS that's both secure and trustworthy. And it also invests the NSA in doing things in the open, which is the way to keep us all the most secure in every way. My paranoia makes me fear the alternatives more.
I refuse to recognize all these convenient contrived distinctions that let a guy get away with what popes do. Like wearing a dress while sending gays to hell (except the gay priests he shuffles around after they rape kids, who he sends to new, exciting and easy jobs in exotic locations)
Actually, running a lying, fraudulent televangelist network is really proof that Scientology is a "real" religion.
Its lack of overall credibility also makes the grade. What good is a religion whose assertions about imaginary creatures and their absolute control of the universe (and beyond) can be tested at all, let alone questioned, let alone credibly proven? That's what we have Apple for.
Next I'll be hearing that some Italian in a beanie and a dress believes in miracles, to the delight of billions of people on TV and in person.
Schwartz: Historically, this type of collaboration used to involve reams and reams of legal documents describing all kinds of confidentiality restrictions, intellectual property exchanges, or cumbersome institutional processes. But it got really simple when we embraced the open source community - now our most fruitful collaborations boil down to this: "come join the community." And that's exactly what we're announcing with the National Security Agency, they've joined the OpenSolaris community.
[...]
Vass: If others want to collaborate, just create an account on opensolaris.org and join in.
S: If someone wants to get a hold of your team to talk about FMAC in the open source community, what should they do? V: Just send me an email, bill.vass@sun.com.
Somehow, I don't think this NSA collaboration with Sun on Solaris' essential embedded security tech consisted of just registering a username/password at Sun.com and sending Bill Vass an email.
Doesn't anyone else see MAJOR privacy and 4th amendment violations when government and business get into bed with each other?!?! I do not want any agency in the US government helping Sun, Microsoft, and or anyone else with "securing" their products.
Not necessarily. Without government and business "in bed with each other" - even ignoring the basic impossibility of avoiding that in the real world, unless the government has its entire separate economy, industrial base, telecom system... which sounds much scarier than current reality - there would be no Internet, no computers. The government was the customer that paid businesses to invent, produce and operate those essential innovations at every step. If the government somehow did have its own parallel universe in which only government was making those things for government use, they'd never have been available to the general public, except perhaps as some purely socialized system, like borrowing "the official standard model" from a local public library or something. Which would never work, and we'd still be back in the 1960s now, telecom wise. Like the Soviet Union was.
There is only one reason why the NSA is interested in OpenSolaris and it has nothing to do with "securing" it.
No, actually, the NSA has more jobs and interests than just the illegal spying they also do (and which should be stopped). It's always good to be paranoid about the government - it's the most American impulse of all - but that doesn't mean we should stop our NSA from improving security whenever it can - which is all that it's supposed to do. Projects like OpenSolaris are open, so the entire public can look at what the NSA has brought to it before deciding to use it. And that includes foreign governments and others with conflicting interests with the NSA, so "official cooperation" doesn't have to keep silent actual security criticisms from other parties not "in bed" with the NSA.
In fact, the NSA spends a lot of our money (and time of the limited amount we can direct our government to spend) securing telecom often operated on less secure systems. So the NSA improving OpenSolaris means the NSA has less work in reacting to telecom crises, because it has helped prevent them. And of course putting the science and engineering that the public pays the NSA to produce into a produce anyone can use means the public is getting more (and more immediate) ROI from what we're spending on the NSA.
And then there's the advantage of getting the NSA invested in openness. After the last decade or so of extreme and always increasing secrecy in the Federal government, especially surrounding NSA "projects", getting the NSA to work more in public, more with the public, is an important organizational reform. Which will also be part of the long road repairing our ruined relationship with foreign intel services we need as allies. All of which can use a common platform that keeps the minimum secrecy for both good engineering and more trustworthy human relationships.
So it's good to see the NSA going for OpenSolaris. It doesn't hurt to be paranoid, but you have to be realistic about what is actually going to be produced, and its actual costs, risks and benefits - compared to the real alternatives. That's security in a nutshell.
Whatever happened to the project embedding a Solaris kernel inside a Debian/GNU OS? Would the current version of that OS work properly with this FMAC and the TrustedExtensions to run "Linux" apps on a much more secure OS?
The US still has to make the cultural leap to seeing broadband Internet as essential a utility as is electric, heat, water and sewage. We still don't even see TV that way, or we'd never put up with its high prices and monopolies - partly because we allowed cartels in exchange for "free" (ad supported, FCC regulated) air/radio broadcasts.
Small experiments in the US have shown that when municipal or other governments introduce network service, it finally spurs competition among the incumbent network operators, who stop putting off the less profitable market segments (who then get no service) while they pursue the "lowest hanging fruit". These municipal networks, whether wired or wireless, can support the increasing municipal network operations without paying tax money to private profit. If they permanently introduce real competition among the private operators, they can recede back into carrying only government traffic, like fire/police/medical comms, public websites, and the government's IT operations (including voice). In the meantime they let public policy make direct changes in what's available, to guide their constituents into a more competitive position with everyone else on the Internet.
Or we can just trust the phone company to invest time and money into keeping American communities competitive with all our foreign competitors, on the Internet that we invented and shared with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Geoffrey of Monmouth's ~1136 book _History of the Kings of Britain_ says that Merlin brought Stonehenge from Ireland.
I say that the British just copied an Irish model, instead of schlepping all that rock across the Irish Sea.
Wow, your sleazy backroom vote rigging gets exposed on Slashdot, and suddenly it's a major international incident.
Is that true of the latest GNASH releases, like the 0.8.2 beta from last week?
When I get a new Firefox, and I hit a page with Flash embedded in it, Firefox doesn't offer to install GNASH. Even though GNASH (and klash) are plugins in my APT repo, which should be the first choice for install, not just some arbitrary .tgz from Adobe.
Well, of course this story is not about spies infiltrating Google, per se. It's about Google infiltrating the spies. The deals (AFAWCT) don't send any of Google's private operational data (eg. your searches, your GMail.com ID, etc) over to the spooks. The spooks are just using the same platforms as Google developed for itself.
But these are spooks. I doubt they'll let their agencies become dependent on Google without having some "leverage", like spies planted inside to be sure "business is operating according to plan". Or without being tempted by the fat intel score living inside Google's separate servers, regardless of how separate the immediate deal is.
But these deals (on their surface) don't mean Google (and, therefore, your privacy) is any more vulnerable. The spooks can plant people inside Google without these vendor contracts, and certainly already have.
What we need to hope, and really should be able to know, is whether Google's internal security is strong enough to protect our privacy from attacks by these spooks, whether or not they're "friendly" with Google's platform vendor business. And when we find out that Google is not secure enough, we have to figure out what to do about it, so we can use powerful services like Google without being at their mercy. Especially if Google goes through a period of "be evil" for a while.
Yes, of course I want to give Berkeley researchers my time for free, so they can add that to the public subsidies that pay for their research, so they can patent the technology and charge me to use it later.
I'm the punchline!
Well, it's "beta" vs "alpha" in the traditional sense: the alphas were test versions tested by the developer team, and the beta is released for testing to people outside the team for feedback. Which is really the distinction here: plenty of people outside the team tested the alphas, but the alphas didn't necessarily use that nonteam feedback. The betas' nonteam feedback is being used to refine the next version.
So this SW is "beta" the way it used to be before Netscape defined that down to "under construction". I've talked with Rob Savoye, who heads the GNASH project, and GNASH is in use all over the place on intranets in critical paths, including life support at hospitals, etc. I dunno about realtime apps, but GNASH's customized deployments are solid and reliable. That might not always be reflected in stability in the wild, with all the different platform specs, configs and random data consumed, but that's what beta is for.
What I really want to know is how well does the GNASH FOSS version of Adobe's FLEX compete with the "real" FLEX.
That raises the question of how "open" is, say, Firefox, if it always installs Adobe's Flash player for
application/x-shockwave-flash
application/x-shockwave-flash2-preview
application/futuresplash
image/vnd.rn-realflash
And doesn't offer alternatives like GNASH at that time. All media types are supposed to be that transparent, and install their handler plugin when data of that type is first downloaded. But if GNASH isn't offered, even though it's valid, that's not really "open": the preinstalled bundling of the "default" Adobe Flash handler makes a closed system.
GNASH also includes a FOSS version of Adobe's proprietary FLEX media streaming server, that's compatible with Adobe's Flash players. Now that is a FOSS product that doesn't suffer from the "not preinstalled" problem, because it uses the preinstalled Adobe Flash players as its target installed base. You can just install it on your server instead of installing FLEX.
But I haven't heard how good it is. Is it fully compatible with Adobe's Flash? Feature-competitive with FLEX? Have you heard anything?
AIR doesn't come preinstalled, so it's just another piece of software people can choose to use, not an existing platform to target with content.
Meanwhile, the GNU implementation of SWF is GNASH, which just released a new version. GNASH is also not preinstalled, but it's in some ways superior to Adobe's Flash, while remaining compatible (with practically all features found in the wild, and adding the rest) - and free, including not adding DRM you don't want. And GNASH was announced to be part of the new KDE, so it will in fact be preinstalled on lots of Linux machines.
Er, silicon dioxide is made of silicon (and oxygen): "Si02" is "silicon dioxide", as I said. So is this new "silicon resonator" (and everything else made of "silicon chips").
Traditional quartz crystals are also made of silicon (SiO2). Silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust, quartz the most abundant mineral. It's a lot cheaper than these new nanofabricated resonators, though the new ones are also made of silicon.
No, I'm just a rich guy who knows what he's talking about after learning it competing in the actual markets, in multiple countries.
While you are just an Anonymous gibbering Coward.
Because calling them just "people who support patents" doesn't tell the whole story, and is kinda tautological. Monopolies are a part of capitalism, though an extreme one. The problem with patents are they're capitalist monopolies, and some people who are OK with that forced the registration of secret atomic plans, which was idiotic. Monopoly capitalists are often that kind of self-threateningly idiotic. So it's worthwhile to connect those dots by calling them that.
Well, I can't blame "capitalism", because it's an economic system, not a person. But I can blame some capitalists, especially the monopoly capitalists who are the most extreme capitalists. They love a state-created (and defended) monopoly, which they don't even have to pay much to create or to defend.
A monopoly capitalist with the noose patent would try to stop you from hanging them by pricing the license out of reach, but if you could pay it they'd take it.
The most extreme capitalists hate a "free market" unless they've got all the freedom, and competitors have none. Sustainable capitalists (like me, and evidently like you) like a free market with government protecting it from monopolies of any kind, with the rarest exceptions.
164GB:day is only about 5TB:month. I pay $100 per month for up to 2TB. I could pay $400 for 5TB:mo on a single server, or $300 for 6TB on 3 servers, which would be cheaper and more redundantly reliable. $3-400 a month isn't very much for such a site, that also clearly has lots of expensive lawyers working to protect it. Even if they're not paying for the lawyers, those kinds of operations make a $400:mo expense look like chicken feed.
No, this outage is more likely the result of shortsighted planning. Either bad architecture in the network, HW or SW for handling spikes, or just renting the wrong hosting ISP. It's been a few weeks since the site started getting huge interest. The sysadmins/webmasters should have switched hosts a long time ago.
If I've got an atomic bomb, I'm not going to pay any attention to your patent lawsuit.
As should be pretty obvious from all the other people who got atomic bombs.
Obvious to anyone, except evidently the retarded capitalists, lawyers or bureaucrats who shared the most secret and dangerous info in the world with an office whose primary mission is publishing technical info, for no use whatsoever except increasing the risk of proliferating the weapons.
Patent dementia. The kind of thing communists mean when they say "capitalists will sell the rope for the nooses to hang them".
I'm surprised (and a little flattered) to learn I know French history better than a French person. But I do wonder from where you're getting what history you do know. Because France wasn't the dominant empire in the early 19th Century, despite Napoleon. France's dominance ended with the rise of first Spanish, then British power, along with the independence of Northern Europe from Catholicism. France's dominance at that later time was limited to military conquest. Which was short lived. And which was at the same time as the loss of much of France's colonial empire, specifically Haiti (which was 1/3 of France's economy) and Louisiana (which was 1/3 of what is now the US, and led to losing Quebec, which was 1/3 of Canada). A decade of conquest that you can't keep, which destroys the conquered territory's ability to deliver much value except for launching more wars, doesn't make for a "leading empire". The actual leading empire at the time was Britain, spanning the globe and centuries, raking in the booty, and keeping the rest of the world trying to catch up. I know it might be hard to convince someone from France that the British were "better", but there's really no arguing with the achievements of the British in creating the Industrial Revolution, with all the science, engineering, economics and politics that came with it.
:).
But lack of a dominant empire didn't keep France from leading in innovation. Specificially in philosophy (which included science and economics in the 1700s and 1800s) and mathematics, France produced many of the main innovators, including evidently this phonographic pioneer this Slashdot story is about. But by the turn of the 20th Century, that cultural vigor of innovation had died out. France has clearly not lost its full cultural vigor, but it also seems to be focused on conserving the past more than creating the future. Britain, in turn, spent the time from the end of WWI until the 1990s in approximately that same boat.
The US too isn't really in the situation you're describing. The US is not really losing its dominance in innovation, or even in political or economic power, or military power (despite its failure to fight terrorists and guerrillas with massive militaries). Its lead is shrinking, certainly due to some losses by the US, and also by other countries finally catching up after rebuilding first from WWII, then from the Cold War. But the US is still well in the lead of all those competing countries. And the various economic crises looming in the US will affect foreign countries as well, many of them worse than the US. Because the US is so globalized, its crises are global crises. What is lost is the 1990s sense that the US was not just in the lead, but defined every category. Which was brief and always unrealistic.
Also, since France's fall from a frontrunner to an also-ran (still among the top, but towards the back of the upper pack, and mainly adopting innovation from elsewhere) seems linked to losing its colonial status (and getting definitively beaten in several wars that threatened France's entire existence, for 3/4 of a century), while the US didn't really have such an empire to lose (and can regain its market equivalent in any number of ways), they're not parallel.
Well, I guess Slashdot isn't the right place to look for historical insights. Unless It's the history of the phonograph, maybe
Well, like I said, I encourage the paranoia. But it must be tested by realism.
I would wait before introducing any OS into a secure critical path until after it has had the maximum review I can afford to wait for. Thre's no reason to believe that the NSA or other spooks haven't had their sticky fingers all over the insides of any popular OS, especially a closed one in so many sensitive operations like Solaris has been for so many years. Microsoft goes without saying, but there's no reason that say NetBSD contributors couldn't have been "agents" (witting or otherwise) of NSA or other spook tricks to insert code in that OS that often runs inside secured perimeters. So since the source for OpenSolaris is open for review, that seems like the most securable approach. Public announcements of the NSA participation will even encourage new scrutiny by others who compete directly with the NSA and its "customers", so I'd expect if, for example, the German government and HSBC uses the product that it is trustworthy.
So I'm not advocating an immediate adoption of the "NSA OpenSolaris". I'd say it's worth waiting maybe 6-8 months after release to analyze (and participate in) the open security analysis of the result. But even that is overestimating the safety of the position from which one is moving, because the NSA (and other untrustworthy actors) has had plenty of time to taint previous versions, just without admitting it. And this is true of any OS. If we want to use an OS in the world where NSA and others can manipulate with giant, secret budgets, teams of extremely smart and even evil people, and immunity from any law, we want their operations to go on as much as possible in the clear public view.
If we were talking about closed source, or binaries only, or some code so complex and hard that there aren't any qualified analysts for it outside the NSA, then we could have more grounds for worry. But since the code is open, and is under review by competing interests, it seems likely to produce an OS that's both secure and trustworthy. And it also invests the NSA in doing things in the open, which is the way to keep us all the most secure in every way. My paranoia makes me fear the alternatives more.
I refuse to recognize all these convenient contrived distinctions that let a guy get away with what popes do. Like wearing a dress while sending gays to hell (except the gay priests he shuffles around after they rape kids, who he sends to new, exciting and easy jobs in exotic locations)
Actually, running a lying, fraudulent televangelist network is really proof that Scientology is a "real" religion.
Its lack of overall credibility also makes the grade. What good is a religion whose assertions about imaginary creatures and their absolute control of the universe (and beyond) can be tested at all, let alone questioned, let alone credibly proven? That's what we have Apple for.
Next I'll be hearing that some Italian in a beanie and a dress believes in miracles, to the delight of billions of people on TV and in person.
Somehow, I don't think this NSA collaboration with Sun on Solaris' essential embedded security tech consisted of just registering a username/password at Sun.com and sending Bill Vass an email.
Not necessarily. Without government and business "in bed with each other" - even ignoring the basic impossibility of avoiding that in the real world, unless the government has its entire separate economy, industrial base, telecom system... which sounds much scarier than current reality - there would be no Internet, no computers. The government was the customer that paid businesses to invent, produce and operate those essential innovations at every step. If the government somehow did have its own parallel universe in which only government was making those things for government use, they'd never have been available to the general public, except perhaps as some purely socialized system, like borrowing "the official standard model" from a local public library or something. Which would never work, and we'd still be back in the 1960s now, telecom wise. Like the Soviet Union was.
No, actually, the NSA has more jobs and interests than just the illegal spying they also do (and which should be stopped). It's always good to be paranoid about the government - it's the most American impulse of all - but that doesn't mean we should stop our NSA from improving security whenever it can - which is all that it's supposed to do. Projects like OpenSolaris are open, so the entire public can look at what the NSA has brought to it before deciding to use it. And that includes foreign governments and others with conflicting interests with the NSA, so "official cooperation" doesn't have to keep silent actual security criticisms from other parties not "in bed" with the NSA.
In fact, the NSA spends a lot of our money (and time of the limited amount we can direct our government to spend) securing telecom often operated on less secure systems. So the NSA improving OpenSolaris means the NSA has less work in reacting to telecom crises, because it has helped prevent them. And of course putting the science and engineering that the public pays the NSA to produce into a produce anyone can use means the public is getting more (and more immediate) ROI from what we're spending on the NSA.
And then there's the advantage of getting the NSA invested in openness. After the last decade or so of extreme and always increasing secrecy in the Federal government, especially surrounding NSA "projects", getting the NSA to work more in public, more with the public, is an important organizational reform. Which will also be part of the long road repairing our ruined relationship with foreign intel services we need as allies. All of which can use a common platform that keeps the minimum secrecy for both good engineering and more trustworthy human relationships.
So it's good to see the NSA going for OpenSolaris. It doesn't hurt to be paranoid, but you have to be realistic about what is actually going to be produced, and its actual costs, risks and benefits - compared to the real alternatives. That's security in a nutshell.
Whatever happened to the project embedding a Solaris kernel inside a Debian/GNU OS? Would the current version of that OS work properly with this FMAC and the TrustedExtensions to run "Linux" apps on a much more secure OS?
The US still has to make the cultural leap to seeing broadband Internet as essential a utility as is electric, heat, water and sewage. We still don't even see TV that way, or we'd never put up with its high prices and monopolies - partly because we allowed cartels in exchange for "free" (ad supported, FCC regulated) air/radio broadcasts.
Small experiments in the US have shown that when municipal or other governments introduce network service, it finally spurs competition among the incumbent network operators, who stop putting off the less profitable market segments (who then get no service) while they pursue the "lowest hanging fruit". These municipal networks, whether wired or wireless, can support the increasing municipal network operations without paying tax money to private profit. If they permanently introduce real competition among the private operators, they can recede back into carrying only government traffic, like fire/police/medical comms, public websites, and the government's IT operations (including voice). In the meantime they let public policy make direct changes in what's available, to guide their constituents into a more competitive position with everyone else on the Internet.
Or we can just trust the phone company to invest time and money into keeping American communities competitive with all our foreign competitors, on the Internet that we invented and shared with them.