Most DVORAK keyboards (homemade ones) are just QWERTY keyboards with the keycaps switched around. Thus, they need software-side mapping. You can buy hardware-mapped DVORAK keyboards but this is a bit silly when the average geek already has a bunch of QWERTY keyboards lying around.
M-Systems makes a device called the Disk-on-Chip that I believe can do this. Although it doesn't interface through IDE, it can be made to emulate a hard drive at the BIOS level, using M-Sys's TrueFFS BIOS. Therefore, operating systems (like Windows 98, I believe) that use BIOS calls to access the hard drive can use the Disk-on-Chip as if it were a hard drive. Other operating systems like Windows NT and Linux need the proper drivers / kernel modules to access the disk. The upshot of all of this is that I was able to get my own hacked-up minidistribution of GNU/Linux (which I naturally called Asshat Linux), to boot and run off of the 16-Megabyte Disk-on-Chip in a Visara 1783 thin client machine (formerly running QNX). I believe that the same could be done for Windows 98. If anyone wants info on how I did this, email me or post a reply.
"...Duke Nukem 3D has had its first non-x86 port..."
I'm not sure that this is correct. Does the Linux/SDL version compile on non-x86 Linux? Or does it contain some kind of processor-dependent code (eew!)? At any rate, this is still a cool hack, and it's nice to see a game console being actively developed for even after being more or less abandoned by the manufacturer. Maybe future console makers will follow Sega's lead and allow non-commercial development without expensive SDKs or illegal (thanks DMCA!) modchips. This could give them a loyal, long-term secondary fanbase much like the Dreamcast has, to complement the profits from the "console of the month" type. I know that consoles are sold at a loss, but people who buy an older console to play a cool GPL game are likely to pick up a few of the classics and some peripherals as well. Would this be a smart move for console makers?
Neal Stephenson mentioned this in _Cryptonomicon_: at one point in the book, the British spoof a message to appear to be from a German submarine by imitating the "fist" of the sub's communications officer. I have no idea if this kind of thing really happened, but it seems plausible.
The form factor is very small -- go to the hardware section for pics of various cases. People have even modded them into old game console cases and the like. The ones powered by the VIA Eden processor have no processor fan at all. The motherboards have built in sound, video (including TV out) and network. Drop in some RAM (the latest models take DDR2100), a hard drive, a slimline DVD-ROM drive, and a TV tuner card, and you have a combination DVD/DivX/MP3/OOG/VCD/whatever player with music visualization, network streaming, and PVR capabilities.
I'm pretty sure this is a troll due to the lack of support to the claims, but I'll respond anyway because the points are still valid:
Unix is a complete joke as far as security.
I don't know what you mean by "Unix", but I'm assuming it includes all POSIX-compatable operating systems (including GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc). In that case, maybe you should look at OpenBSD. It's about as Unix as they come, being BSD-derived and all. Yet it is also one of the most secure general-purpose operating systems out there. In the past 7+ years, OpenBSD has had one remote root hole in the default install (the OpenSSH off-by-one hole, I believe) and a handfull of priviledge escalation holes and the like. Compare this to Solaris or Red Hat Linux, and you'll see that not all Unixes are the same.
a.) It's ancient so most of the flaws are finally worked out.
I agree here, but I think that the point deserves more elaboration. Many of the flaws in Windows and Windows-related products like IIS stem from fundamental design problems, the kind that only massive time and energy spent reworking can fix. For example, the fact that any NetBIOS-enabled Windows machine will send you its password hashes upon request (by getting the machine to retrieve a remote file:// url) has been acknowledged by Microsoft as a pretty much unfixable design flaw. Similarly, the IIS URL parsing mechanism is overly complex, leading to holes like the Unicode../../ problems. With Unix, most of the fundamental design issues have been worked out or worked around. True, there are still a few fundamental problems; the inflexible permissions system and the fact that many things run as root just to get one specific priviledge (ping, daemons, etc) come to mind. But most of the flaws in Unix programs come from buffer overflows, format string vulnerabilities, unchecked perl open() calls, and the like: little, isolated errors that are easy to make and almost as easy to fix.
b.) Nobody _gives a shit_ about Unix so there aren't a lot of hackers out there targetting it.
This point blatantly contradicts the others. If Unix is so unimportant, why (according to point a) have there been so many flaws found and fixed? Besides that, have you looked at how many companies are into Linux these days? I think that Red Hat, IBM, and HP (just to name a few) would disagree with your statement that "Nobody _gives a shit_ about Unix". With the release of Mac OS X, Unix is now also a popular desktop OS with a significant market share. As for "hackers" (I'll assume you meant crackers) targeting Unix, take a look at any security-related mailing list and you'll see that many Unix-related flaws are researched and found, and often exploited. Crackers and script kiddies do care about Unix (it accounts for over half of all webservers*, for example), and this is why so much effort has gone into and will continue to go into securing Unix.
*Netcraft says that 64.19% of sites run Apache, but does not mention the OS distribution. Since most Apache installs are on Unix systems, and since there are also some non-Apache Unix webservers, I figured that saying 50% was more than reasonable.
Linux was first developed for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher). These days it also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64,
ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64 and CRIS architectures.
So, I'm guessing that they would use that existing kernel code on existing hardware rather than switching to x86. Desktop-oriented x86 chips by Intel and AMD are way too power-hungry and hot to be of any use in most embedded systems -- about the smallest thing you'd find one in would be a game console. Other x86-compatibles such as VIA's Eden might be a bit more practical, but still out of the range of what T-Linux seems to be targeted at. Really, the x86 architecture was never intended for this kind of use (and is horribly broken in general, and probably should be done away with altogether, but that's another rant).
Linux (Debian GNU/Linux to be specific) has done virtual consoles for me on PowerPC Macintosh and 680x0 Macintosh -- the key sequence to switch is Open Apple + left or right arrow. (Does anyone remember the days when there was a Closed Apple key too?) I haven't tried this with X, though (my LC3's 68030 is just a little too slow to do graphics). On a side note (for text stuff at least), you could always use the excellent utility screen for an infinite number of virtual terminals.
That's a little different. Keep-alive connections in HTTP still have the normal TCP connection startup (SYN - SYN/ACK - ACK) and teardown procedures, it's just that they last for multiple transactions. A keep-alive connection is generally closed after the page, including all embedded content, images, etc is loaded. What IE and IIS are doing is most certainly non-RFC: they are keeping the TCP connection half-open between page views, even though they "close" the connection at the HTTP level with a "Connection: close" header. Then, it can be reopened directly later, without worrying about any of that "reliability" and "stability" and "standards" crap. Yay for the Microsoft Monopoly! Next thing you know, they'll distribute broken/nonexistant Java VMs to get people to use their own proprietary, insecure technology.
Reading an article means more than just looking at each word in order. It also means thinking about intentions and "reading between the lines." IMHO, most of the ??AA "piracy busts" have little to nothing to do with actual piracy. If all they cared about was the money lost to infringement, record companies would just ignore piracy like other industries do (retailers with shoplifting, credit card companies with fraud, etc.) I find it hard to believe that all the money that the ??AA spend on tracking down pirate outfits (including relatively small ones), launching massive FUD campaigns, and paying for laws is less than the amount really lost to piracy (remember, not everyone who buys a $2 bootleg CD would have bought the $15 legit copy). Instead, the whole "war on piracy" is just a giant PR campaign, to drum up support for the media monopolies and increasing control over the uses of copyright works.
So, in short: Yes, the article says counterfit, but the point of the original submitter was that it's all a ruse to limit used CD distribution and run Mom & Pop stores out of buisness.
It's not illegal just to make a copy of something digital. It is, however, illegal (by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, aka DMCA) to circumvent any digital copy prevention system, even for fair use purposes*. This means that if you buy a CD (one with no copy protection), you can legally make a backup for your own purposes. But if you buy a copy-protected pseudo-CD and use a circumvention device to make a backup copy, you are breaking the law. This essentially means that content producers get to limit your use of their product arbitrarily, even when it falls under fair use. As far as time shifting goes, the DTV broadcast flag could be considered a copy-protection system under the DMCA, so in a few years using your HDTiVo to time-shift certain programs very well could be illegal. Sucks, doesn't it?
All of the above applies in the United States only (unless you happen to be a certain Russian programmer). I have no clue what laws other countries have about this kind of stuff.
* There is a provision for fair use in the DMCA, but it has never (?) been invoked and probably has no real effect. This has been discussed elsewhere in this thread.
IT DOES NOT READ YOUR MIND, THEY WILL NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING, WHAT YOU ATE FOR DINNER, NOTHING..
Its only a "reading" of the electric signals to look for a pattern based on a certain set values.
#include <ianal.h>
And what's the difference? Isn't "what you are thinking" just the composite of all the "electric signals" in your brain? In fact, general readings may be more of an invasion of privacy, due to false positives. As other posters have noted, this system could have serious problems differentiating between homicidal terrorists and people who are just pissed off / paranoid / imagining the worst / very afraid of flying / etc. This could lead to airport security searching / detaining / questioning travalers unnecessarily. Do they have the right to question people for whatever reason? Yes. Is it a pain in the ass? Yes.
That said, I seriously doubt this will actually be implemented. Besides the inevitable public outlash, the technology is unproven, and (probably) expensive too. Hopefully enough people will realize that this is just a flashy technological "solution" that won't really improve security.
I once saw power strips advertised to protect "computers up to 350 MHz". Of course, the more expensive one could go up to 450 MHz. Yes, you have to buy a more expensive power strip for a faster computer. Riiiiiiiiight.
If mandatory government key escrow actually would help prevent terrorism, I think I would be happy to give up that small liberty to save thousands of lives. But will it really help? Of course not! As Tuesday's attacks have shown, terrorists are anything but stupid. They can just snag an old version of PGP from somewhere, along with some steganography software to conceal the very use of encryption. I'm even willing to bet that there's at least one person in every major terrorist organization who could whip up a simple RSA implementation. And picture-based stega is almost impossible to detect. As the saying goes, "Outlaw encryption, and only outlaws will use encryption."
I hate to say this, but the grand jury indictment doesnt suprise me one bit. As much as we hate it, the DMCA is the law. And there's plenty of evidence that Dmitry violated the DMCA. Right now the most important thing is to get Dmitry home to his family right now. If that sets a precedent for the DMCA, that's great, but let's not make Dmitry a martyr at his own expense (yes I realize that's an oxymoron). The DMCA can be challenged later, probably in the Supreme Court. Unfortunatly, this means that there will have to be more and more Sklyarov/Felton/2600-esque cases untill the DMCA is gone for good.
For some reason, this article appeared in the YRO section a few hours before it appeared on the main page. This explains how the 1st post could go to a non-troll, as YRO has a very low viewing population.
Personally, I love browser-desktop environment integration in Windows. Things like being able to type a web address into my taskbar (yes, I know it's possible with a GNOME or KDE applet), being able to use the same window for file browsing or web browsing, treating local and remote files equally, etc. What I don't like is browser-OS integration, because it means that a user-space program is embedded into the operating system, thereby limiting choice and flexability. With Windows I just have to accept this as a downside of browser-desktop environment integration. But with Linux there is no tradeof. Relax, noone is trying to compile Konqueror into the kernel or anything. ---
Ever heard of holding a fortification? In complex water battles this is a huge advantage. And, the bipod can be folded up so the gun becomes (in principle) portable. I wouldn't want to have to hold one with a full tank while pumping and firing and running at the same time, though... ---
I don't know if this is supposed to be a troll or not, but I would just like to note that the/. "lameness" filter, flawed as it may be, is NOT censorship./. has EVERY RIGHT to choose what it puts on its OWN SITE. This is like submitting a book to a publisher and having them reject it. "Oh no, censorship!" They can use any braindead method they like to choose what they publish. Slashdot is not a seperate third party from your comment and your comment's viewer. They are more like a publisher than a neutral comment hosting service. A content provider choosing what to provide (/. lameness filter) is NOT censorship. A third party choosing what a content provider can provide IS censorship (CYBERSitter, etc.) ---
It's already been established that Juno has a pretty fscked up buisness model. And as any physicist will tell you, adding more mass will only increase the momentum of the downward spiral. Free net access is dead, and it's not a viable buisness model anymore. How is one big bulky company going to do any better in this market than two smaller ones? ---
Re:And in a completely unrelated story...
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 1
I'm suprised their customers let them get away with that crap.
Unfortunatly, they can. Here's why:
The automatic customer's response to a "DNS Error" message is "Oh, the web site is down." Almost noone stops to think if they are being censored unless the error says so (or they have other evidence)
Abovenet is a backbone provider, not an ISP. Therefore, even if someone sees this story on some website, they probably won't know if it affects them. "Oh, but this is about Abovenet, I use (insert any Abovenet powered ISP)"
Very few people are behind an Abovenet ISP, and try to visit a certain censored site on a certain day, and see a news story about that same site being blocked by Abovenet, and realize that they are using an ISP that uses Abovenet, and complain about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Most DVORAK keyboards (homemade ones) are just QWERTY keyboards with the keycaps switched around. Thus, they need software-side mapping. You can buy hardware-mapped DVORAK keyboards but this is a bit silly when the average geek already has a bunch of QWERTY keyboards lying around.
M-Systems makes a device called the Disk-on-Chip that I believe can do this. Although it doesn't interface through IDE, it can be made to emulate a hard drive at the BIOS level, using M-Sys's TrueFFS BIOS. Therefore, operating systems (like Windows 98, I believe) that use BIOS calls to access the hard drive can use the Disk-on-Chip as if it were a hard drive. Other operating systems like Windows NT and Linux need the proper drivers / kernel modules to access the disk. The upshot of all of this is that I was able to get my own hacked-up minidistribution of GNU/Linux (which I naturally called Asshat Linux), to boot and run off of the 16-Megabyte Disk-on-Chip in a Visara 1783 thin client machine (formerly running QNX). I believe that the same could be done for Windows 98. If anyone wants info on how I did this, email me or post a reply.
I'm not sure that this is correct. Does the Linux/SDL version compile on non-x86 Linux? Or does it contain some kind of processor-dependent code (eew!)? At any rate, this is still a cool hack, and it's nice to see a game console being actively developed for even after being more or less abandoned by the manufacturer. Maybe future console makers will follow Sega's lead and allow non-commercial development without expensive SDKs or illegal (thanks DMCA!) modchips. This could give them a loyal, long-term secondary fanbase much like the Dreamcast has, to complement the profits from the "console of the month" type. I know that consoles are sold at a loss, but people who buy an older console to play a cool GPL game are likely to pick up a few of the classics and some peripherals as well. Would this be a smart move for console makers?
Neal Stephenson mentioned this in _Cryptonomicon_: at one point in the book, the British spoof a message to appear to be from a German submarine by imitating the "fist" of the sub's communications officer. I have no idea if this kind of thing really happened, but it seems plausible.
True Fantasy Live Online? Is it just me or does the title seem a bit oxymoronic?
The form factor is very small -- go to the hardware section for pics of various cases. People have even modded them into old game console cases and the like. The ones powered by the VIA Eden processor have no processor fan at all. The motherboards have built in sound, video (including TV out) and network. Drop in some RAM (the latest models take DDR2100), a hard drive, a slimline DVD-ROM drive, and a TV tuner card, and you have a combination DVD/DivX/MP3/OOG/VCD/whatever player with music visualization, network streaming, and PVR capabilities.
Unix is a complete joke as far as security.
I don't know what you mean by "Unix", but I'm assuming it includes all POSIX-compatable operating systems (including GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc). In that case, maybe you should look at OpenBSD. It's about as Unix as they come, being BSD-derived and all. Yet it is also one of the most secure general-purpose operating systems out there. In the past 7+ years, OpenBSD has had one remote root hole in the default install (the OpenSSH off-by-one hole, I believe) and a handfull of priviledge escalation holes and the like. Compare this to Solaris or Red Hat Linux, and you'll see that not all Unixes are the same.
a.) It's ancient so most of the flaws are finally worked out.
I agree here, but I think that the point deserves more elaboration. Many of the flaws in Windows and Windows-related products like IIS stem from fundamental design problems, the kind that only massive time and energy spent reworking can fix. For example, the fact that any NetBIOS-enabled Windows machine will send you its password hashes upon request (by getting the machine to retrieve a remote file:// url) has been acknowledged by Microsoft as a pretty much unfixable design flaw. Similarly, the IIS URL parsing mechanism is overly complex, leading to holes like the Unicode ../../ problems. With Unix, most of the fundamental design issues have been worked out or worked around. True, there are still a few fundamental problems; the inflexible permissions system and the fact that many things run as root just to get one specific priviledge (ping, daemons, etc) come to mind. But most of the flaws in Unix programs come from buffer overflows, format string vulnerabilities, unchecked perl open() calls, and the like: little, isolated errors that are easy to make and almost as easy to fix.
b.) Nobody _gives a shit_ about Unix so there aren't a lot of hackers out there targetting it.
This point blatantly contradicts the others. If Unix is so unimportant, why (according to point a) have there been so many flaws found and fixed? Besides that, have you looked at how many companies are into Linux these days? I think that Red Hat, IBM, and HP (just to name a few) would disagree with your statement that "Nobody _gives a shit_ about Unix". With the release of Mac OS X, Unix is now also a popular desktop OS with a significant market share. As for "hackers" (I'll assume you meant crackers) targeting Unix, take a look at any security-related mailing list and you'll see that many Unix-related flaws are researched and found, and often exploited. Crackers and script kiddies do care about Unix (it accounts for over half of all webservers*, for example), and this is why so much effort has gone into and will continue to go into securing Unix.
*Netcraft says that 64.19% of sites run Apache, but does not mention the OS distribution. Since most Apache installs are on Unix systems, and since there are also some non-Apache Unix webservers, I figured that saying 50% was more than reasonable.
Linux (Debian GNU/Linux to be specific) has done virtual consoles for me on PowerPC Macintosh and 680x0 Macintosh -- the key sequence to switch is Open Apple + left or right arrow. (Does anyone remember the days when there was a Closed Apple key too?) I haven't tried this with X, though (my LC3's 68030 is just a little too slow to do graphics). On a side note (for text stuff at least), you could always use the excellent utility screen for an infinite number of virtual terminals.
Oh wait.
So, in short: Yes, the article says counterfit, but the point of the original submitter was that it's all a ruse to limit used CD distribution and run Mom & Pop stores out of buisness.
It's not illegal just to make a copy of something digital. It is, however, illegal (by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, aka DMCA) to circumvent any digital copy prevention system, even for fair use purposes*. This means that if you buy a CD (one with no copy protection), you can legally make a backup for your own purposes. But if you buy a copy-protected pseudo-CD and use a circumvention device to make a backup copy, you are breaking the law. This essentially means that content producers get to limit your use of their product arbitrarily, even when it falls under fair use. As far as time shifting goes, the DTV broadcast flag could be considered a copy-protection system under the DMCA, so in a few years using your HDTiVo to time-shift certain programs very well could be illegal. Sucks, doesn't it?
All of the above applies in the United States only (unless you happen to be a certain Russian programmer). I have no clue what laws other countries have about this kind of stuff.
* There is a provision for fair use in the DMCA, but it has never (?) been invoked and probably has no real effect. This has been discussed elsewhere in this thread.
#include <ianal.h>
And what's the difference? Isn't "what you are thinking" just the composite of all the "electric signals" in your brain? In fact, general readings may be more of an invasion of privacy, due to false positives. As other posters have noted, this system could have serious problems differentiating between homicidal terrorists and people who are just pissed off / paranoid / imagining the worst / very afraid of flying / etc. This could lead to airport security searching / detaining / questioning travalers unnecessarily. Do they have the right to question people for whatever reason? Yes. Is it a pain in the ass? Yes.
That said, I seriously doubt this will actually be implemented. Besides the inevitable public outlash, the technology is unproven, and (probably) expensive too. Hopefully enough people will realize that this is just a flashy technological "solution" that won't really improve security.
I once saw power strips advertised to protect "computers up to 350 MHz". Of course, the more expensive one could go up to 450 MHz. Yes, you have to buy a more expensive power strip for a faster computer. Riiiiiiiiight.
If mandatory government key escrow actually would help prevent terrorism, I think I would be happy to give up that small liberty to save thousands of lives. But will it really help? Of course not! As Tuesday's attacks have shown, terrorists are anything but stupid. They can just snag an old version of PGP from somewhere, along with some steganography software to conceal the very use of encryption. I'm even willing to bet that there's at least one person in every major terrorist organization who could whip up a simple RSA implementation. And picture-based stega is almost impossible to detect. As the saying goes, "Outlaw encryption, and only outlaws will use encryption."
I hate to say this, but the grand jury indictment doesnt suprise me one bit. As much as we hate it, the DMCA is the law. And there's plenty of evidence that Dmitry violated the DMCA. Right now the most important thing is to get Dmitry home to his family right now. If that sets a precedent for the DMCA, that's great, but let's not make Dmitry a martyr at his own expense (yes I realize that's an oxymoron). The DMCA can be challenged later, probably in the Supreme Court. Unfortunatly, this means that there will have to be more and more Sklyarov/Felton/2600-esque cases untill the DMCA is gone for good.
For some reason, this article appeared in the YRO section a few hours before it appeared on the main page. This explains how the 1st post could go to a non-troll, as YRO has a very low viewing population.
Personally, I love browser-desktop environment integration in Windows. Things like being able to type a web address into my taskbar (yes, I know it's possible with a GNOME or KDE applet), being able to use the same window for file browsing or web browsing, treating local and remote files equally, etc. What I don't like is browser-OS integration, because it means that a user-space program is embedded into the operating system, thereby limiting choice and flexability. With Windows I just have to accept this as a downside of browser-desktop environment integration. But with Linux there is no tradeof. Relax, noone is trying to compile Konqueror into the kernel or anything.
---
Ever heard of holding a fortification? In complex water battles this is a huge advantage. And, the bipod can be folded up so the gun becomes (in principle) portable. I wouldn't want to have to hold one with a full tank while pumping and firing and running at the same time, though...
---
I don't know if this is supposed to be a troll or not, but I would just like to note that the /. "lameness" filter, flawed as it may be, is NOT censorship. /. has EVERY RIGHT to choose what it puts on its OWN SITE. This is like submitting a book to a publisher and having them reject it. "Oh no, censorship!" They can use any braindead method they like to choose what they publish. Slashdot is not a seperate third party from your comment and your comment's viewer. They are more like a publisher than a neutral comment hosting service. A content provider choosing what to provide (/. lameness filter) is NOT censorship. A third party choosing what a content provider can provide IS censorship (CYBERSitter, etc.)
---
According to the Hague Treaty, they have the total right to do that. Let's hope it doesn't get ratified.
---
It's already been established that Juno has a pretty fscked up buisness model. And as any physicist will tell you, adding more mass will only increase the momentum of the downward spiral. Free net access is dead, and it's not a viable buisness model anymore. How is one big bulky company going to do any better in this market than two smaller ones?
---
Don't forget DHMO and cheese.
---
Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
We must stop the use of DHMO-producing fuels in rocket engines IMMEDIATELY or we risk furthering the Earth's contamination with this DEADLY chemical!
To clue-impaired moderators: this is a joke.
---
Unfortunatly, they can. Here's why: