Besides the fact of your positing one in assumption, I see no difference in principle.
Ummm... okay ?
If revealing one's SSN (or the address to one's house, or one's middle name) is a foolish act that decreases security, it stands to reason that keeping one's SSN obscured is an effective security measure.
Nobody is suggesting that revealing your SSN is a good idea, but if that is all you are doing, you are probably not secure. So you are careful about your SSN, but at the same time you have a facebook account where you reveal you name, address, birthday, all of your family members, where you have worked before etc, I could probably get just about anything on you.
Say you come in to a store I work in, and my store (like of lot of them do) prints out you full credit card number on the store copy of the receipt. So I go to facebook (or myspace, or even your personal blog if you happen to have one) and I find out your birth date. Now I can call Visa's 800 number, enter you credit card number and your birth date and have full access to your Visa account. I can order new cards, request a higher credit limit or even additional cards, change the address you statements are mailed to etc.
I can use this information to approach other financial institutions and apply for further credit. If someone wants to confirm that I am you, what are they going to ask me? Your mother's maiden name? Or maybe they have other security questions, like the name of your high school or a former employer. Well, that's all available from the resume you have up on your blog, or your facebook account. Or whatever.
The point is, "security through obscurity" isn't a bad idea if it's just one of several things you do to protect yourself. But if you are saying "I'm okay cause I don't reveal my SSN" but meanwhile are hemorrhaging personal info by giving your phone number, name etc to save a few pennies every time you make a purchase, or putting bills or other documents in the trash without shredding them, or basically not taking pains to keep your private info private all the time, then you security model is not effective.
Most of you have scoffed for years at anyone using security-through-obscurity in any security model at any level, yet by making fun of people who have been exploited for revealing account information in public you are clearly upholding the principle
Not revealing your social security number isn't "security through obscurity" any more than not leaving the combination of the safe on a post-it note stuck to the safe door is.
An example of "security through obscurity" would be "nobody knows about this money I have hidden in my sock drawer, so it must be safe."
99% of the general public doesn't get the distinction and probably never will. "Hacker" has gone the way of other fine old words
So I guess we should all just start calling our monitors the "computer" and the box that actually contains the computer the "hard drive," since 99% of the general public thinks that's correct? Oh, and I'm trying to download a program in Excel, when what I really mean is create a spreadsheet?
No thanks. I think I'll just continue to educate people who don't know any better as to what these words really mean, which can only lead to a better understanding of these mysterious machines they've had thrust upon them. There is a difference between language evolving, and the haphazard use of jargon, simply because no one has taught the person using it the proper word to use in a given circumstance. Simply giving in and letting people babble on nonsensically only leads to confusion.
That is, they either need to choose to offer zero warranties on damage resulting from a user's actions, OR they can put a lot of effort into supporting and encouraging developers
Isn't that already the case? Most warranties cover only manufacturing defects, and only for a limited period of time. Damage that results from a user's actions - whether it be hacking it to add functionality, or simply spilling a coffee on it - are generally not covered. The trick is determining whether it was the user's actions that caused the hardware to fail, or a defect in the hardware itself.
This is where buyers need to protect themselves by researching the experience of others when dealing with a given company over warranty issues, and factor that in to their purchasing decision. If a company looks for any excuse to deny warranty coverage, it should be avoided. Too many people only consider the cost at the till, and ignore the TCO including the level of after sale support.
Negroponte, however, appears to be trying to limit consumer choices and stifle competition.
Ah, yes. That's really what this is all about, isn't it. Negroponte is a threat to US corporations, who want nothing more than to prepare poor children in developing countries for a life of enslavement to US corporations and consumption of their products. How dare he attempt to provide them with a tool that merely educates them, without corralling them into the MS/Intel silo, like their North American counterparts.
I have the same reaction to these types of stories. I'm not worried about Apple "killing" Linux, or Linux "killing" Windows, or whatever. I want choices. And I feel that I have that now.
OSX and the current crop of Apple hardware has made the "mac" a more viable choice than it was back in the 90s when I was selling Performas, and downplaying the diminishing selection of software in the Mac aisles to my customers. Now, I urge friends and co-workers to consider Macs when making new computer purchases.
I used to duel-boot, because there were too many things that were just too much trouble to get working in Linux. These days, Linux distros are far easier to install, easier to use (even things like wifi are no longer any more complicated to set up than they are with Windows, at least in my experience) and every few months another example of "you can't do that in Linux" falls by the wayside.
And again, if I want to run an app that simply does not have a FOSS equivalent, I still have the choice to pay for a Windows license and the app. Or to do without. It's up to me. But I don't have to do that just to do basic things like write a letter, send an email or read Slashdot.
As I've said in the past in response to these types of articles, the success of FOSS is not measured in market share, but rather how vibrant the community of developers and users is. As long as there are hackers out there with the same itch I have and a willingness to scratch it, it will only be a matter of time before that "Windows-only" app will have either a Linux equivalent, or some kind of work-around. From my perspective we're doing just fine.
Don't let these marketing weasels define what success means for us.
Well, there you go. I hit "submit," refreshed, and was immediately rewarded with an answer to my question. Not bad for a Sunday morning.;^)
So your take seems to be that there is better community support, so to speak, with the deb based distros, which results in saner dependency descriptions and fewer problems with upgrades and such. Fair enough. I won't contest the dedication of Debian developers. It's not my distro of choice, but their reputation speaks volumes. I've experienced the occasional dependency glitch over the years, but assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that these issues were not unique to RPM. If apt is a 100%-always-just-works-without-exception solution, I will concede it may be superior to RPM.
But the occasional dependency glitch (which can usually be solved by hunting down the missing package, installing it then trying again) isn't enough to make me switch distros, and hardly qualifies as a "nightmare scenario," as described by the article's author. Is RPM bashing - as I've seen elsewhere in this thread, in addition to the article - just good clean fun on the part of people who are (rightly so) proud of their favorite distro, or have people really encountered serious issues with RPM? I've been using Mandriva (nee Mandrake) for years, and before that Red Hat, and I've never experienced anything worse than mild irritation.
Most of the distros I've used over the years used RPM for package management, and I don't understand the criticism against it either. This line in the article really stuck out:
I have never been too impressed with RPM-based distributions, but to be fair, most of this came from nightmare scenarios with Mandriva and SuSE.
Nightmare scenarios? With which versions of Mandriva and Suse? I've never experienced anything so extreme. Sure, you have to set up your repositories. Easyurpmi makes that... easy. After that, it's pretty much sudo urpmi to your heart's content. Not all that different from apt get . If someone could enlighten me on what these problems with RPM are, I would be very interested in hearing about them.
I agree with your remarks about the abuse of the moderation system. That's the reason I metamoderate.
I also buy my software, music, movies etc. Thousands of dollars worth, every year.
That's not to say I won't use bittorrent to grab an episode of CSI that I missed, or get up to use the bathroom during a commercial, or tell a joke I heard on Seinfeld, hum Hey Jude, scan a birthday card I like to use as desktop wallpaper, figure out how to play the guitar part from American X by BRMC then teach my neice to play it, rip my DVDs and CDs so I can enjoy them on any device I own without paying for a new copy for each device, or give a recipe I got from a cook book to my mother because she asked for it.
You are correct, the concept of Intellectual Property exists, and there are a lot of people who would like us to believe that a song is no different than a bicycle, and that any redistribution - even making a "slow jam mix tape" for your favorite girl - should be met with a crippling lawsuite.
Most of those people are not artists.
As for "I don't believe in Imaginary Property," well... that doesn't sound any worse than "I don't believe copyright should ever expire." Neither of these positions lives up to their end of the copyright bargain.
Yep. One of the best-natured dogs I know is a Bullmastif. As a bonus, this dog also sees no reason to go on a barking jag just because someone is at the front door, unlike most small, yappy dogs I have encountered.
From my experience, nurture plays at least as great a role as nature when it comes to the temperament of a dog.
if you're trying to download it through a corporate firewall it's damn near impossible
Okay, so you're downloading Linux distributions at work? If this is something you are doing for your company, you should be able to have some influence on the firewall, perhaps have a machine in the DMZ to facilitate these types of downloads. If you are just leaching the company's bandwidth to download distros for you own use, I can't work up much sympathy.
In either case, another alternative is to run an ssh server on you machine at home, assuming you have broadband. Connect to it from work, run the torrent client on your machine at home, then transfer the image file to work through the ssh tunnel. Again, if your company needs these torrents, you should be able to get compensated for your bandwidth. Who knows, you might be able to get work to pay for your ISP's bill.
the annoying tendency for Linux distributions and mirrors to no longer put DVD ISOs on their FTP or web sites and instead point to a damn torrent.
Yeah, I'm getting pretty annoyed with these distros making all this software available to me for free in every sense of the word and then choosing to distribute it to me - for free - in a manner that reduces their bandwidth costs, which aren't free.
Why don't you try ordering a boxed set of the distro you are trying to download from behind your corporate firewall and pay for it with your company credit card. They could use the money to pay for some bandwidth and maybe get those ftp servers back up.
You are right, and I don't take issue with anything you've said. It comes down to good judges doing a good job, and ensuring subpoenas are not issued in cases where a well-connected plaintiff is merely attempting to out a whistle-blower, or discredit a critic by digging up dirt that isn't relevant to the issue the blogger is criticizing.
Don't say "intellectual property" when you mean "data."
Why not? If a song or a movie or a piece of code can be property, then the songs and movies and code I paid for is my property.
The media companies don't want you to think of it as yours, they want you to think only they can own intellectual property. But if I paid for it it's mine, and I will do with it as I see fit - within the confines of copyright law. Vista seems designed to prevent you from doing this, which is why I advise against using it to store your property.
Moreover, I own the copyright on every photo, song, piece of video and piece of code that I author. Hundreds of gigabytes of data, all of it my IP - if you want to define IP strictly as that which I hold the copyright for. Every email I've written, every blog entry I've made. If I record my own version She Loves You, Michael Jackson still owns the copyright on the song, but I own the copyright on that recording.
And I don't need Vista or Zune applying Microsoft DRM to my property.
And how exactly does one do this with Vista? The default security in Vista makes the Users folder unreadable from another machine.
That sounds like a problem. I don't know. I got tired of worrying about where my data was, and which machines could read it or write it. We've got Windows, Linux and Mac machines, and I wanted everyone to be able to read from and write to the directories that held our media files.
So I run a Linux file server and use Samba to communicate with the Windows machines. I use RAID 5, back my photos up to CDs and the rest to an external HD. That way if a box goes down, the worst case is I'll have to reinstall the OS and all the apps.
My advise to the person running Vista would be to use their old windows box and a Ubuntu CD to set up a dedicated server to store their files. Don't trust your intellectual property to an OS that doesn't respect your IP rights.
I've also read about recovery CDs that entirely reformat the computer's hard drive, taking My Documents with it.
Popping the hard drive in to one of those USB enclosures and copying your data files onto another machine before running the recovery CD looks after that. The summary says the exploit just corrupts Windows' kernel files. Assuming it doesn't do anything further to make your data unreadable, there is no reason to lose any data.
You've got it backwards. All stations - Terrestrial and over-the-air - pay royalties to the copyright holder of the song itself. These royalties are paid to organizations like ASCAP and BMI, who then distribute the money to the songwriter. The royalties this article discusses are collected by SoundExchange on behalf of the copyright holder of the "performance" of the song (ie the recording the radio station plays). This copyright is generally held by the record company.
Terrestrial stations have so far been exempt from paying the performance royalties, but it looks like that may change.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what would a teenager know about music?
Yup, sounds like he doesn't know a thing about the subject.
Then again, I'm over 40, so I guess my opinion doesn't count either.
If you feel so sure of it, post your credit card number and we'll see
Ummm
Nobody is suggesting that revealing your SSN is a good idea, but if that is all you are doing, you are probably not secure. So you are careful about your SSN, but at the same time you have a facebook account where you reveal you name, address, birthday, all of your family members, where you have worked before etc, I could probably get just about anything on you.
Say you come in to a store I work in, and my store (like of lot of them do) prints out you full credit card number on the store copy of the receipt. So I go to facebook (or myspace, or even your personal blog if you happen to have one) and I find out your birth date. Now I can call Visa's 800 number, enter you credit card number and your birth date and have full access to your Visa account. I can order new cards, request a higher credit limit or even additional cards, change the address you statements are mailed to etc.
I can use this information to approach other financial institutions and apply for further credit. If someone wants to confirm that I am you, what are they going to ask me? Your mother's maiden name? Or maybe they have other security questions, like the name of your high school or a former employer. Well, that's all available from the resume you have up on your blog, or your facebook account. Or whatever.
The point is, "security through obscurity" isn't a bad idea if it's just one of several things you do to protect yourself. But if you are saying "I'm okay cause I don't reveal my SSN" but meanwhile are hemorrhaging personal info by giving your phone number, name etc to save a few pennies every time you make a purchase, or putting bills or other documents in the trash without shredding them, or basically not taking pains to keep your private info private all the time, then you security model is not effective.
Not revealing your social security number isn't "security through obscurity" any more than not leaving the combination of the safe on a post-it note stuck to the safe door is.
An example of "security through obscurity" would be "nobody knows about this money I have hidden in my sock drawer, so it must be safe."
Gee, did I just fall for a troll?
And not even original
So I guess we should all just start calling our monitors the "computer" and the box that actually contains the computer the "hard drive," since 99% of the general public thinks that's correct? Oh, and I'm trying to download a program in Excel, when what I really mean is create a spreadsheet?
No thanks. I think I'll just continue to educate people who don't know any better as to what these words really mean, which can only lead to a better understanding of these mysterious machines they've had thrust upon them. There is a difference between language evolving, and the haphazard use of jargon, simply because no one has taught the person using it the proper word to use in a given circumstance. Simply giving in and letting people babble on nonsensically only leads to confusion.
Isn't that already the case? Most warranties cover only manufacturing defects, and only for a limited period of time. Damage that results from a user's actions - whether it be hacking it to add functionality, or simply spilling a coffee on it - are generally not covered. The trick is determining whether it was the user's actions that caused the hardware to fail, or a defect in the hardware itself.
This is where buyers need to protect themselves by researching the experience of others when dealing with a given company over warranty issues, and factor that in to their purchasing decision. If a company looks for any excuse to deny warranty coverage, it should be avoided. Too many people only consider the cost at the till, and ignore the TCO including the level of after sale support.
Ah, yes. That's really what this is all about, isn't it. Negroponte is a threat to US corporations, who want nothing more than to prepare poor children in developing countries for a life of enslavement to US corporations and consumption of their products. How dare he attempt to provide them with a tool that merely educates them, without corralling them into the MS/Intel silo, like their North American counterparts.
He's probably a communist, too.
I have the same reaction to these types of stories. I'm not worried about Apple "killing" Linux, or Linux "killing" Windows, or whatever. I want choices. And I feel that I have that now.
OSX and the current crop of Apple hardware has made the "mac" a more viable choice than it was back in the 90s when I was selling Performas, and downplaying the diminishing selection of software in the Mac aisles to my customers. Now, I urge friends and co-workers to consider Macs when making new computer purchases.
I used to duel-boot, because there were too many things that were just too much trouble to get working in Linux. These days, Linux distros are far easier to install, easier to use (even things like wifi are no longer any more complicated to set up than they are with Windows, at least in my experience) and every few months another example of "you can't do that in Linux" falls by the wayside.
And again, if I want to run an app that simply does not have a FOSS equivalent, I still have the choice to pay for a Windows license and the app. Or to do without. It's up to me. But I don't have to do that just to do basic things like write a letter, send an email or read Slashdot.
As I've said in the past in response to these types of articles, the success of FOSS is not measured in market share, but rather how vibrant the community of developers and users is. As long as there are hackers out there with the same itch I have and a willingness to scratch it, it will only be a matter of time before that "Windows-only" app will have either a Linux equivalent, or some kind of work-around. From my perspective we're doing just fine.
Don't let these marketing weasels define what success means for us.
Yup. Just turtles, all the way down
Thank you for telling us without using profanity, or threatening to beat anybody up
Not with this, but if they came up with a "religious brain-washing" vaccine, I'd give it some serious thought.
Well, there you go. I hit "submit," refreshed, and was immediately rewarded with an answer to my question. Not bad for a Sunday morning. ;^)
So your take seems to be that there is better community support, so to speak, with the deb based distros, which results in saner dependency descriptions and fewer problems with upgrades and such. Fair enough. I won't contest the dedication of Debian developers. It's not my distro of choice, but their reputation speaks volumes. I've experienced the occasional dependency glitch over the years, but assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that these issues were not unique to RPM. If apt is a 100%-always-just-works-without-exception solution, I will concede it may be superior to RPM.
But the occasional dependency glitch (which can usually be solved by hunting down the missing package, installing it then trying again) isn't enough to make me switch distros, and hardly qualifies as a "nightmare scenario," as described by the article's author. Is RPM bashing - as I've seen elsewhere in this thread, in addition to the article - just good clean fun on the part of people who are (rightly so) proud of their favorite distro, or have people really encountered serious issues with RPM? I've been using Mandriva (nee Mandrake) for years, and before that Red Hat, and I've never experienced anything worse than mild irritation.
Nightmare scenarios? With which versions of Mandriva and Suse? I've never experienced anything so extreme. Sure, you have to set up your repositories. Easyurpmi makes that
I agree with your remarks about the abuse of the moderation system. That's the reason I metamoderate.
... that doesn't sound any worse than "I don't believe copyright should ever expire." Neither of these positions lives up to their end of the copyright bargain.
I also buy my software, music, movies etc. Thousands of dollars worth, every year.
That's not to say I won't use bittorrent to grab an episode of CSI that I missed, or get up to use the bathroom during a commercial, or tell a joke I heard on Seinfeld, hum Hey Jude, scan a birthday card I like to use as desktop wallpaper, figure out how to play the guitar part from American X by BRMC then teach my neice to play it, rip my DVDs and CDs so I can enjoy them on any device I own without paying for a new copy for each device, or give a recipe I got from a cook book to my mother because she asked for it.
You are correct, the concept of Intellectual Property exists, and there are a lot of people who would like us to believe that a song is no different than a bicycle, and that any redistribution - even making a "slow jam mix tape" for your favorite girl - should be met with a crippling lawsuite.
Most of those people are not artists.
As for "I don't believe in Imaginary Property," well
But the RIAA are the ones filing the lawsuits.
Yep. One of the best-natured dogs I know is a Bullmastif. As a bonus, this dog also sees no reason to go on a barking jag just because someone is at the front door, unlike most small, yappy dogs I have encountered.
From my experience, nurture plays at least as great a role as nature when it comes to the temperament of a dog.
Okay, so you're downloading Linux distributions at work? If this is something you are doing for your company, you should be able to have some influence on the firewall, perhaps have a machine in the DMZ to facilitate these types of downloads. If you are just leaching the company's bandwidth to download distros for you own use, I can't work up much sympathy.
In either case, another alternative is to run an ssh server on you machine at home, assuming you have broadband. Connect to it from work, run the torrent client on your machine at home, then transfer the image file to work through the ssh tunnel. Again, if your company needs these torrents, you should be able to get compensated for your bandwidth. Who knows, you might be able to get work to pay for your ISP's bill.
Yeah, I'm getting pretty annoyed with these distros making all this software available to me for free in every sense of the word and then choosing to distribute it to me - for free - in a manner that reduces their bandwidth costs, which aren't free.
Why don't you try ordering a boxed set of the distro you are trying to download from behind your corporate firewall and pay for it with your company credit card. They could use the money to pay for some bandwidth and maybe get those ftp servers back up.
Just be thankful he didn't spell it "two"
That's okay, someone else will be. Maybe they should hire Slashdot
I don't think there is anything in it denying anonymity either, but it's not my constitution.
The default should always be to protect privacy/anonymity, unless there is evidence that a crime has been committed.
You are right, and I don't take issue with anything you've said. It comes down to good judges doing a good job, and ensuring subpoenas are not issued in cases where a well-connected plaintiff is merely attempting to out a whistle-blower, or discredit a critic by digging up dirt that isn't relevant to the issue the blogger is criticizing.
Why not? If a song or a movie or a piece of code can be property, then the songs and movies and code I paid for is my property.
The media companies don't want you to think of it as yours, they want you to think only they can own intellectual property. But if I paid for it it's mine, and I will do with it as I see fit - within the confines of copyright law. Vista seems designed to prevent you from doing this, which is why I advise against using it to store your property.
Moreover, I own the copyright on every photo, song, piece of video and piece of code that I author. Hundreds of gigabytes of data, all of it my IP - if you want to define IP strictly as that which I hold the copyright for. Every email I've written, every blog entry I've made. If I record my own version She Loves You, Michael Jackson still owns the copyright on the song, but I own the copyright on that recording.
And I don't need Vista or Zune applying Microsoft DRM to my property.
That sounds like a problem. I don't know. I got tired of worrying about where my data was, and which machines could read it or write it. We've got Windows, Linux and Mac machines, and I wanted everyone to be able to read from and write to the directories that held our media files.
So I run a Linux file server and use Samba to communicate with the Windows machines. I use RAID 5, back my photos up to CDs and the rest to an external HD. That way if a box goes down, the worst case is I'll have to reinstall the OS and all the apps.
My advise to the person running Vista would be to use their old windows box and a Ubuntu CD to set up a dedicated server to store their files. Don't trust your intellectual property to an OS that doesn't respect your IP rights.
Popping the hard drive in to one of those USB enclosures and copying your data files onto another machine before running the recovery CD looks after that. The summary says the exploit just corrupts Windows' kernel files. Assuming it doesn't do anything further to make your data unreadable, there is no reason to lose any data.
You've got it backwards. All stations - Terrestrial and over-the-air - pay royalties to the copyright holder of the song itself. These royalties are paid to organizations like ASCAP and BMI, who then distribute the money to the songwriter. The royalties this article discusses are collected by SoundExchange on behalf of the copyright holder of the "performance" of the song (ie the recording the radio station plays). This copyright is generally held by the record company.
Terrestrial stations have so far been exempt from paying the performance royalties, but it looks like that may change.