Well, I'm not good at this, but I believe Windows has quite a lot of funky services open once the firewall is deactivated.
And they are quite hard to switch off or configure to react to localhost only, at least when you are not a sysadmin who spends his time figuring things out, but just a user trying to get work done.
Using the "enemy's weapon" does not always invalidate a defense. After all no-one is hurt by the use of the enemies weapons in the GPL, maybe with the exceptions of those whose power of abuse is limited by the existance of the GPL.
I'm sorry, you can't show the kid playing with the barbie doll in the movie since you are stealing the design and looks of barbie, hence our intellectual property.
Ah yes, and the color the room is painted in is trademarked by our subsidary.
Well, as for myself, on my PC the operating systems installed are OT(old testament) and NT(new testament).
While I like how the OT is handling faults from a theoretical point of view, in practice I mostly use the NT, since applications keep on running and work together well.
You have only one vote in a representative democracy, and usually it comes down to voting for one of two parties, so it is a yes or no.
This means your vote will often be decided by just one issue - all the other "minor" issues can be resolved by the politicians at their whim. Software patents failed the first round in Europe because it came to the attention of lawmakers ^^ that some people did not think it was a minor issue. It also helped that it turned out that the eurocracy was unable to formulate rules for software patents that were unequivocal. Lawmakers hate to pass laws which have bugs, they enjoy control.
Siemens was always good at patents, and they understand fully well their power and when they can be abused or ignored. However, I believe until told otherwise that Siemens actually did good research in their history.
One of Freenet's primary goals may be resistance to a powerful, organized opposition, but what keeps such an opposition to simply label anyone running a freenet node as a criminal? And it would be at least partially true, because the intent of freenet as you stated it is to provide a white noise background to forbidden activity. Basically all of freenet becomes a cluster which can be prosecuted as a whole.
If a network such as freenet at least strives to maintain some kind of group accountability and identity by restricting which nodes talk to others, then some cliques will be able to claim a legitimate use of freenet. In addition, prosecuting someone over a network with less contacts eventually means to have to chase him over more hops, which requires more effort even if only a legal effort.
I also think that it will still be possible to get a message from one clique of freenet to another clique by following links established by commonplace activity like the exchange of free music and software; in fact, if you really wanted to stay clandestine, you'd have to engage in this activity to stay connected at all.
My suggestion that the quality of files transferred needs to be checked also is aimed at network leeches, who only download but never emit. One would randomly check that the host one is connected to actually is willing to cede that information.
I am aware that such a network would trade bandwidth for safety, but it seems to be the right choice considering the stated goals.
Since this topic creeps up again, let me share what I wrote some time ago; I kept it hidden in the hope that it would mature, but it did not by itself;-) Its fancy name is: Tractatus Arcanae
I'm going to suggest a combination of measures to improve the stealth and integrity of peer-to-peer communication.
Preface:
The exchange of personal information and forbidden secrets is facing the nosyness of governments and intellectual property 0wners. Allow me to add a sidenote here:
I believe there is such a thing as intellectual property, but that it only exists as long as you actually keep the information secret.
Steps in securing a P2P network are already implemented by Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/). The steps are encryption of traffic and obfuscating the origin of a file to the extent that the author of the file looses control over the file and stays anonymous, while the file is duplicated across the network in the cache of the nodes.
This leaves a bad feeling, because one might end up storing content that one does not condone, like bad pornography. Fortunately, a network such as Freenet has a property which puts the extra traffic and routing to good use: Computation of network flow.
As Advogato explains (http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html), network flow has the property that in a network containing "good" information, say good music, and "bad information"(everything else..), the flow between the good part of the network and the bad part is restricted by the throughput rate of the "confused" notes, who don't know the difference between good and bad information.
This means that if the nodes, instead of keeping the information anonymous, instead specialize on knowing about and storing such information as is liked and considered good by the user, then nodes that "like each other" will automatically cluster. However, many P2P systems are very generous in giving away information, something that is very dangerous in a police state or when the traffic is otherwise under scrutinity. It does not help that traffic is encrypted since the source of the file, or at least the identity of the last one to pass the file is known. Therefore, restricting the flow of information only to between nodes that trust each other therefore is essential to the operation of a network that can hide the identity of at least some users of the network.
How is the trust relationship between nodes with good information established? This closes the circle with the aliens I mentioned in the beginning: if you trade information with them, you will initially have to consider them untrustworthy, and you will only want to give information if you get information back.
Therefore the mechanism to establish trust is not unlike a conversation: You talk with someone and when have something in common to talk about, like soccer or baseball, you will talk more with the person. In a peer-to-peer network, this can work by requesting a information(a file) from the unknown, and if you get back good information, which you can verify either because you have the file already, or because you got the hash from 3rd parties, then you add this node to the list of nodes that can be trusted and increase the trust rating. Initially, you will have to trade public information to determine common interests, information like a copy of a GPL licensed software, or a list of prime numbers(that is, if you talk to aliens). When exchanging new information, the quality of the information would have to be manually evaluated, just like two hackers who don't know each other will evaluate their knowledge for e-quality. Gradually, the trust level of the conversation between the nodes will rise and the the nodes will concentrate on handling traffic between trusted nodes.
I am aware that these methods require a lot of traffic for transferring some new information, but these are necessary
I found Ubuntu's install quite powerful, as it needed to be to handle my weird setup. But using LILO instead of grub is an option that was too well hidden for me, I wasn't aware grub is unwilling to boot from a former dos partition, I had to juggle things till grub booted to LILO to get to th' olde OS..
In your case, it probably should have made a backup of the boot sector, to allow restoring it. In my case, it detected the other old win OS, so Ubuntu tries to do dual boot, at least sometimes.
I wasn't even aware you could choose OS from bios.. It is not an option for people with just one HD, is it?
This comment reminds me of the idiocy of shareholders suing the company they own because the stock of the company dropped. Which is completely silly, since the stock is exactly what is supposed to represent ALL claims of shareholders vs. the company.
Maybe this is the fault of CEOs and the board, who get paid huge sums of money and so make it forgotten. But the board is not the company.
Now what has this to do with you, CaymanIslandCarpedie, complaining that Novell gets a first bite, not the shareholders? Well, quite simply, the company just acts as a front for the shareholders. It is the shareholders job to vote into office a board and thus a CEO who acts in their interest and does not bring them into the situation that they lose their assets.
Of course, small shareholders get my sympathy because their votes don't actually count, but they should have known what they are doing and did not need to hold the stock..
This is not meant as an insult to the parent poster, I'm sure you are just trying to protect the little guy..
All male citizens please report to your next testicle measurement center, where it will be weighed and its volume measured by dipping it in a bowl of ice-cold water.
As a female citizen, it is you duty to record and report all your intercourse, so that male wankers cannot pretend to have had intercourse with you.
- unveil the mystery of the pioneer anomaly - build anti-anti-anti-anti-gravity device - place device in orbit and point at Earth - blow Earth to pieces, creating another Asteroid belt - profit! - Ow, wait..
Even if you can split off the option to have maintenance and upgrade into a separate value, it does not mean it costs the same - in particular, you will always have to pay for that option if you buy proprietary software(and you might not get returns for it - Windows support in the past ended 5 years after a release, or the company might go broke).
With free software, you don't have to pay for the option to have support, although you have the option to do so if you wish to be professional.
This means the article does actually not say that free software has the same price, but that the stripped price of paid for software is much lower and comes closer to "free".
I also suspect that the two options the author of the article mentions, maintenance and a cheaper upgrade, actually overlap, because the company will just sell you the upgrade instead of doing special maintenance. This means these two options add up to something with lower value.
A nice list of principles - you don't have to add 0) Anonymity because that is covered in 1) while 2)3)4) would allow you to have different handles.
Of course, it is never going to work to have an identity control system that does not reveal your identity. Your identity is revealed by your IP anyway.
I can see the PDF quite well in FireFox with just adobe installed, but my PC is pretty old, and it takes ages for the pdf to display all the pretty images in the PDF, and when I scroll down, it starts to redraw all again.
I was pretty grateful for the "karma-whoring" plain text copy of the pdf today.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not good at this, but I believe Windows has quite a lot of funky services open once the firewall is deactivated.
And they are quite hard to switch off or configure to react to localhost only, at least when you are not a sysadmin who spends his time figuring things out, but just a user trying to get work done.
Using the "enemy's weapon" does not always invalidate a defense. After all no-one is hurt by the use of the enemies weapons in the GPL, maybe with the exceptions of those whose power of abuse is limited by the existance of the GPL.
You didn't notice that the entire building is actually the radius of a nuclear blast away, did you? Smart of them to move it around ..
I'm sorry, you can't show the kid playing with the barbie doll in the movie since you are stealing the design and looks of barbie, hence our intellectual property.
Ah yes, and the color the room is painted in is trademarked by our subsidary.
Well, as for myself, on my PC the operating systems installed are OT(old testament) and NT(new testament).
While I like how the OT is handling faults from a theoretical point of view, in practice I mostly use the NT, since applications keep on running and work together well.
You have only one vote in a representative democracy, and usually it comes down to voting for one of two parties, so it is a yes or no.
This means your vote will often be decided by just one issue - all the other "minor" issues can be resolved by the politicians at their whim. Software patents failed the first round in Europe because it came to the attention of lawmakers ^^ that some people did not think it was a minor issue. It also helped that it turned out that the eurocracy was unable to formulate rules for software patents that were unequivocal. Lawmakers hate to pass laws which have bugs, they enjoy control.
Siemens was always good at patents, and they understand fully well their power and when they can be abused or ignored. However, I believe until told otherwise that Siemens actually did good research in their history.
One of Freenet's primary goals may be resistance to a powerful, organized opposition, but what keeps such an opposition to simply label anyone running a freenet node as a criminal? And it would be at least partially true, because the intent of freenet as you stated it is to provide a white noise background to forbidden activity. Basically all of freenet becomes a cluster which can be prosecuted as a whole.
If a network such as freenet at least strives to maintain some kind of group accountability and identity by restricting which nodes talk to others, then some cliques will be able to claim a legitimate use of freenet. In addition, prosecuting someone over a network with less contacts eventually means to have to chase him over more hops, which requires more effort even if only a legal effort.
I also think that it will still be possible to get a message from one clique of freenet to another clique by following links established by commonplace activity like the exchange of free music and software; in fact, if you really wanted to stay clandestine, you'd have to engage in this activity to stay connected at all.
My suggestion that the quality of files transferred needs to be checked also is aimed at network leeches, who only download but never emit. One would randomly check that the host one is connected to actually is willing to cede that information.
I am aware that such a network would trade bandwidth for safety, but it seems to be the right choice considering the stated goals.
The find should further stuff up modern astrologers - they still have not got the hang of Uranus.
Well, I hadn't noticed their probes yet, I didn't think someone would go the distance to get to know me inside outSince this topic creeps up again, let me share what I wrote some time ago; I kept it hidden in the hope that it would mature, but it did not by itself ;-) Its fancy name is:
Tractatus Arcanae
I'm going to suggest a combination of measures to improve the stealth and integrity of peer-to-peer communication.
Preface:
The exchange of personal information and forbidden secrets is facing the nosyness of governments and intellectual property 0wners. Allow me to add a sidenote here:
I believe there is such a thing as intellectual property, but that it only exists as long as you actually keep the information secret.
Steps in securing a P2P network are already implemented by Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/).
The steps are encryption of traffic and obfuscating the origin of a file to the extent that the author of the file looses control over the file and stays anonymous, while the file is duplicated across the network in the cache of the nodes.
This leaves a bad feeling, because one might end up storing content that one does not condone, like bad pornography. Fortunately, a network such as Freenet has a property which puts the extra traffic and routing to good use:
Computation of network flow.
As Advogato explains (http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html), network flow has the property that in a network containing "good" information, say good music, and "bad information"(everything else..), the flow between the good part of the network and the bad part is restricted by the throughput rate of the "confused" notes, who don't know the difference between good and bad information.
This means that if the nodes, instead of keeping the information anonymous, instead specialize on knowing about and storing such information as is liked and considered good by the user, then nodes that "like each other" will automatically cluster. However, many P2P systems are very generous in giving away information, something that is very dangerous in a police state or when the traffic is otherwise under scrutinity. It does not help that traffic is encrypted since the source of the file, or at least the identity of the last one to pass the file is known. Therefore, restricting the flow of information only to between nodes that trust each other therefore is essential to the operation of a network that can hide the identity of at least some users of the network.
How is the trust relationship between nodes with good information established? This closes the circle with the aliens I mentioned in the beginning: if you trade information with them, you will initially have to consider them untrustworthy, and you will only want to give information if you get information back.
Therefore the mechanism to establish trust is not unlike a conversation: You talk with someone and when have something in common to talk about, like soccer or baseball, you will talk more with the person. In a peer-to-peer network, this can work by requesting a information(a file) from the unknown, and if you get back good information, which you can verify either because you have the file already, or because you got the hash from 3rd parties, then you add this node to the list of nodes that can be trusted and increase the trust rating. Initially, you will have to trade public information to determine common interests, information like a copy of a GPL licensed software, or a list of prime numbers(that is, if you talk to aliens). When exchanging new information, the quality of the information would have to be manually evaluated, just like two hackers who don't know each other will evaluate their knowledge for e-quality. Gradually, the trust level of the conversation between the nodes will rise and the the nodes will concentrate on handling traffic between trusted nodes.
I am aware that these methods require a lot of traffic for transferring some new information, but these are necessary
I found Ubuntu's install quite powerful, as it needed to be to handle my weird setup. But using LILO instead of grub is an option that was too well hidden for me, I wasn't aware grub is unwilling to boot from a former dos partition, I had to juggle things till grub booted to LILO to get to th' olde OS..
In your case, it probably should have made a backup of the boot sector, to allow restoring it. In my case, it detected the other old win OS, so Ubuntu tries to do dual boot, at least sometimes.
I wasn't even aware you could choose OS from bios.. It is not an option for people with just one HD, is it?
eh-heh ;-)
Not the extreme left or right?
This comment reminds me of the idiocy of shareholders suing the company they own because the stock of the company dropped. Which is completely silly, since the stock is exactly what is supposed to represent ALL claims of shareholders vs. the company.
..
..
Maybe this is the fault of CEOs and the board, who get paid huge sums of money and so make it forgotten. But the board is not the company.
Now what has this to do with you, CaymanIslandCarpedie, complaining that Novell gets a first bite, not the shareholders? Well, quite simply, the company just acts as a front for the shareholders. It is the shareholders job to vote into office a board and thus a CEO who acts in their interest and does not bring them into the situation that they lose their assets.
Of course, small shareholders get my sympathy because their votes don't actually count, but they should have known what they are doing and did not need to hold the stock
This is not meant as an insult to the parent poster, I'm sure you are just trying to protect the little guy
All male citizens please report to your next testicle measurement center, where it will be weighed and its volume measured by dipping it in a bowl of ice-cold water.
As a female citizen, it is you duty to record and report all your intercourse, so that male wankers cannot pretend to have had intercourse with you.
Thank you, citizen.
Well, since we are into tech names in this thread:
How about naming the planet(-ino)
"foo" and its moon "bar" ?
because cleary it is Far Out and Beyond All Recovery
- unveil the mystery of the pioneer anomaly ..
- build anti-anti-anti-anti-gravity device
- place device in orbit and point at Earth
- blow Earth to pieces, creating another Asteroid belt
- profit!
- Ow, wait
Even if you can split off the option to have maintenance and upgrade into a separate value, it does not mean it costs the same - in particular, you will always have to pay for that option if you buy proprietary software(and you might not get returns for it - Windows support in the past ended 5 years after a release, or the company might go broke).
With free software, you don't have to pay for the option to have support, although you have the option to do so if you wish to be professional.
This means the article does actually not say that free software has the same price, but that the stripped price of paid for software is much lower and comes closer to "free".
I also suspect that the two options the author of the article mentions, maintenance and a cheaper upgrade, actually overlap, because the company will just sell you the upgrade instead of doing special maintenance. This means these two options add up to something with lower value.
A nice list of principles - you don't have to add 0) Anonymity because that is covered in 1) while 2)3)4) would allow you to have different handles.
Of course, it is never going to work to have an identity control system that does not reveal your identity. Your identity is revealed by your IP anyway.
Microsoft Frowned at for Smiley Patent
Now you frown, till we patent thatI can see the PDF quite well in FireFox with just adobe installed, but my PC is pretty old, and it takes ages for the pdf to display all the pretty images in the PDF, and when I scroll down, it starts to redraw all again.
I was pretty grateful for the "karma-whoring" plain text copy of the pdf today.
I don't quite understand why they need to keep someone in jail if they can't even charge him with something ..
I mean anything solid enough to make the police want to seek his files so hard also should allow them to charge him.
Why not hook up another sense to the brain implant instead of random impulses?
:-)
How about sonar or ultraviolet vision? Or hooking up an internet connection
The answer is: No, my empty purse seriously impedes PC sales.
The problem is there is nothing that stops software providers from forcing you to have an upgrade which is a downgrade. Or worse ..