I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person would play a game where one player can gain an advantage simply by paying more. Note this is different from games that charge a small monthly fee just to play. Myself, and everyone I know refuse to play (or admit when I asked) games with in game bonuses purchasable with real cash.
In other words, if you want to gain an advantage by spending real currency, why just stay in the real world, where that's always been possible?
Sophomoric philosophy is still sophomoric when spouted by a game designer.
Microtransaction systems are morally wrong? Who even suggested such a thing? It's like suggesting a hammer is morally wrong, or the idea of barter is morally wrong.
My goodness, I guess when I wasn't looking, computer games became "srs bznss"?
Perhaps you need to refresh your memory on the defintion of amoral.
Twenty years ago, this was a major paradigm in PC gaming. You get the introductory set of levels free, you get the rest when you cough up the dough.
What happened? Why is this paradigm now evil?
I completely agree there. Every game I've paid for, with the exception of the original Deus Ex, happened after I'd played the game or a predecessor either as a demo/shareware version or the whole game. I guess one other exception is games I've obtained as part of bundles. I didn't know anything about Portal before I got it as part of the Orange Box, but I was sure glad I did. But overall, if I can get a chance to play a game in some form, I can decide if it's worth paying for. I've even paid for a number of games I'd obtained without authorization.
Because they still are Doom clones. I haven't seen anything meaningful introduced in the last decade+ worth of Doom clones that wasn't already done in Doom.
Well, why not call them Wolf3D clones? Wolf3D introduced the genre. Seriously, any FPS today, regardless of how great the graphics, would be a waste of time if it were no more than a Doom clone. The best example is Half-Life, which vastly improved on its iD inspirations.
Either you support leaks or you do not. Selective leaking is simply propaganda dressed up to look pretty.
To me, this issue emphasizes one thing that's always bothered me about wikileaks.org: It's not actually a Wiki. Wikis are about maximum user freedom, but I don't think that's ever been true of wikileaks.org.
So, basically, if the copyright holder complains, the file will be removed. But, if Rapidshare et al. are any instance, it'll promptly be reuploaded under a different name. Encrypted and password locked so the RIAA won't know it's there unless they manually go out and search all the sites linking to it. Or, in other words, it's just as "legitimate" (I honestly think it is legitimate) as TPB is, just with better ass-coverage, more work required on the part of the copyright cartels, and less chance of downloaders being traced. Perfectly legally, of course.
But since it doesn't use bittorrrent, the performance will probably suck.
Well.... sounds like we need an adaptive add-on to the HTTP protocol for ad-hoc encryption.
Or you could just HTTPS sites, whether they have self-signed certs or not. Banning VPNs without banning HTTPS is pointless. Or, maybe they're sneakier than we think and they're already monitoring all HTTPS connections by poisoning DNS and other techniques.
did you read article, said laptop had to be repaired first. care to change your point of view, or if not I have $60 thinkpad T23 laptop for you to buy that needs screen, hardrive, memory, networking module and battery pack.
It wasn't a good idea to use a laptop which needed to be repaired and had an uncertain history without reinstalling the operating system in any case. Even if it weren't stolen, it was still probably full of malware.
Via copyright. It has been established that the person taking the photos holds the copyright on those photos. Not the person who owns the camera, or the bought the resources (film, storage, etc), but the person who took the pictures. So if she took the pictures... she could fight to get the images taken down the site, but copyright isn't well respected among many online users (or so I'm told *looks around*). If somebody got the images and redistributed them, it would be very hard to shut them all down.
But yes, she is guilty of owning stolen property and due to the legal issues that may bring.
(not a lawyer here, but recall the whole "Dr. Laura" scandal, and how she lost that case).
I'm pretty sure copyrights don't prevent photos or anything else from being used as evidence of a crime. Thankfully, big content hasn't managed to push through any ludicrous extension to their power that obscene. Obviously, if the photos were on a public web site, it would be hard to argue they were simply being used as evidence. However, the article only mentions that the police officers involved in the case had access to them.
and abet thieves by being their knowing customers. And at $60, you know that as a recent laptop it's stolen.
So cry me a river.
But still, I don't think it should compromise your right to privacy. Those pics were presumably taken in her home without her permission and should have been destroyed if it didn't add to the case.
Photos are pretty useful for positively identifying people. If she didn't take any clothed pictures of herself, the naked ones were certainly important to the case. Otherwise, she could say "it's my nephew's laptop."
Hardcore open source (well, fill in anything here, but in this case it's an open source guy) advocate thinks doing thinks the way he thinks should be done is smart, and doing things other ways is stupid.
For someone who's a professional advocate for Open Source, I don't think he makes a very compelling argument that it's in everyone's enlightened self-interest to give as well as take. Certainly I've seen better arguments to that effect in slashdot comments.
If there is such a thing as "hardcore open source," Zemlin's argument shows its weakness. What's specifically insufficient is the OSI's sole emphasis on pragmatism rather than on freedom and pragmatism. I think it makes more sense to argue that Free/Open Source software is good for everyone in general and usually good for a specific business. There are still cases when participating in a Free/Open Source project is not best for a given business, but that's changing. I think it's a mistake to deemphasize either freedom or practical benefits.
After all, open source was created to free people from proprietary code and people telling them what they can't do.
Free Software and specifically copyleft (as implemented by the GPL) was created to free people from proprietary code. Permissive licenses such as that of BSD and MIT were created to encourage as many people as possible to use the code rather than keep it Free for everyone. Both copyleft and permissive licenses make something both Free and Open Source and each has its place, depending on whether the goal is to keep the software Free for everyone or have it used by anyone in any way, possibly including making it proprietary.
Open Source was created to market Free Software to business. That was a important role which hadn't been fulfilled by the FSF or anyone else, so OSI's work is very important. However, since it's focused on marketing, it sometimes forgets about their Free Software roots. I think it's a shame that the FSF doesn't emphasize the value of Free Software to business more and the OSI doesn't emphasize the importance of the freedom of Open Source software more, since they have much more in common than not.
I think Firefox lost "good" long before the rapid releases began. Rapid releases were just a (failed) attempt to fix the suck.
I'm not sure Firefox ever really lost anything, though. It's possible my tolerance for lame cross platform solutions has just gone way, way down.
I'm sure it's you who has changed, since Firefox has been steadily improving for many years, though improvement could be faster in some areas. Extension compatibility with the rapid release cycle does seem like a real problem, but other than that, I don't see any reason to doubt it will continue to improve. Are you saying that a cross platform program is necessarily lame? The only major browser which isn't cross-platform is Internet Explorer and few would consider its development history exemplary. I've used Firefox on Windows and GNU/Linux since before it was called by that name and more recently on OSX and Android, and it works well on all, though it sometimes feels more polished on Windows.
Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?
Of course this business model could be abused to exploit people, but would this one be more likely to result in abuse than tech support or clothing manufacture?
TRESOR is an implementation of AES as a cipher kernel module which stores the keys in the CPU debug registers, and which handles all of the crypto operations directly on the CPU, in a way which prevents the key from ever entering RAM.
Awesome, its stores the keys in the cpu debug registers when in use. The data to recreate them still has to flow into the CPU from ram, so all you're taking out is the path between ram and the CPU for an intermediate step. So all you get is a speed boost, no security gain since the attacker already knows the algorithm your using and all the data you provided to the CPU. The speed boost is nice if its being used all over the place (like for an encrypted FS) but otherwise its not that big of a deal and its certainly not new.
As for the rest, cryptfs or bitlocker with your screensaver/lock setup to throw out your keys when the screen blanks/suspends/whatever.
So basically Win7 with BitLocker enabled or whatever alternative setup results in the same thing on Linux. Its not even a little hard, and you've already got well past the point where they'll just beat the password out of you.
If you did it to learn, good for you. If you did it for some sort of practical value, then this really is one place where epic fail applies.
You clearly didn't read much of TFA and only demonstrate your own ignorance. The speed benefit for AES encryption comes from the AES-NI instructions in recent Intel CPUs regardless of where the key is stored. There is not a speed benefit from using TRESOR (which does use AES-NI when available), but it does make cold boot attacks on systems with encrypted disks much more difficult. This is because the key used to decrypt the disk contents only needs to exist in RAM long enough to copy it to CPU registers. After that, the key does not exist in system RAM anywhere. There are tools which make it easy to recover RAM contents after rebooting many machines, but not CPU registers.
The real enemy, which is the alien space zebra vampires that are out to suck your blood.
Seriously, this much effort is excessive considering the value of what anybody in a normal situation should have on their laptop. If you have a genuine need for this, you should be on the level of the person carrying the Football, and as such, you would be better investing in the Secret Service equivalent.
I think the education of the author and indirectly those who read the post goes far beyond the value of protecting that particular laptop. I don't have the patience to spend as much time as he did researching and experimenting, but now I can benefit for his work by implementing some of the same protections. The logical extension of this project would be to produce an install disk making it possible for anyone to have the same level of security on her laptop with only slightly more effort than a standard Ubuntu install. The benefit of that would easily outweigh the time spent on the prototype. Such a Ubuntu (or other distribution) installer could be created by the author, since he's already done some work in that direction, or anyone else who reads the post.
This guy is so far above influential in everything that he did, such a tribute to American creativity. I was just thinking that it is just a shame that there seems to be no one who's on his level. I mean, this guy brought ideas about graphical user interfaces to reality. His visions shaped the courses of his competition. He's the Walt Disney of our era. I never really found Apple products useful enough for me personally to own, but I enjoy the fringe benefits of touch screen phones, simplified user interface (think why Windows 7 looks like it does), and of course films from Pixar and Disney. Who's going to fill the void?
Oh, before anybody winges - an Apple Mac is often used as a Personal Computer and is thus a PC -- regardless of what the marketing people want you to think.
Modern Macs are literally PCs in exactly the same way anything from HP or Dell is. They have Intel x86 CPUs, USB input devices, PCIe buses, VGA video, and even PC BIOS as part of what Apple calls "Boot Camp". I haven't tried it, but there's no technical reason you couldn't run MS-DOS on one.
Let's be blunt. Only nerds on tech sites worry about "closeness." They're a tiny niche that wants to keep their nerd playgrounds around. The vast majority simply wants good products that work.
Let's be even blunter: Only nerds on tech sites are capable of building important thinks like the Internet and the hardware for using it. Without the nerd playgrounds good products that work won't be invented. It's no coincidence that Apple is doing better with Mac hardware that is pretty much PC hardware after floundering with much more proprietary platforms. iOS devices are completely proprietary and are quickly being outsold by good products that work based on more open platforms.
How about the Dynabook which could be seen as the inspiration for modern laptops and tablets and was conceptualized in 1968? Apparently Alan Kay called Microsoft's Tablet PC "the first Dynabook-like computer good enough to criticize" rather than anything from Apple.
FSF is free to worry about violations of licenses on their own code. They don't own Linux however.
The FUD being spread by bloggers is that an unscrupulous Linux contributor could extort Google and Android phone makers. If the FSF held the copyrights, they would seek compliance, not money. Also, they did write both the GPL 2 and GPL 3, so they're not exactly irrelevant to the issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person would play a game where one player can gain an advantage simply by paying more. Note this is different from games that charge a small monthly fee just to play. Myself, and everyone I know refuse to play (or admit when I asked) games with in game bonuses purchasable with real cash.
In other words, if you want to gain an advantage by spending real currency, why just stay in the real world, where that's always been possible?
Sophomoric philosophy is still sophomoric when spouted by a game designer.
Microtransaction systems are morally wrong? Who even suggested such a thing? It's like suggesting a hammer is morally wrong, or the idea of barter is morally wrong.
My goodness, I guess when I wasn't looking, computer games became "srs bznss"?
Perhaps you need to refresh your memory on the defintion of amoral.
Twenty years ago, this was a major paradigm in PC gaming. You get the introductory set of levels free, you get the rest when you cough up the dough.
What happened? Why is this paradigm now evil?
I completely agree there. Every game I've paid for, with the exception of the original Deus Ex, happened after I'd played the game or a predecessor either as a demo/shareware version or the whole game. I guess one other exception is games I've obtained as part of bundles. I didn't know anything about Portal before I got it as part of the Orange Box, but I was sure glad I did. But overall, if I can get a chance to play a game in some form, I can decide if it's worth paying for. I've even paid for a number of games I'd obtained without authorization.
Because they still are Doom clones. I haven't seen anything meaningful introduced in the last decade+ worth of Doom clones that wasn't already done in Doom.
Well, why not call them Wolf3D clones? Wolf3D introduced the genre. Seriously, any FPS today, regardless of how great the graphics, would be a waste of time if it were no more than a Doom clone. The best example is Half-Life, which vastly improved on its iD inspirations.
There is no honor amongst thieves.
Either you support leaks or you do not. Selective leaking is simply propaganda dressed up to look pretty.
To me, this issue emphasizes one thing that's always bothered me about wikileaks.org: It's not actually a Wiki. Wikis are about maximum user freedom, but I don't think that's ever been true of wikileaks.org.
So, basically, if the copyright holder complains, the file will be removed. But, if Rapidshare et al. are any instance, it'll promptly be reuploaded under a different name. Encrypted and password locked so the RIAA won't know it's there unless they manually go out and search all the sites linking to it. Or, in other words, it's just as "legitimate" (I honestly think it is legitimate) as TPB is, just with better ass-coverage, more work required on the part of the copyright cartels, and less chance of downloaders being traced. Perfectly legally, of course.
But since it doesn't use bittorrrent, the performance will probably suck.
Naw, he just jumped ship to a much cooler form of evil: aquatic robots ready to take over the world.
Well.... sounds like we need an adaptive add-on to the HTTP protocol for ad-hoc encryption.
Or you could just HTTPS sites, whether they have self-signed certs or not. Banning VPNs without banning HTTPS is pointless. Or, maybe they're sneakier than we think and they're already monitoring all HTTPS connections by poisoning DNS and other techniques.
did you read article, said laptop had to be repaired first. care to change your point of view, or if not I have $60 thinkpad T23 laptop for you to buy that needs screen, hardrive, memory, networking module and battery pack.
It wasn't a good idea to use a laptop which needed to be repaired and had an uncertain history without reinstalling the operating system in any case. Even if it weren't stolen, it was still probably full of malware.
Via copyright. It has been established that the person taking the photos holds the copyright on those photos. Not the person who owns the camera, or the bought the resources (film, storage, etc), but the person who took the pictures. So if she took the pictures... she could fight to get the images taken down the site, but copyright isn't well respected among many online users (or so I'm told *looks around*). If somebody got the images and redistributed them, it would be very hard to shut them all down.
But yes, she is guilty of owning stolen property and due to the legal issues that may bring.
(not a lawyer here, but recall the whole "Dr. Laura" scandal, and how she lost that case).
I'm pretty sure copyrights don't prevent photos or anything else from being used as evidence of a crime. Thankfully, big content hasn't managed to push through any ludicrous extension to their power that obscene. Obviously, if the photos were on a public web site, it would be hard to argue they were simply being used as evidence. However, the article only mentions that the police officers involved in the case had access to them.
and abet thieves by being their knowing customers. And at $60, you know that as a recent laptop it's stolen.
So cry me a river.
But still, I don't think it should compromise your right to privacy. Those pics were presumably taken in her home without her permission and should have been destroyed if it didn't add to the case.
Photos are pretty useful for positively identifying people. If she didn't take any clothed pictures of herself, the naked ones were certainly important to the case. Otherwise, she could say "it's my nephew's laptop."
...the difference between open source and a proprietary model is to allow people to be idiots? Correct me if I'm wrong.
There's no difference in that respect.
Hardcore open source (well, fill in anything here, but in this case it's an open source guy) advocate thinks doing thinks the way he thinks should be done is smart, and doing things other ways is stupid.
For someone who's a professional advocate for Open Source, I don't think he makes a very compelling argument that it's in everyone's enlightened self-interest to give as well as take. Certainly I've seen better arguments to that effect in slashdot comments.
If there is such a thing as "hardcore open source," Zemlin's argument shows its weakness. What's specifically insufficient is the OSI's sole emphasis on pragmatism rather than on freedom and pragmatism. I think it makes more sense to argue that Free/Open Source software is good for everyone in general and usually good for a specific business. There are still cases when participating in a Free/Open Source project is not best for a given business, but that's changing. I think it's a mistake to deemphasize either freedom or practical benefits.
After all, open source was created to free people from proprietary code and people telling them what they can't do.
Free Software and specifically copyleft (as implemented by the GPL) was created to free people from proprietary code. Permissive licenses such as that of BSD and MIT were created to encourage as many people as possible to use the code rather than keep it Free for everyone. Both copyleft and permissive licenses make something both Free and Open Source and each has its place, depending on whether the goal is to keep the software Free for everyone or have it used by anyone in any way, possibly including making it proprietary.
Open Source was created to market Free Software to business. That was a important role which hadn't been fulfilled by the FSF or anyone else, so OSI's work is very important. However, since it's focused on marketing, it sometimes forgets about their Free Software roots. I think it's a shame that the FSF doesn't emphasize the value of Free Software to business more and the OSI doesn't emphasize the importance of the freedom of Open Source software more, since they have much more in common than not.
I think Firefox lost "good" long before the rapid releases began. Rapid releases were just a (failed) attempt to fix the suck.
I'm not sure Firefox ever really lost anything, though. It's possible my tolerance for lame cross platform solutions has just gone way, way down.
I'm sure it's you who has changed, since Firefox has been steadily improving for many years, though improvement could be faster in some areas. Extension compatibility with the rapid release cycle does seem like a real problem, but other than that, I don't see any reason to doubt it will continue to improve. Are you saying that a cross platform program is necessarily lame? The only major browser which isn't cross-platform is Internet Explorer and few would consider its development history exemplary. I've used Firefox on Windows and GNU/Linux since before it was called by that name and more recently on OSX and Android, and it works well on all, though it sometimes feels more polished on Windows.
that crowdsource tasks to workers in India.
Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?
Of course this business model could be abused to exploit people, but would this one be more likely to result in abuse than tech support or clothing manufacture?
TRESOR is an implementation of AES as a cipher kernel module which stores the keys in the CPU debug registers, and which handles all of the crypto operations directly on the CPU, in a way which prevents the key from ever entering RAM.
Awesome, its stores the keys in the cpu debug registers when in use. The data to recreate them still has to flow into the CPU from ram, so all you're taking out is the path between ram and the CPU for an intermediate step. So all you get is a speed boost, no security gain since the attacker already knows the algorithm your using and all the data you provided to the CPU. The speed boost is nice if its being used all over the place (like for an encrypted FS) but otherwise its not that big of a deal and its certainly not new.
As for the rest, cryptfs or bitlocker with your screensaver/lock setup to throw out your keys when the screen blanks/suspends/whatever.
So basically Win7 with BitLocker enabled or whatever alternative setup results in the same thing on Linux. Its not even a little hard, and you've already got well past the point where they'll just beat the password out of you.
If you did it to learn, good for you. If you did it for some sort of practical value, then this really is one place where epic fail applies.
You clearly didn't read much of TFA and only demonstrate your own ignorance. The speed benefit for AES encryption comes from the AES-NI instructions in recent Intel CPUs regardless of where the key is stored. There is not a speed benefit from using TRESOR (which does use AES-NI when available), but it does make cold boot attacks on systems with encrypted disks much more difficult. This is because the key used to decrypt the disk contents only needs to exist in RAM long enough to copy it to CPU registers. After that, the key does not exist in system RAM anywhere. There are tools which make it easy to recover RAM contents after rebooting many machines, but not CPU registers.
The real enemy, which is the alien space zebra vampires that are out to suck your blood.
Seriously, this much effort is excessive considering the value of what anybody in a normal situation should have on their laptop. If you have a genuine need for this, you should be on the level of the person carrying the Football, and as such, you would be better investing in the Secret Service equivalent.
I think the education of the author and indirectly those who read the post goes far beyond the value of protecting that particular laptop. I don't have the patience to spend as much time as he did researching and experimenting, but now I can benefit for his work by implementing some of the same protections. The logical extension of this project would be to produce an install disk making it possible for anyone to have the same level of security on her laptop with only slightly more effort than a standard Ubuntu install. The benefit of that would easily outweigh the time spent on the prototype. Such a Ubuntu (or other distribution) installer could be created by the author, since he's already done some work in that direction, or anyone else who reads the post.
Alright then, who gets the prime hours? Where 12pm means noon and 12am means midnight?
The answer is in the question, as well as historic precedent. UTC is the time at the prime meridian.
This guy is so far above influential in everything that he did, such a tribute to American creativity. I was just thinking that it is just a shame that there seems to be no one who's on his level. I mean, this guy brought ideas about graphical user interfaces to reality. His visions shaped the courses of his competition. He's the Walt Disney of our era. I never really found Apple products useful enough for me personally to own, but I enjoy the fringe benefits of touch screen phones, simplified user interface (think why Windows 7 looks like it does), and of course films from Pixar and Disney. Who's going to fill the void?
Yes, he realized the GUI, invented touchscreens and was the vision behind Pixar. He did found Apple all by himself after all. Jobs is clearly very good at making businesses successful based on others' ideas. That's not inherently bad, but he's often given way too much credit for the ideas themselves.
Oh, before anybody winges - an Apple Mac is often used as a Personal Computer and is thus a PC -- regardless of what the marketing people want you to think.
Modern Macs are literally PCs in exactly the same way anything from HP or Dell is. They have Intel x86 CPUs, USB input devices, PCIe buses, VGA video, and even PC BIOS as part of what Apple calls "Boot Camp". I haven't tried it, but there's no technical reason you couldn't run MS-DOS on one.
Functionality > philosophy
You're absolutely right. I much prefer being able to choose what to do with my devices than submitting to Steve's philosophy of how I should use them.
Let's be blunt. Only nerds on tech sites worry about "closeness." They're a tiny niche that wants to keep their nerd playgrounds around. The vast majority simply wants good products that work.
Let's be even blunter: Only nerds on tech sites are capable of building important thinks like the Internet and the hardware for using it. Without the nerd playgrounds good products that work won't be invented. It's no coincidence that Apple is doing better with Mac hardware that is pretty much PC hardware after floundering with much more proprietary platforms. iOS devices are completely proprietary and are quickly being outsold by good products that work based on more open platforms.
How about the Dynabook which could be seen as the inspiration for modern laptops and tablets and was conceptualized in 1968? Apparently Alan Kay called Microsoft's Tablet PC "the first Dynabook-like computer good enough to criticize" rather than anything from Apple.
FSF is free to worry about violations of licenses on their own code. They don't own Linux however.
The FUD being spread by bloggers is that an unscrupulous Linux contributor could extort Google and Android phone makers. If the FSF held the copyrights, they would seek compliance, not money. Also, they did write both the GPL 2 and GPL 3, so they're not exactly irrelevant to the issues.