Parent poster may sound like a troll, but he has a point - software piracy is widespread in Russia (and was even more so)
That was exactly the point I was trying to make, although it seems to have got lost in the giant whooshing noise: If you're trying to make money from your software then being very popular in a geographic region where piracy is the norm isn't terribly useful. This will no doubt again get modded as a troll by people who haven't lived there and don't know how it works - you pay whoever runs your microraion for net access and it's sort of understood that that comes with access to all the pirated software, music, and video content you can eat. If for some reason what you wan't isn't there, everyone knows someone who can get it for them.
I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.
By "quality" I assume you really mean "qualities", i.e. the combination of its appearance, UI, stability, compatibility, and so on. And that's the problem with FF today, the market is broken up into people sticking with 3.6.x because it's a significant improvement on all of its successors, people on a random spread of versions up to whatever we're on this week (I don't want to post a version number because by the time this post appears it'll have changed), and people who've abandoned it for Chrome, which FF seems to be trying to copy, but badly.
Same goes for Opera, which is extremely popular in Russia and CIS countries and actually beats any other browser. It has like 50% market share in some countries.
Now if only it had 50% market share in countries that have a tradition of people paying for software...
Google has the benefit of size. If Google calls up Cisco and say "please fix this problem that exists in the thousands of routers we buy from you", it'll get fixed. If you or I call up Linksys and say "please fix this problem that exists in this one router I bought from you"... well... don't hold your breath.
So I'm not the only one who read the article as "stay as far away from IPv6 as possible for as long as you can manage"? If an organisation with the size, resources, and clout with vendors that Google has is four years into an estimated eight-year move to IPv6 (as opposed to "we switch over from v4 to v6 next weekend, set your watches"), that's a sign that I don't want to move my organisation to this stuff any time soon. A network upgrade should be, at worst, a somewhat over-long weekend, not a new career path.
Let's all trust the U.S. propaganda machine. It was the Russians.
Damn straight it was the Russians! It's all part of the Russian infiltration, Russian indoctrination, Russian subversion and the international Russian conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Stuxnet is without a doubt the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Russian plot we have ever had to face.
When a major corporation makes one of their previously proprietary crown jewels open source, it's an admission that it's dead.
(And for those who are going to say that WebOS was never close to being one of their crown jewels, what would you call an HP jewel? HP-UX? JetDirect?).
Looking up the old Star Ace definition it's even appropriate:
Imperial Command Enforcement is composed of fanatically loyal elite troops who also function as the Imperial secret police. ICE has priority and authority over other branches when in the field, and answers only to the Emperor^H^H^H^HMAFIAA.
What would be some useful keywords to use, to search, say, eBay for a device such as that?
The answer to that is a bit complicated because it's not an advertised capability of any HDMI switch/repeater but an inevitable consequence of forcing the cost of DRM onto manufacturers. If an HDMI device manufacturer includes HDCP then their product is less interoperable, slower, and less reliable than that of a manufacturer who doesn't, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lost sales. The economically rational thing for a manufacturer to do then is to not include HDCP (or more generally to pretend to do DRM but to not actually do so in practice). This doesn't work too well if you're a US or European manufacturer within lawyer range, but if you're a fly-by-night manufacturer in Shenzhen who won't be around (at least under the same name/shell company) in a week then it's perfectly OK to do this. So the one I have is a standard off-the-shelf HDMI switch made with standard parts used in endless numbers of devices globally that simply doesn't bother turning on HDCP in the output (I've looked at the data coming over the internal control bus, it clears the HDCP-out bits on the HDMI switch chips).
So unfortunately there's no easy way to specifically locate something that does this. In my case the search criteria were "the cheapest HDMI switch from the closest place that's open at 5pm on a Sunday", and the HDCP stripping was a pleasant extra. One starting point would be Alibaba, but be warned that that's drinking from a firehose (a search for 'HDMI' gives 75,000 hits).
I have a $35 no-name chinese-made HDMI repeater that strips HDCP from anything you feed to it. Quite useful for watching BluRay output on my old non-HDCP TV. Doing it with an FPGA is a nice trick, but doing it with off-the-shelf parts selling for $35 retail is more convenient:-).
One of the three members of the trio who ran WordPerfect corporation, Pete Petersen, wrote a detailed book about the WordPerfect saga called Almost Perfect. Go read it now, it's a fascinating tale of a once-great company so busy shooting itself in the foot that it hasn't noticed that it's going down the tubes. WordPerfect Corp was doing such a good job of committing suicide that it really didn't need any help from Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
Can't CA's be revoked? Or only certificates? I was thinking, though could be wrong, that DigiNotar could've revoked... something... before generating a new CA (or going broke).
Uhh... how long do you want the answer to this one to be? In effect trusted root certs can't be revoked, for other certs they can, in theory, be revoked, but the revocation system is so broken that you can't really rely on it, which is why the Mozilla guys used the somewhat unusual approach described above (and other browser vendors took equivalent action, hardcoding in the certs they wanted gone rather than relying on CRLs and OCSP).
I kinda thought PKI was pretty solid, so your earlier comment kinda burst my bubble. What's the alternative?
That would require an even longer reply... a short summary is to do what other anti-malware folks like the anti-spam industry do and take a look at what you're dealing with (e.g. what's on the web site, does it look suspicious, is it hosted in Kazahkstan but claiming to be Amazon, that sort of thing) rather than blindly trusting a site full of drive-by download malware that's run by the Russian mafia just because it has a certificate.
I see DigiNotar and DigiCert Authorities in Firefox's Certificate Manager. Should I be concerned about these?
Since the situation with DigiNotar and others isn't, by definition, allowed to happen in PKI, there's no way of dealing with it when it does. So the only way to handle it is for Mozilla to create fake certs for those CAs and add them to the FF cert store, effectively cache-poisoning themselves so that the fake certs, which aren't trusted, get used by FF instead of the real ones. Since they're not trusted, you get a verification failure when you try and use them.
(See my earlier comment in the other thread about PKI being treated as something to roll your eyes at and/or joke about by security experts).
For years now there have been some very vocal "security experts" who repeatedly trumpet how certificates and digital signatures somehow solve all security woes.
In practice you'll find that very few "security experts" have any faith in PKI. It's more something you roll your eyes at or joke about than take seriously. The only people who "trumpet" certificates are (a) academics teaching about certificates based on an abstract theoretical model of how they work (which hardly counts as "trumpeting" them) and (b) people selling PKI products and services.
Lots of European countries have very young MPs in national parliaments. The Minister of Taxes in Denmark is 26. The youngest MP in Denmark is 20.
Pitt the Even Younger has those guys beat by more than a decade. Mind you he didn't actually win the Dunny-on-the-Wold byelection, so technically he never ended up as an MP...
If that were the case, then sales figures for portable optical drives would back it up. Many people buy MacBook Airs and many more have bought Netbooks that don't have optical drives. Mac Minis are coming out without optical drives too. Did sales drop? Are people returning their purchased laptops, "ultra books", Netbooks, Mac minis, ipads, etc by the million?
Exactly. I have an Ultrabook (well, it wasn't called that when I got it two years ago, but Intel have labelled it for me now, as well as tripling the price over what I paid for it) without an optical drive, and I've needed one exactly once, ever, to install Visual Studio (I copied it to a USB key from the install CD and used that instead). All an optical drive does on a lightweight laptop is add a lot of extra weight and bulk, for something I'd never, ever use.
don't need my windows to 'shake' as I drag them across.
Amen to that. Or explode into fragments when I close them and spend the next several seconds preventing me from doing anything as crudely-animated 3D blocks fly all over the screen. I felt like I was in a 14-year-old's video game rather than the interface for an OS. OK, so you've figured out (some of) OpenGL. Have a biscuit. Now can I have a practical interface to the OS?
Oh, I wouldn't say that. It's helped export a pile of US legislation and policy that no other government would ever voluntarily accept into the countries that wanted the "free trade" agreements. So it has had some positive effect.
The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture [...] It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.
Of course it had to done by reverse-engineering an Alpha, because there's no way that a mere chinaman could possibly create their own CPU. I mean just think of the implications! That'd practically be admitting that they can think!
(Hint: Loongson/Godson is MIPS32/MIPS64, and MIPS64 != Alpha. The entire claim seems to be based on this piece of nonsense, which concludes that the Loongson/Godson MIPS device is actually an Alpha because it has, hold on for it, "128-bit system bus, I$ and D$ 8KB, four-issues superscalar, two integer and two floating-point", and a few others. Ah yes, how could we have missed such conclusive evidence).
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Parent poster may sound like a troll, but he has a point - software piracy is widespread in Russia (and was even more so)
That was exactly the point I was trying to make, although it seems to have got lost in the giant whooshing noise: If you're trying to make money from your software then being very popular in a geographic region where piracy is the norm isn't terribly useful. This will no doubt again get modded as a troll by people who haven't lived there and don't know how it works - you pay whoever runs your microraion for net access and it's sort of understood that that comes with access to all the pirated software, music, and video content you can eat. If for some reason what you wan't isn't there, everyone knows someone who can get it for them.
I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.
By "quality" I assume you really mean "qualities", i.e. the combination of its appearance, UI, stability, compatibility, and so on. And that's the problem with FF today, the market is broken up into people sticking with 3.6.x because it's a significant improvement on all of its successors, people on a random spread of versions up to whatever we're on this week (I don't want to post a version number because by the time this post appears it'll have changed), and people who've abandoned it for Chrome, which FF seems to be trying to copy, but badly.
Same goes for Opera, which is extremely popular in Russia and CIS countries and actually beats any other browser. It has like 50% market share in some countries.
Now if only it had 50% market share in countries that have a tradition of people paying for software...
Google has the benefit of size. If Google calls up Cisco and say "please fix this problem that exists in the thousands of routers we buy from you", it'll get fixed. If you or I call up Linksys and say "please fix this problem that exists in this one router I bought from you"... well... don't hold your breath.
So I'm not the only one who read the article as "stay as far away from IPv6 as possible for as long as you can manage"? If an organisation with the size, resources, and clout with vendors that Google has is four years into an estimated eight-year move to IPv6 (as opposed to "we switch over from v4 to v6 next weekend, set your watches"), that's a sign that I don't want to move my organisation to this stuff any time soon. A network upgrade should be, at worst, a somewhat over-long weekend, not a new career path.
Let's all trust the U.S. propaganda machine. It was the Russians.
Damn straight it was the Russians! It's all part of the Russian infiltration, Russian indoctrination, Russian subversion and the international Russian conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Stuxnet is without a doubt the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Russian plot we have ever had to face.
Personally, I now have more faith in the CA system than before.
Personally, I now have more faith in our financial system than before.
When a rogue CA was spotted, within days it had was revoked [...]
When Lehman Brothers screwed up, within days they had collapsed [...]
That's a pretty damn good response, and caused the collapse of the company and a government investigation
That's a pretty damn good response, and caused the collapse of the company and a government investigation
The point of the CA system is trust. At some point you have to trust someone [...]
The point of the financial system is trust. At some point you have to trust someone [...]
When a major corporation makes one of their previously proprietary crown jewels open source, it's an admission that it's dead.
(And for those who are going to say that WebOS was never close to being one of their crown jewels, what would you call an HP jewel? HP-UX? JetDirect?).
... for helping them achieve this?
Was this motto designed by people who support, or oppose, the proposal? How is equating it to learning latin going to attract students?
... Command Enforcement"?
Looking up the old Star Ace definition it's even appropriate:
Imperial Command Enforcement is composed of fanatically loyal elite troops who also function as the Imperial secret police. ICE has priority and authority over other branches when in the field, and answers only to the Emperor^H^H^H^HMAFIAA.
What would be some useful keywords to use, to search, say, eBay for a device such as that?
The answer to that is a bit complicated because it's not an advertised capability of any HDMI switch/repeater but an inevitable consequence of forcing the cost of DRM onto manufacturers. If an HDMI device manufacturer includes HDCP then their product is less interoperable, slower, and less reliable than that of a manufacturer who doesn't, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lost sales. The economically rational thing for a manufacturer to do then is to not include HDCP (or more generally to pretend to do DRM but to not actually do so in practice). This doesn't work too well if you're a US or European manufacturer within lawyer range, but if you're a fly-by-night manufacturer in Shenzhen who won't be around (at least under the same name/shell company) in a week then it's perfectly OK to do this. So the one I have is a standard off-the-shelf HDMI switch made with standard parts used in endless numbers of devices globally that simply doesn't bother turning on HDCP in the output (I've looked at the data coming over the internal control bus, it clears the HDCP-out bits on the HDMI switch chips).
So unfortunately there's no easy way to specifically locate something that does this. In my case the search criteria were "the cheapest HDMI switch from the closest place that's open at 5pm on a Sunday", and the HDCP stripping was a pleasant extra. One starting point would be Alibaba, but be warned that that's drinking from a firehose (a search for 'HDMI' gives 75,000 hits).
.
I have a $35 no-name chinese-made HDMI repeater that strips HDCP from anything you feed to it. Quite useful for watching BluRay output on my old non-HDCP TV. Doing it with an FPGA is a nice trick, but doing it with off-the-shelf parts selling for $35 retail is more convenient :-).
One of the three members of the trio who ran WordPerfect corporation, Pete Petersen, wrote a detailed book about the WordPerfect saga called Almost Perfect. Go read it now, it's a fascinating tale of a once-great company so busy shooting itself in the foot that it hasn't noticed that it's going down the tubes. WordPerfect Corp was doing such a good job of committing suicide that it really didn't need any help from Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
Canonical would be moving away from CouchDB due to a few unresolvable issues
Of course they'd want to drop CouchDB. It's clearly not web scale.
Can't CA's be revoked? Or only certificates? I was thinking, though could be wrong, that DigiNotar could've revoked ... something ... before generating a new CA (or going broke).
Uhh... how long do you want the answer to this one to be? In effect trusted root certs can't be revoked, for other certs they can, in theory, be revoked, but the revocation system is so broken that you can't really rely on it, which is why the Mozilla guys used the somewhat unusual approach described above (and other browser vendors took equivalent action, hardcoding in the certs they wanted gone rather than relying on CRLs and OCSP).
I kinda thought PKI was pretty solid, so your earlier comment kinda burst my bubble. What's the alternative?
That would require an even longer reply... a short summary is to do what other anti-malware folks like the anti-spam industry do and take a look at what you're dealing with (e.g. what's on the web site, does it look suspicious, is it hosted in Kazahkstan but claiming to be Amazon, that sort of thing) rather than blindly trusting a site full of drive-by download malware that's run by the Russian mafia just because it has a certificate.
I see DigiNotar and DigiCert Authorities in Firefox's Certificate Manager. Should I be concerned about these?
Since the situation with DigiNotar and others isn't, by definition, allowed to happen in PKI, there's no way of dealing with it when it does. So the only way to handle it is for Mozilla to create fake certs for those CAs and add them to the FF cert store, effectively cache-poisoning themselves so that the fake certs, which aren't trusted, get used by FF instead of the real ones. Since they're not trusted, you get a verification failure when you try and use them.
(See my earlier comment in the other thread about PKI being treated as something to roll your eyes at and/or joke about by security experts).
Onze visie op de eigen slagkracht van de overheid.
Ewige Schlangenkraft! Ewige Overheid!
For years now there have been some very vocal "security experts" who repeatedly trumpet how certificates and digital signatures somehow solve all security woes.
In practice you'll find that very few "security experts" have any faith in PKI. It's more something you roll your eyes at or joke about than take seriously. The only people who "trumpet" certificates are (a) academics teaching about certificates based on an abstract theoretical model of how they work (which hardly counts as "trumpeting" them) and (b) people selling PKI products and services.
Yes, but that is because the voter accidentally brutally cut his own head off while coming his hair... Or was that election official? I forget.
You're thinking of Alan Beresford B'Stard, the Minister of Administrative Affairs.
Lots of European countries have very young MPs in national parliaments. The Minister of Taxes in Denmark is 26. The youngest MP in Denmark is 20.
Pitt the Even Younger has those guys beat by more than a decade. Mind you he didn't actually win the Dunny-on-the-Wold byelection, so technically he never ended up as an MP...
If that were the case, then sales figures for portable optical drives would back it up. Many people buy MacBook Airs and many more have bought Netbooks that don't have optical drives. Mac Minis are coming out without optical drives too. Did sales drop? Are people returning their purchased laptops, "ultra books", Netbooks, Mac minis, ipads, etc by the million?
Exactly. I have an Ultrabook (well, it wasn't called that when I got it two years ago, but Intel have labelled it for me now, as well as tripling the price over what I paid for it) without an optical drive, and I've needed one exactly once, ever, to install Visual Studio (I copied it to a USB key from the install CD and used that instead). All an optical drive does on a lightweight laptop is add a lot of extra weight and bulk, for something I'd never, ever use.
In a life-or-death situation, I'd probably let the keyboard take the bullet, but only because I still have a stockpile of 7 more.
What was your address again?
don't need my windows to 'shake' as I drag them across.
Amen to that. Or explode into fragments when I close them and spend the next several seconds preventing me from doing anything as crudely-animated 3D blocks fly all over the screen. I felt like I was in a 14-year-old's video game rather than the interface for an OS. OK, so you've figured out (some of) OpenGL. Have a biscuit. Now can I have a practical interface to the OS?
No good has come from so-called "Free Trade".
Oh, I wouldn't say that. It's helped export a pile of US legislation and policy that no other government would ever voluntarily accept into the countries that wanted the "free trade" agreements. So it has had some positive effect.
.
I was actually going to quote the same line:
The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture [...] It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.
Of course it had to done by reverse-engineering an Alpha, because there's no way that a mere chinaman could possibly create their own CPU. I mean just think of the implications! That'd practically be admitting that they can think!
(Hint: Loongson/Godson is MIPS32/MIPS64, and MIPS64 != Alpha. The entire claim seems to be based on this piece of nonsense, which concludes that the Loongson/Godson MIPS device is actually an Alpha because it has, hold on for it, "128-bit system bus, I$ and D$ 8KB, four-issues superscalar, two integer and two floating-point", and a few others. Ah yes, how could we have missed such conclusive evidence).