I stopped using Freenet because it gobbles up all my memory and washes it down with all my bandwidth. Yes, I know you can set the JVM to use less RAM and configure freenet to use less bandwidth, but then performance gets even worse. Also, the UI is terrible.
Now, tor! There's a service that lets people access a world of content easily and anonymously and allows for hidden services, which are much more reliable and lower latency than freesites.
The iPhone/Apple dig had nothing to do with the article and was normal slashdot FUD. Why does everyone keep going after Apple for possible bricking of iPhones?
People keep going after Apple because most people believe that Apple expended extra effort to ensure that the firmware update would brick modified iPhones. The moral continuum looks something like this:
malice and punitive-----------------modifications--------------------modifications encouraged & action towards modders--------------not supported--------------------dev tools provided
If you don't want the iPhone and Apple's product model, get an open source phone. Yes, this is the right thing to do. It's unfortunate that all of the FOSS/Linux-based phones suck right now compared to closed offerings. I don't think it's going to get much better until someone steps in and starts Mark Shuttleworthing things.
I got into an argument at work about living in one of the more socialist countries (Full healthcare, full welfare, full retirement, etc) and then I bring up income tax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg) and they start bitching about how much the USA already takes, who in their right mind would let someone take MORE.
Yes, we all need to get t-shirts printed that say TAXES = SOCIAL PROGRAMS. Eventually, people will get it.
Exactly. When I first heard about this, I thought it was ridiculous that tax payer dollars would go towards paying so people could keep watching TV. I could see a little justification that the FCC is forcing the antequation of millions if not billions of dollars worth of televisions, and the people using bunny ears are the least likely to be able to afford to replace their televisions.
Setting aside for a moment whatever ethical responsibilities the FCC may have, the $40 coupon is ridiculous because it will only serve to raise the price of converter boxes by $40. It reminds me of that video about walmart that got some publicity a while ago. Walmart was paying their employees very low wages and telling them, as a group, to get on welfare. Again setting aside the discussion of whether welfare is a good program, that particular behavior is abuse of the system and is not what welfare is intended to do.
"Making converter boxes more affordable" is the only justification I've read for the $40 coupon. When I see converter boxes available for prices that are not inflated by $40, I will reconsider, but for now the $40 coupons don't seem to do anything worthwhile.
I feel that any expenses endured due to the sale of the spectrum ought to be covered by the sale of the spectrum. If the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum can't cover the costs of selling the 700 mhz spectrum, then we shouldn't be selling it.
I feel the same way, in that the government ought to be efficient with its money, since when it needs more it just dips into my pocket. However, the government has important functions other than turning a profit for the people who own it. Managed properly, the 700MHz spectrum could be a huge benefit to our nation!
It would be best if you bugged your vendor to get off their arses and *support their software*. Which is what you presumably pay them for in the first place...
Actually it's been several years since I worked there, but I agree: a good vendor ought to support their software. If the stories I've heard are true, the people working in the lab after I left did try to get the vendor to responsibly support the software, but the vendor refused. The vendor decided to continue with the elitist, "we don't think you're doing things the proper way so we're going to intentionally break your applications," attitude. So the lab admins switched from Redhat to OS X.
Oh me too. But if I'm forced to choose between threads and Matlab, I'll take my Matlab. Especially if Matlab is the whole reason the computer is there in the first place.
If you're running Matlab on Linux, you'd better pick one version of one Linux distribution and make sure the version of Matlab you're using supports it. If you change distros or get updates, expect problems, like crashes when you multiply [1,0]*[1;0].
If you're a free software advocate, you could blame this on the mathworks for not providing the source to Matlab so that it can be endlessly tweaked and rebuilt to keep up with FOSS development.
If you've got any common sense, you can blame this on OSS developers who do things like making binary incompatible changes to libraries and doing nothing to make sure old programs don't accidentally load the new, incompatible libs. It doesn't make one iota of difference if it's "wrong" for a program to access errno directly! There are programs that depend on being able to do it, and taking away "extern int errno" breaks those programs (including Matlab).
You may be depressed about electronic voting machines that slant the tallies or how little your one vote matters. I agree. Your one vote is not likely to change the outcome of any particular election, but voting makes you more credible when you try to convince other people to agree (and vote) with you. If you can convince just one other person to believe that the things you think are important are actually important, you will have doubled your voting power.
The agreement will allow rentals of Fox's latest DVD releases by downloading a copy from the online iTunes store for a limited time, the Financial Times said.
One can't rent digital data because an integral part of renting something is returning it at the end of the rental period. Some people get this, and some people don't: http://www.bash.org/?104052 (warning: language).
Yes, I know they mean DRM. This is slashdot, so nobody has to be reminded that DRM is impossible.
Sheesh. You need to put some commas in your big numbers or at least give them context.
For the non-mathematically-inclined, you could assign about 55 IPv6 addresses to each instance of the something-???-profit joke without exhausting the address space.
I thought that was always the (almost) explicit goal of copyleft. If we can't get rid of the draconian copyright laws, then we must subvert them to impotence.
I disagree. Perhaps getting rid of draconian copyright was the original goal of copyleft, but I think that's since changed. Here's the definition of Free software from gnu.org:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The problem is that if authors have no control over who copies their program and/or source code, other developers can make non-trivial and useful modifications to those programs and redistribute them in binary form only. This (from a practical standpoint) prevents downstream users from exercising freedoms 1 and 3.
The GPL currently prevents this negative consequence by taking advantage of copyright law to limit the actions that recipients of that software may take, whereas BSD-style licenses do not prevent this. So the GPL gives less freedom to users than BSD-style licenses, even though using the GPL leads to a better result for everyone.
Living in a world without copyright would mean giving up the benefits of the GPL, and that stings, but copyright is sufficiently messed up that it's a sacrifice worth making.
Thats right, if BSD copy and pasted all of those GPLed drivers and stripped the license and labled it BSD I wouldn't be heartbroken at all.
Hear hear!
I support the GPL over BSD-style licenses because I don't like the idea of Free code being used to improve proprietary software, but that's something I'm willing to live with if copyright is abolished, which is a more important goal.
Forget about consumer products for now. How about: When will they deliver what they promised in the first place?
From the article: Roscheisen said the manufacturing process the company has developed will enable it to eventually deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt, which would be significantly cheaper than fossil fuel sources of power generation.
I do it largely because I have client data on my computer and I would be liable if I took it in for repairs and someone stole the data.
You might be interested in Ubuntu 7.10. If you choose the text-based install, you have the option of encrypting your entire hard drive, save the part that contains the boot loader, the kernel, and the initrd. The installer makes this very easy to set up.
Of course, the encryption could be broken within your lifetime depending on how technology advances, but it might give you some extra peace of mind.
Adding an anti-feature to a product is crippling, regardless if the anti-feature is written into the specification or not.
I'm not positive, but I think you have the definition of an anti-feature backwards. At first, I thought an anti-feature meant a bad feature, or a feature that hurts users. However, note the following from the linked article:
[The availability of RAW format images from a camera] is an example of an anti-feature. Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort.
After reading this, I think an anti-feature in this context would be a lack of DRM. For example, if you are offered a movie at a premium price because it has no DRM, that's an anti-feature. The publisher didn't have to do anything to provide a movie with no DRM. In fact, the publisher had to go through extra effort to take away the benefits of DRM-less media in order to create the inferior DRM'd product.
Another example of an anti-feature would be a full version of a shareware program that doesn't contain nag screens. The lack of nag screens is good, and it's an anti-feature because it's a fundamental or unavoidable aspect of the system. When you create a new program like "Hello world", it doesn't automatically draw a nag screen when you run it. That's something you have to work to add.
Golly. It sounds like you think people play Slashdot like some kind of giant MMORPG, grinding for points. But that couldn't be true. The purpose of comment moderation is to encourage people to make posts that are useful to the community and enrich the news, and everyone knows that computer systems are only used for their intended purpose.
Yes. The home broadband Internet situation in Australia is atrocious. For example, Optus customers have low monthly transfer caps and pay $150/GB downloaded or uploaded past that: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15837/1085/ . Just google for australia broadband for more examples of how bad the service is in that country.
For a while, Telstra had apparently partially hidden its terrible business practices by hosting certain file downloads such as OpenOffice (so that they would not be counted towards monthly transfer caps). They are no longer doing this, once again exposing customers to huge fees and poor service.
So no, an ISP has no obligation to host file downloads and customers are free to download OpenOffice elsewhere--kind of.
Nobody has proven that 3DES, AES, or other symmetric cyphers are secure, either. But in many decades of study, not attacks better than 2^111 operations have been found in 3DES. The only encryption alogirthm wiht provabal rproperties is the oine time pad. So do you not trust any other crypto?
No, I don't absolutely trust any crypto. As one of the parent posts said, not having proof that a proposition is false does not constitute proof that that proposition is true.
That said, I still use encryption whenever possible. It makes messages much harder to read than plaintext. I don't think anyone in particular wants to read my email, but it's important to me to promote an Internet environment where encryption is "just what's done." So that when a person has a genuine need for encryption, that person's messages won't stick out. You should use encryption too!
Most mathemeticians would tell you RSA is very unlikely to be broken through a magical, as-yet-undiscovered polynomial-time factoring solution.
Mathematicians sometimes make mistakes. Fermat conjectured that all Fermat numbers were primes based on the first five in the sequence. Oops.
Quantum computers that can operate on 512+ bit numbers are decades away, even for the NSA.
I still use RSA and I'm not afraid of the NSA, but I see nothing backing up your statement and no reason to be any more confident in RSA for right now.
A goot rootkit leaves no trace either: it installs through exploit of choice, copies passphrases and private key over the network, and removes itself. Certainly writing something like that is a lot less resource intensive than trying to crask RSA (or any other strong cryptosystem).
I agree. The NSA obviously needs a few good rootkits lying around just in case. Now, if you were the NSA, would you rather have a good rootkit or a good crack for RSA?
How can you possibly prove that finding the prime factorization of a large number cannot be done quickly and easily? You can't prove a negative.
I think what you mean is: "It's impossible to prove that some general task (say, quickly computing the prime factorization of a large number) cannot be accomplished. There ought to be some slick computer program that can do it. Maybe we just haven't thought of it yet. And not having thought of something is not a proof that that something does not exist."
You are right. We haven't thought of a way to quickly compute the prime factorization of a large number. However, you are wrong that one can't decisively "prove a negative." For a famous example of someone "proving a negative", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
As far as I know, nobody has proved that finding the prime factorization of a large number (or more directly, computing Euler's totient function of a large number) cannot be done quickly and easily. Until I see a proof that this is hard, I will not call attacking RSA "dumb."
As for your second point, the advantage to breaking RSA over installing a rootkit or keystroke logger is that breaking RSA leaves no trace.
Am I the only one that notices that Apple's response to every problem is a swift "let's delete this topic and pretend the problem doesn't exist"?.. Seems like bad business practise to me.
This happens all the time on corporate forums. The really infuriating part is that the admins also delete posts advocating a move to another forum without censorship. The only way to take discussion to sane place is to find topics before they've been deleted, see who's interested enough to post in those threads, and PM them with an invitation to a different forum.
It was also probably not worth bothering the NSA with. I wouldn't take this to mean much of anything about how quickly the Feds can crack PGP.
It's more than that. If the people at the NSA know how to break RSA and they do it to help the police in a case like this, then everyone will instantly drop RSA and switch to another algorithm that the NSA maybe hasn't figured out how to break yet.
Considering what a tremendous advantage it would be for the NSA if the rest of the world kept using a flawed cryptosystem, I don't think the NSA would ever break RSA to convict any one person, no matter what that person did.
A friend of mine in the air force is in Iraq right now. As part of an "anti-freeware" policy, they won't let him load Linux on his laptop or even visit ubuntu.com in his web browser. Are things different in the army?
Thank you for clarifying the details. Facts are always important. Still, whether or not compatibility was the intended result, the flood of NE2000-compatible NICs is evidence that two devices doing the same kind of job but from different manufacturers can use the same driver.
Your less direct point about a standardized hardware model preventing efficiency gains is an important one. I think compatibility is more important than performance in this case, but others are of course free to disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
I stopped using Freenet because it gobbles up all my memory and washes it down with all my bandwidth. Yes, I know you can set the JVM to use less RAM and configure freenet to use less bandwidth, but then performance gets even worse. Also, the UI is terrible.
Now, tor! There's a service that lets people access a world of content easily and anonymously and allows for hidden services, which are much more reliable and lower latency than freesites.
I truly believe that HD-DVD was generally a better win for consumers.
Why is that?
Why does everyone keep going after Apple for possible bricking of iPhones?
People keep going after Apple because most people believe that Apple expended extra effort to ensure that the firmware update would brick modified iPhones. The moral continuum looks something like this: If you don't want the iPhone and Apple's product model, get an open source phone.
Yes, this is the right thing to do. It's unfortunate that all of the FOSS/Linux-based phones suck right now compared to closed offerings. I don't think it's going to get much better until someone steps in and starts Mark Shuttleworthing things.
I got into an argument at work about living in one of the more socialist countries (Full healthcare, full welfare, full retirement, etc) and then I bring up income tax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg) and they start bitching about how much the USA already takes, who in their right mind would let someone take MORE.
Yes, we all need to get t-shirts printed that say TAXES = SOCIAL PROGRAMS. Eventually, people will get it.
Exactly. When I first heard about this, I thought it was ridiculous that tax payer dollars would go towards paying so people could keep watching TV. I could see a little justification that the FCC is forcing the antequation of millions if not billions of dollars worth of televisions, and the people using bunny ears are the least likely to be able to afford to replace their televisions.
Setting aside for a moment whatever ethical responsibilities the FCC may have, the $40 coupon is ridiculous because it will only serve to raise the price of converter boxes by $40. It reminds me of that video about walmart that got some publicity a while ago. Walmart was paying their employees very low wages and telling them, as a group, to get on welfare. Again setting aside the discussion of whether welfare is a good program, that particular behavior is abuse of the system and is not what welfare is intended to do.
"Making converter boxes more affordable" is the only justification I've read for the $40 coupon. When I see converter boxes available for prices that are not inflated by $40, I will reconsider, but for now the $40 coupons don't seem to do anything worthwhile.
I feel that any expenses endured due to the sale of the spectrum ought to be covered by the sale of the spectrum. If the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum can't cover the costs of selling the 700 mhz spectrum, then we shouldn't be selling it.
I feel the same way, in that the government ought to be efficient with its money, since when it needs more it just dips into my pocket. However, the government has important functions other than turning a profit for the people who own it. Managed properly, the 700MHz spectrum could be a huge benefit to our nation!
Actually it's been several years since I worked there, but I agree: a good vendor ought to support their software. If the stories I've heard are true, the people working in the lab after I left did try to get the vendor to responsibly support the software, but the vendor refused. The vendor decided to continue with the elitist, "we don't think you're doing things the proper way so we're going to intentionally break your applications," attitude. So the lab admins switched from Redhat to OS X.
Oh me too. But if I'm forced to choose between threads and Matlab, I'll take my Matlab. Especially if Matlab is the whole reason the computer is there in the first place.
If you're running Matlab on Linux, you'd better pick one version of one Linux distribution and make sure the version of Matlab you're using supports it. If you change distros or get updates, expect problems, like crashes when you multiply [1,0]*[1;0].
If you're a free software advocate, you could blame this on the mathworks for not providing the source to Matlab so that it can be endlessly tweaked and rebuilt to keep up with FOSS development.
If you've got any common sense, you can blame this on OSS developers who do things like making binary incompatible changes to libraries and doing nothing to make sure old programs don't accidentally load the new, incompatible libs. It doesn't make one iota of difference if it's "wrong" for a program to access errno directly! There are programs that depend on being able to do it, and taking away "extern int errno" breaks those programs (including Matlab).
Then there was that whole NPTL mess. *sigh*
The people's car? I wonder what people will call it in Germany. Maybe some sort of Wagon? For the Volks?
Vote!
You may be depressed about electronic voting machines that slant the tallies or how little your one vote matters. I agree. Your one vote is not likely to change the outcome of any particular election, but voting makes you more credible when you try to convince other people to agree (and vote) with you. If you can convince just one other person to believe that the things you think are important are actually important, you will have doubled your voting power.
The agreement will allow rentals of Fox's latest DVD releases by downloading a copy from the online iTunes store for a limited time, the Financial Times said.
One can't rent digital data because an integral part of renting something is returning it at the end of the rental period. Some people get this, and some people don't: http://www.bash.org/?104052 (warning: language).
Yes, I know they mean DRM. This is slashdot, so nobody has to be reminded that DRM is impossible.
6143569056076952107294386875907695350
Sheesh. You need to put some commas in your big numbers or at least give them context.
For the non-mathematically-inclined, you could assign about 55 IPv6 addresses to each instance of the something-???-profit joke without exhausting the address space.
I disagree. Perhaps getting rid of draconian copyright was the original goal of copyleft, but I think that's since changed. Here's the definition of Free software from gnu.org:
The problem is that if authors have no control over who copies their program and/or source code, other developers can make non-trivial and useful modifications to those programs and redistribute them in binary form only. This (from a practical standpoint) prevents downstream users from exercising freedoms 1 and 3.
The GPL currently prevents this negative consequence by taking advantage of copyright law to limit the actions that recipients of that software may take, whereas BSD-style licenses do not prevent this. So the GPL gives less freedom to users than BSD-style licenses, even though using the GPL leads to a better result for everyone.
Living in a world without copyright would mean giving up the benefits of the GPL, and that stings, but copyright is sufficiently messed up that it's a sacrifice worth making.
Thats right, if BSD copy and pasted all of those GPLed drivers and stripped the license and labled it BSD I wouldn't be heartbroken at all.
Hear hear!
I support the GPL over BSD-style licenses because I don't like the idea of Free code being used to improve proprietary software, but that's something I'm willing to live with if copyright is abolished, which is a more important goal.
Forget about consumer products for now. How about: When will they deliver what they promised in the first place?
From the article: Roscheisen said the manufacturing process the company has developed will enable it to eventually deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt, which would be significantly cheaper than fossil fuel sources of power generation.
I do it largely because I have client data on my computer and I would be liable if I took it in for repairs and someone stole the data.
You might be interested in Ubuntu 7.10. If you choose the text-based install, you have the option of encrypting your entire hard drive, save the part that contains the boot loader, the kernel, and the initrd. The installer makes this very easy to set up.
Of course, the encryption could be broken within your lifetime depending on how technology advances, but it might give you some extra peace of mind.
Adding an anti-feature to a product is crippling, regardless if the anti-feature is written into the specification or not.
I'm not positive, but I think you have the definition of an anti-feature backwards. At first, I thought an anti-feature meant a bad feature, or a feature that hurts users. However, note the following from the linked article:
[The availability of RAW format images from a camera] is an example of an anti-feature. Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort.
After reading this, I think an anti-feature in this context would be a lack of DRM. For example, if you are offered a movie at a premium price because it has no DRM, that's an anti-feature. The publisher didn't have to do anything to provide a movie with no DRM. In fact, the publisher had to go through extra effort to take away the benefits of DRM-less media in order to create the inferior DRM'd product.
Another example of an anti-feature would be a full version of a shareware program that doesn't contain nag screens. The lack of nag screens is good, and it's an anti-feature because it's a fundamental or unavoidable aspect of the system. When you create a new program like "Hello world", it doesn't automatically draw a nag screen when you run it. That's something you have to work to add.
Golly. It sounds like you think people play Slashdot like some kind of giant MMORPG, grinding for points. But that couldn't be true. The purpose of comment moderation is to encourage people to make posts that are useful to the community and enrich the news, and everyone knows that computer systems are only used for their intended purpose.
Or am i missing something key here?
Yes. The home broadband Internet situation in Australia is atrocious. For example, Optus customers have low monthly transfer caps and pay $150/GB downloaded or uploaded past that: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15837/1085/ . Just google for australia broadband for more examples of how bad the service is in that country.
For a while, Telstra had apparently partially hidden its terrible business practices by hosting certain file downloads such as OpenOffice (so that they would not be counted towards monthly transfer caps). They are no longer doing this, once again exposing customers to huge fees and poor service.
So no, an ISP has no obligation to host file downloads and customers are free to download OpenOffice elsewhere--kind of.
Nobody has proven that 3DES, AES, or other symmetric cyphers are secure, either. But in many decades of study, not attacks better than 2^111 operations have been found in 3DES. The only encryption alogirthm wiht provabal rproperties is the oine time pad. So do you not trust any other crypto?
No, I don't absolutely trust any crypto. As one of the parent posts said, not having proof that a proposition is false does not constitute proof that that proposition is true.
That said, I still use encryption whenever possible. It makes messages much harder to read than plaintext. I don't think anyone in particular wants to read my email, but it's important to me to promote an Internet environment where encryption is "just what's done." So that when a person has a genuine need for encryption, that person's messages won't stick out. You should use encryption too!
Most mathemeticians would tell you RSA is very unlikely to be broken through a magical, as-yet-undiscovered polynomial-time factoring solution.
Mathematicians sometimes make mistakes. Fermat conjectured that all Fermat numbers were primes based on the first five in the sequence. Oops.
Quantum computers that can operate on 512+ bit numbers are decades away, even for the NSA.
I still use RSA and I'm not afraid of the NSA, but I see nothing backing up your statement and no reason to be any more confident in RSA for right now.
A goot rootkit leaves no trace either: it installs through exploit of choice, copies passphrases and private key over the network, and removes itself. Certainly writing something like that is a lot less resource intensive than trying to crask RSA (or any other strong cryptosystem).
I agree. The NSA obviously needs a few good rootkits lying around just in case. Now, if you were the NSA, would you rather have a good rootkit or a good crack for RSA?
How can you possibly prove that finding the prime factorization of a large number cannot be done quickly and easily? You can't prove a negative.
I think what you mean is: "It's impossible to prove that some general task (say, quickly computing the prime factorization of a large number) cannot be accomplished. There ought to be some slick computer program that can do it. Maybe we just haven't thought of it yet. And not having thought of something is not a proof that that something does not exist."
You are right. We haven't thought of a way to quickly compute the prime factorization of a large number. However, you are wrong that one can't decisively "prove a negative." For a famous example of someone "proving a negative", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
As far as I know, nobody has proved that finding the prime factorization of a large number (or more directly, computing Euler's totient function of a large number) cannot be done quickly and easily. Until I see a proof that this is hard, I will not call attacking RSA "dumb."
As for your second point, the advantage to breaking RSA over installing a rootkit or keystroke logger is that breaking RSA leaves no trace.
Am I the only one that notices that Apple's response to every problem is a swift "let's delete this topic and pretend the problem doesn't exist"? .. Seems like bad business practise to me.
This happens all the time on corporate forums. The really infuriating part is that the admins also delete posts advocating a move to another forum without censorship. The only way to take discussion to sane place is to find topics before they've been deleted, see who's interested enough to post in those threads, and PM them with an invitation to a different forum.
It was also probably not worth bothering the NSA with. I wouldn't take this to mean much of anything about how quickly the Feds can crack PGP.
It's more than that. If the people at the NSA know how to break RSA and they do it to help the police in a case like this, then everyone will instantly drop RSA and switch to another algorithm that the NSA maybe hasn't figured out how to break yet.
Considering what a tremendous advantage it would be for the NSA if the rest of the world kept using a flawed cryptosystem, I don't think the NSA would ever break RSA to convict any one person, no matter what that person did.
A friend of mine in the air force is in Iraq right now. As part of an "anti-freeware" policy, they won't let him load Linux on his laptop or even visit ubuntu.com in his web browser. Are things different in the army?
Thank you for clarifying the details. Facts are always important. Still, whether or not compatibility was the intended result, the flood of NE2000-compatible NICs is evidence that two devices doing the same kind of job but from different manufacturers can use the same driver.
Your less direct point about a standardized hardware model preventing efficiency gains is an important one. I think compatibility is more important than performance in this case, but others are of course free to disagree.