And so, after many years. Slashdot is being removed from my bookmarks bar. This bit of poorly-sourced, shameless click-bait is the final straw. It was fun for awhile.
Remember this? In December 2010 there was a scandal when a developer who had previously worked on OpenBSD wrote to Theo de Raadt and claimed that the FBI had paid the company he had been working with at the time, NETSEC Inc (since absorbed by Verizon), to insert a backdoor into the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. They particularly pointed to two employees of NETSEC who had worked on OpenBSD's cryptograhpic code, Jason Wright and Angelos Keromytis. In typically open-source fashion, de Raadt published the letter on an OpenBSD mailing list.
After the team began a code audit de Raadt wrote,
"After Jason left, Angelos (who had been working on the ipsec stack alreadyfor 4 years or so, for he was the ARCHITECT and primary developer of the IPSEC stack) accepted a contract at NETSEC and (while travelling around the world) wrote the crypto layer that permits our ipsec stack to hand-off requests to the drivers that Jason worked on. That crypto layer contained the half-assed insecure idea of half-IV that the US govt was pushing at that time. Soon after his contract was over this was ripped out....
"I believe that NETSEC was probably contracted to write backdoors as alleged."
I'd like to find a more recent report of what they found.
Great rant, except that over 75% of the Linux code contributed is contributed by paid corporate employees that are simply doing their job.
Supporting evidence for this assertion:
"It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the “unknown” contributors were working on their own time, over 75% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work."
Management cares about features they can sell, and stuff that does not immediately translates into new features is considered a waste of time.
What you're saying may be generally true. That's what made Mac OS 10.6 such an amazing release. As John Siracusa wrote in his Ars review:
At WWDC 2009, Bertrand Serlet announced a move that he described as "unprecedented" in the PC industry.
"0 New Features"
Read Bertrand's lips: No New Features! That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: "Snow Leopard." Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more... uh... snowy.
I think Mac OS X could use another release like that today. Fewer iOS-like "features" more bugs quashed, please. Too bad Serlet left the company.
Slow down. Winestock is not making the "If you're offline you must have something to hide..." argument, he's anticipating it. He's warning that this is an argument authoritarians will soon be making and so one should be ready to defend the right to even have a general-purpose computer and keep one's data locally.
I think you're misreading the article. The Winestock is not making the "if you have something to hide..." argument, he's anticipating it. His argument is that the computer industry, and perhaps computing as a technical endeavor, tends the direction of centralization of computing power and grunt work which then leads to centralization of data. Both governments and business – even cool, supposedly "revolutionary" businesses – like it this way. So, don't look to the high tech companies for help protecting your privacy. As he says in TFA:
Pleading will not help because the interests of those companies and their users are misaligned. One reason why they are misaligned is because one side has all of the crunch; terabytes of data, sitting in the servers, begging to be monetized. Rather than giving idealistic hackers the means to liberate the users from authority, the democratization of computing has only made it easier for idealistic hackers to get into this conflict of interest. That means that more of them will actually do so and in more than one company.
You see, in the past, the computer industry was dominated by single corporations; first IBM, then Microsoft. Being lone entities, their dominance invited opposition. Anti-trust suits of varying (lack of) effectiveness were filed against them. In the present, we don't even have that thin reed. Thanks to progress, we now have an entire social class of people who have an incentive to be rent-seekers sitting on our data.
Being members of the same social class, they will have interests in common, whatever their rivalries. Those common interests will lead to cooperation in matters that conflict with the interests of their users. For example, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is backed by Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and, yes, Google, too.
As the head of the Software Freedom Law foundation, Eben Moglen says, keep your data locally, at home, where the 4th Amendment still has some effect. As Winestock is saying, you better be ready to defend even the right to do that.
So little effort went into this product. It has the same specs as the Gorebot 2000 with just some cosmetic changes to the exterior and a firmware update.
The market for full-size Princeps is moribund these days. Mobile is where all the action is.
As the submitter of the original story, I'll be relieved if the leaked memo is a fake. It gives me an excuse to put off migrating from Mac OS X to Linux, which was going to be a good deal of work.
But the earlier case of RIM agreeing to provide in-country servers to enable government surveillance in the UAE, India and Saudia Arabia shows the leverage that governments can wield over companies that operate within their territory. Vigilance is warranted.
Sure Hitchens made a name for himself for his efforts against religion. But those pale in comparison to his greater achievement: helping to bring the world the Iraq war.
I will always remember the steadfastly careerist way Hitchens reached across the political divide to join hands with the neocons in the Bush administration to boldly hype up false intelligence to make the war in Iraq a reality. Thanks to Hitchens the Iraqi people no longer live in fear of Saddam Hussein's regime. Now they live in fear of torture and death at the hands of Iraqi government and/or various politico-religious militias. Always better when a government monopoly is replaced by a competitive market, eh?
The war also removed the burden of a functioning electrical grid or sanitation systems – facilities that would be superfluous for the 6% of the population, or 2 million Iraqis, who have been internally displaced by the war.
None of this would have been possible without the efforts of pro-war propagandists like Christopher Hitchens. I hope for his sake, that he's right and there is no god.
Me, too. Safari has an "Advanced Preference" for "Database Storage" to allow "none before asking". I always say "no". But so far only Twitter's website wants to store data on my machine.
Chrome and Firefox don't seem to have a similar preference. I see reference to cache but not local storage or database storage which I think are the relevant terms, here.
My router, an Apple Airport Extreme (extreme!), allows for a guest network. Mine is unencrypted. There have been occasions when I've needed an open WiFi network to find where I'm going or quickly check an email, and I've found one. The same is true for everyone posting on or reading this thread. Now, I'm giving back, and if the police and the cable company don't like it that's too damn bad.
Don't be hypocritical. You've all taken, give back when you can.
Hierarchical organizations are subject to the threats and favors of the state. Keep your data at home where the Fourth Amendment still (sort of) exists.
If you're worried that a proprietary framework might be compromised by the Government threatening/bribing Apple into implementing a back door...
"We can make that FCC investigation into the back-dating of executive stock options go away, Mr Jobs. If you'll cooperate with the government..."
... or you just want a solution that works better with Time Machine than FileVault does, here is a How-To on getting EncFS full-disk encrytion working on Mac OS X.
If the point to leaking documents is to get information to the public about wrongdoing by powerful institutions like governments and large corporations so that the public can do something about it, The New York Times is not where I'd send the information.
The Times had evidence of the Bush Administration program to illegally wiretap American Citizens but, at the urging of the White House, sat on the story for a year until after the 2004 elections before publishing. The public might have taken action to punish the perpetrators of this crime by voting them out of office. But the Times made sure that the powerful lawbreakers avoided any accountability for their crimes.
Go ahead and leak information about crimes to The New York Times. But if that information implicates powerful people or institutions in the US, don't expect them to publish until the criminals have safely gotten away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
And so, after many years. Slashdot is being removed from my bookmarks bar. This bit of poorly-sourced, shameless click-bait is the final straw. It was fun for awhile.
I'd like to find a more recent report of what they found.
Great rant, except that over 75% of the Linux code contributed is contributed by paid corporate employees that are simply doing their job.
Supporting evidence for this assertion:
Corbet, Jonathan, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Amanda McPherson. Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It . San Francisco: Linux Foundation, March 2012. 9.
Your post makes you sound like a censorious, company man. I'm hoping your soul isn't really dead.
Management cares about features they can sell, and stuff that does not immediately translates into new features is considered a waste of time.
What you're saying may be generally true. That's what made Mac OS 10.6 such an amazing release. As John Siracusa wrote in his Ars review:
I think Mac OS X could use another release like that today. Fewer iOS-like "features" more bugs quashed, please. Too bad Serlet left the company.
This has been in the works long, long before the crisis caused by the financial industry catastrophe of 2008.
Slow down. Winestock is not making the "If you're offline you must have something to hide ..." argument, he's anticipating it. He's warning that this is an argument authoritarians will soon be making and so one should be ready to defend the right to even have a general-purpose computer and keep one's data locally.
I think you're misreading the article. The Winestock is not making the "if you have something to hide ..." argument, he's anticipating it. His argument is that the computer industry, and perhaps computing as a technical endeavor, tends the direction of centralization of computing power and grunt work which then leads to centralization of data. Both governments and business – even cool, supposedly "revolutionary" businesses – like it this way. So, don't look to the high tech companies for help protecting your privacy. As he says in TFA:
As the head of the Software Freedom Law foundation, Eben Moglen says, keep your data locally, at home, where the 4th Amendment still has some effect. As Winestock is saying, you better be ready to defend even the right to do that.
Cause that would be cool.
So little effort went into this product. It has the same specs as the Gorebot 2000 with just some cosmetic changes to the exterior and a firmware update.
The market for full-size Princeps is moribund these days. Mobile is where all the action is.
Good point.
As the submitter of the original story, I'll be relieved if the leaked memo is a fake. It gives me an excuse to put off migrating from Mac OS X to Linux, which was going to be a good deal of work.
But the earlier case of RIM agreeing to provide in-country servers to enable government surveillance in the UAE, India and Saudia Arabia shows the leverage that governments can wield over companies that operate within their territory. Vigilance is warranted.
New list of supporters as of 3:02PM Fri 23 Dec 2011 is here.
"SOPA Supporters.pdf" is no longer found at that link at house.gov. Hmmmm. Maybe they're having to update it ...
Sure Hitchens made a name for himself for his efforts against religion. But those pale in comparison to his greater achievement: helping to bring the world the Iraq war.
I will always remember the steadfastly careerist way Hitchens reached across the political divide to join hands with the neocons in the Bush administration to boldly hype up false intelligence to make the war in Iraq a reality. Thanks to Hitchens the Iraqi people no longer live in fear of Saddam Hussein's regime. Now they live in fear of torture and death at the hands of Iraqi government and/or various politico-religious militias. Always better when a government monopoly is replaced by a competitive market, eh?
The war also removed the burden of a functioning electrical grid or sanitation systems – facilities that would be superfluous for the 6% of the population, or 2 million Iraqis, who have been internally displaced by the war.
None of this would have been possible without the efforts of pro-war propagandists like Christopher Hitchens. I hope for his sake, that he's right and there is no god.
Excellent. Thank you.
HTML 5 local storage worries the hell out of me.
Me, too. Safari has an "Advanced Preference" for "Database Storage" to allow "none before asking". I always say "no". But so far only Twitter's website wants to store data on my machine.
Chrome and Firefox don't seem to have a similar preference. I see reference to cache but not local storage or database storage which I think are the relevant terms, here.
"We do like our binge drinking" -- Maurice Moss
that we break the internet. Get to it!
My router, an Apple Airport Extreme (extreme!), allows for a guest network. Mine is unencrypted. There have been occasions when I've needed an open WiFi network to find where I'm going or quickly check an email, and I've found one. The same is true for everyone posting on or reading this thread. Now, I'm giving back, and if the police and the cable company don't like it that's too damn bad.
Don't be hypocritical. You've all taken, give back when you can.
Hierarchical organizations are subject to the threats and favors of the state. Keep your data at home where the Fourth Amendment still (sort of) exists.
If you're worried that a proprietary framework might be compromised by the Government threatening/bribing Apple into implementing a back door ...
Nota bene: I have not tried this yet myself.
Here's video of the reactor exploding.
If the point to leaking documents is to get information to the public about wrongdoing by powerful institutions like governments and large corporations so that the public can do something about it, The New York Times is not where I'd send the information.
The Times had evidence of the Bush Administration program to illegally wiretap American Citizens but, at the urging of the White House, sat on the story for a year until after the 2004 elections before publishing. The public might have taken action to punish the perpetrators of this crime by voting them out of office. But the Times made sure that the powerful lawbreakers avoided any accountability for their crimes.
Go ahead and leak information about crimes to The New York Times. But if that information implicates powerful people or institutions in the US, don't expect them to publish until the criminals have safely gotten away with it.
NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.