You know, I can't help but wonder how this kind of legislation will affect anonymizing projects like Freenet. After all, Freenet is designed to protect political dissidents from their own governments while providing a forum for free speech by protecting the identities of the speakers and the listeners alike. If everyone who uses P2P systems like this have to register their identities with some organization, that would defeat the purpose of something like Freenet in the first place. Would this result in Freenet being criminalized? How will this affect anonymous free speech?
The mathematics are impeccable, but the human factor and the environment always constitute the weak point in any secure system.
We can use cryptographic constructs such as blinding and cut-and-choose to allow the right people to vote once and only once while preserving their anonymity. The problem lies at the point where the user selects the candidate and hits ``Submit''. If a rogue program is able to gain control of the system (trojan, virus, time bomb, etc.), then the program can simply substitute the user's selection for another one at the time of the vote submission. All the mathematics will work beautifully... to select the wrong candidate.
I am a believer in the power of technology, but I cannot place any faith in the viability of such a system. Unfortunately, a perfect Palladium-style environment is the only thing that may be able to fix the vulnerability I just described. Giving the keys to my hardware to a ``trusted'' third party is the last thing I will submit to, and any ``trusted computing'' implementation is bound to be flawed anyway.
I actually hunted down a copy the new HP book online the day it came out; after failing to find it in bookstores... Though I'm sure the author would love to sue me... I'm not saying Go forth and pirate books! I'm just saying that maybe having people get exposed to your book, no matter how it happens, results in drastically increased sales?
I noticed an interesting image in the article. It shows two kid sisters in a public library at 1:00am; one of them is dressed up as Harry Potter and it sitting by a bookshelf rack reading the new book. These kids did not pay a dime to read the book. I am quite sure that dozens upon dozens of people will be checking that copy out to read it, again with no money going to the author or to the publisher (except, of course, the money from the library's original purchase).
I cannot help but wonder what Ms. Rowling or other authors and publishers think of this kind of thing. Obviously, they cannot speak out against public libraries, without inciting the wrath from the public at large. Libraries are something that we grew up with. They are institutions of learning that our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, felt were essential for any progressive society.
Yet the same people who would become incensed about the public library being challenged would not think twice about condemning the sharing of a digital copy over the Internet. I am sorry, but I simply fail to see the fundamental difference between the two. Both mediums allow me to read the book without paying for it.
Perhaps this newfangled Internet thing and its implications are too radical a paradigm shift for the public at large, and they cannot deduce the obvious analogies to how things have been being done in the non-digital world for centuries.
Oh, and I can just as easily walk into my local library and checkout out a CD or a DVD. As the media oligopoly tightens its grip on our society (please, no Star Wars jokes), it seems that they will have to attack libraries themselves in order to follow through with many of the assertions they have been making to their inevitable conclusion.
I can take the unblinded, signed credential to the bookstore now
Forgive me, I got a bit ahead of myself here. The bookstore actually gets the complete set of signed and blinded credentials. I then unblind the entire set for the bookstore, and the bookstore verifies that the contents of all the credentials are identical (that they state the same thing about myself). Otherwise I would be able to slip one dishonest credential into the set originally signed by the school, and the school may not have checked it; I would then show only the falsified credential to the bookstore. By having the entire set be signed and shown to the bookstore, I eliminate the opportunity to do such a thing. I just want to make sure I'm absolutely clear on how this works.
Privacy and activity requiring "automated identification" (e.g., on-line, electronic banking, voting, commerce, etc.) are mutually exclusive. The only way you can be positively identified is if a trusted third party has sufficient knowledge of you that they can verify that you really are who you say you are (good-bye privacy) or you have some sort of unique identification that cannot be forged and that absolutely identifies you (hello government IDs).
Actually, there is some really cool cryptography that helps alleviate a lot of these kinds of privacy issues. For example, it is possible for me to approach my school and to ask them to give me cryptographic proof that I am a full-time student. I can then take that proof with me into a bookstore that is offering a student discount, and without revealing my identity, I can show to the bookstore that I am indeed a full-time student at my school. Even better than that, the bookstore and my school can then collude together to try to reveal my identity, and they will not be able to successfully do so, because of the mathematics involved.
Essentially, this is done through operations called ``cut-and-choose'' and ``blinded signatures.'' I can create a set of blinded digital credentials (credentials that I generate that state fact about myself, yet cannot be read without a special ``unblinding'' factor). I can present to my school, say, 10,000 different blinded copies of the same credential with different serial numbers in each one. I would ask my school to sign one of them, vouching that the school agrees with the information contained in the credential. Because the school cannot read the contents of the blinded credential, the school is warry of signing one of them. So, to test to see if I'm being honest, the school can ask for the ``unblinding factor'' for any number of the credentials in the set. The probability of my having guessed which ones the school would have picked is 1/(n choose m), where m is the number of credentials, and n is the number of credentials that the school asks to unblind. Once the school verifies in the information in the unblinded credentials, it signs the rest. I can then take my signed credentials and remove the blinding while preserving the original signature. I can take the unblinded, signed credential to the bookstore now, and show the bookstore the credential stating that my school asserts that the bearer of the credential (or, in other words, the one holding the associated private key to the public key in the attribute credential blindly signed by my school) is indeed a student. Voila'! I now have a discounted book, and neither the bookstore, nor my school, can track me based on my identity!
If you like this kind of stuff, I recommend that you look up some work done by Chaum. You would be surprised about what complex mathematics is capable of doing for preserving privacy.
Any encryption can still be broken through though brute force.
This is simply not true. One-time pads are 100% unbreakable, and they will always be unbreakable (at least mathematically speaking), no matter how sophisticated technology gets in the future. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a one-time pad is a cryptographically random string of 1's and 0's, which is at least of the same length of the message itself. Two parties have a secure channel in which to exchange these pads; for example, if Alice and Bob wish to use one-time pads, Alice can generate a list of 10,000 cryptographically random strings, put them in a suitcase that is handcuffed to her wrist, and deliver them to Bob in person. Bob and Alice then have a set of one-time pads that they can use for all future communication. Each time they encrypt a message with one of the pads, they discard the pad and never use it again. Because the pad is at least the length of any messages they might pass back and forth, there is no way to analyze the encrypted message for patterns. It is mathematically impossible. You could easily come up strings of 1's and 0's that would ``decrypt'' the message into anything, be it passages from the Bible, or Ogg Vorbis encoded music. You would have no idea which set of 1's and 0's produced the actual original message. This is truly unbreakable encryption on a mathematical level.
Most companies claiming that their encryption is ``unbreakable'' are using one-time pads; the problem is reduced to finding a secure channel of communications in which to transmit those pads. This is usually not a feasible assumption, which is why we all prefer using, for example, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which depends on the difficulty of math involving discrete logarithms. The encryption we now use is breakable, but it is hard enough to break that it is generally considered secure.
Here is a script I hacked up a while back to automatically download trailers from Apple's website. Just pass the resulting filename to the player of your choice. It is written in Ruby, and I use MPlayer. You can use it by doing a copy-and-paste of the URL in the story as a parameter on the command line (watch out for the lameness filter putting a space in the filename near the end after an underscore character; they really need to fix the problem in a real way, like using CSS right:-):
No GnuPG is not ``freeware'' It is licensed under the GPL; hence, it is Free Software. ``Freeware'' refers to a classification of software that is distributed by the author (or his publishing company) at no monetary cost. You may still be restricted by anti-community clauses in the EULA and by the source code remaining secret. Free Software preserves your freedoms and guarantees that you have access to the source code for studying, modification, and redistribution.
One study I recall reading about (take it with a grain of salt) has shown that the average error rate in a program is 60 errors in 1000 lines of code. Some companies have managed to get that down to around 1 error per 1000 lines of code. Organizations that successfully incorporate the ISO 9000 model (Dilbert jokes barred) tend to have a much better rate. For example, code for a space shuttle only has 1 error per 420,000 lines of code - an astronomical (excuse the pun) figure as far as software engineering statistics go. Critical software development teams at Lockheed-Martin, for example, may spend up to two-tirds of their time in meetings and in design, rather than in actual coding. And the engineers tend to go home at 5:00 too. Just some food for thought.
I consider myself to be a seasoned Linux user. I have been using various distributions of Linux exclusively on my desktop for two years now.
My school's Unix Users Group runs a periodic Install Fest, where people bring in their desktops, and UUG members load Linux onto them.
Having settled in Debian myself, I figured I would be able to easily install it for someone else. While all my buddies were zipping through the RedHat 8.0 installation for others, I tenatiously stuck with Debian 3.0 for the guy who came to my station.
Things were complicated by the fact that his network card would not play nice with our switch, so I had to use the CD installation (I always prefer the net install with Debian). It took me about twice as long as the RedHat guys just to get a basic system installed and a command prompt. Then his USB mouse wasn't being recognized by the kernel at all.
Well, the guy went home, and then installed Mandrake over the Debian installation I had worked so hard to start up, because he couldn't figure out how to configure his network or his USB mouse, and he didn't want to go through the time or trouble to get it working. Mandrake just did it for him, and he was on his way with his classwork.
It wasn't until I replaced my own motherboard that I realized that you have to use UHCI for some USB chipsets and OHCI for other USB chipsets (he probably had a chipset that was different than that which came with the Debian kernel image). Mandrake and RedHat just figure all that out for you. I wish Debian would do the same.
Some of the guys on the UUG mailing list are claiming that since RedHat now has apt-get, there is no longer any good reason to keep using Debian. I argue that some of Debian's strongest points are that its developers are not blown about by every whim of the market, and when they say "stable," they mean it. Also, the unstable branch provides ample opportunity to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest packages, if that's what floats your boat.
Well, to make a long story short, for now, I tend to encourage newbies to just use RedHat or Mandrake... but to keep their/home directories on a separate partition for the day that they will wipe their root partition and install Debian;-)
Create a prototype system with all the software packages necessary installed and configured. Then, dd the partition into an image file and burn it onto a CD.
Make sure that the user's home drive is network mounted via NFS.
If the user inadvertently breaks something, tell him to pop the restore CD in and reboot. Have a script dd the image back onto his hard disk partition. Ta-da!
It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly.:-)
In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the discs contained both the Windows and the Linux versions of the software. But given the context of this story, that should go without saying. We also had MacOS X discs for the occasional Mac user.
During the summer, I suggested to my local Unix Users Group that we put together a campaign on campus dubbed "Software for Starving Students." The idea is that we would advocate the use of Free Software among the student body at BYU.
The ball got rolling, and we put together a CD image that we burned and handed out to students from a booth in the student center. We selected OpenOffice, Mozilla, The Gimp, BZFlag, and AbiWord in the most recent incarnation.
Last week, we gave out 400 copies of the CD from the booth. I mentioned to the group that if we did the math the way Microsoft does math, with each disc, we saved a student around $1,300. The 400 copies from last week combined with the 180 copies we gave out during the summer comes to around 3/4 of a million dollars with of savings to the student body!:-)
I, of course, took every opportunity to explain to passerby who accepted the disc about the multiple meanings of the word "free." The club president was making people promise to copy the software and give it to their friends in exchange for receiving the disc. Our Linux Install Fest last Saturday kept the classroom packed with students who heard about Linux and wanted us to install it on their computers for them.
I'm happy to say that we're doing our part to keep Linux from getting "stomped."
Re:Need to outperform closed source options
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As commercial vendors tend to provide schools and universities with cheap or free licenses for educational uses - to make the students familiar with their products so that they would buy them when they finally graduate and enter work-life. So, am I terribly wrong if I assume that there is not the cost benefit or atleast it is not very significant?
When pitting Free Software against commercial counterparts, it only makes sense to go for the commercial counterpart if the difference in functionality between the Free Software and the commercial software is worth at least the cost of the commercial software.
At my school, Microsoft Office is available to students for $65. Thus, for it to make sense for students to buy Microsoft Office rather than use OpenOffice, there must be some aspects of Microsoft Office that OpenOffice lacks which are worth at least $65 to the students. It turns out that frequently, the polished spelling and grammer checking, the 100% compatibility with MS Office files, or simply brand name recognition alone is worth $65 to most students.
However, buying something like Microsot Office under an educational license is somewhat short-sighted. For example, if a student is married, then that student's spouse (who isn't a student) is not supposed to use the software, according to the terms of the EULA. In addition, when you leave school, you can no longer use the software. If you want access to all your data, you must purchase the full retail version of MS Office, since educational versions are not elligible for upgrade prices.
Plus, you lock yourself into the ``Perpetual Upgrade Cycle.'' Your lifelong costs for using that software will long exceed the up-front cost while you're in school. When you look at it in these terms, it just doesn't make sense to purchase commercial software in most cases while you are in school.
I volunteer in a call referral center for my church. The church runs TV advertisements for free Bibles and videos, and people call in to get request a delivery.
We get lots of people who were trying to call DirectTV, but they misdialed the number and got us instead. Many times, even after we go through the introduction, "Hello. I'm Joe Smith. Thank you for calling for your free Bible for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints..." people still don't realize that we aren't DirectTV, and they proceed all the way through giving us their names and home addresses until we get to the part where we ask about where they heard about the offer. Then they exclaim, "Free Bible? What?! I want my DirectTV fixed!!"
It's like they fuzz out on many levels here. First of all, they don't listen to our introduction at all, and then they don't think there's anything out of the ordinary about the fact that they got a live human being the instant they called.
It's too bad that most of them wind up not wanting a free Bible anyway:-)
"I see it almost every day with my own two eyes: a young man in a suit, busily yapping away on his cell phone, totally ambivilous to the fact that he is crossing against a green light."
I am ambivalent on this one -- I can't decide whether you're slightly unskilled or just oblivious when it comes to English vocabulary...
It's actually a word game I play. I make up words that aren't "defined" words that can be derived from their roots and their context. I know, it's a bad habit, and it's going to haunt me some day. Don't be so criticismal:-)
At my university, the business college is in a building that is separated by the rest of campus by a road. Every Friday, all the business majors play dress up (the department has a policy that they all have to wear suits on Fridays).
They all have laptops and cell phones. They circle around tables in the building with their laptops open, busy hammering out assignments in Excel and taking important calls.
And they narrowly avoid getting sqashed on the crosswalk between the business building and the rest of campus. I see it almost every day with my own two eyes: a young man in a suit, busily yapping away on his cell phone, totally ambivilous to the fact that he is crossing against a green light. I saw a guy almost get creamed once; the driver slammed on his brakes and honked, stopping just inches from the business major. The business major didn't skip a beat in his conversation. He just waved and kept on chatting away as he crossed.
Someday, someone is going to get a "wake up call."
I was in a similar predicament. I have heard plenty of horror stories where LCD panels got cracked while being subjected to the pressure of books and odd objects in backpacks.
When I got my new laptop, I was worried about taking it on-campus in my backpack. So, I built a custom aluminum box to protect the screen.
I picked up a 12-foot aluminum bar from a nearby sheet metal warehouse. I took it to a machine shop near campus and spent a couple of hours measuring, cutting, and drilling holes in the aluminum. I put it together with machine screws and corner brackets, and then I covered the inside with cardboard. I have three bars spanning the width of the box. While it doesn't completely encase the laptop, it is sufficient to keep the pressures of books off the computer.
The result is a fairly lightweight protective box that fits in my backpack and then protects the LCD panel from cracking (you could stand on the box with the laptop in it, and it would not put any pressure on the laptop itself). So far, it's worked like a charm. I am still careful not to drop my laptop into my backpack while it's resting on the floor, since longitudinal forces on the screen can also do damage.
Filmmakers are successful because their audience likes to watch their films. They can't run around alienating the viewers by making unilateral decisions about how the audience is to appreciate their art. If people are spending money and effort to edit content out of films, then this should come as a message to the filmmakers that they are producing content that people don't care to see. Successful filmmaking needs to involve both the filmmakers and the film viewers.
I keep my gpg private key on a floppy. My ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg file is a symlink to/mnt/floppy/secring.gpg. When I need to sign or decrypt something I push the floppy in, mount it, use the key, unmount, and eject.
My box has been hacked a few times, but I like knowing for certain that the key wasn't taken.
Neat trick, but you need to find the disk, put it in the drive, mount the drive, read the key, unmount the drive, and eject the disk. Another more convenient thing to do is to encrypt your private key with a symmetric key, so you must enter the passphrase every time you wish to use it. Assuming you pick a strong passphrase, this can give you equivalent security against your private key being compromised. Even if your secret key ring is captured, it can be computationally infeasible to crack your private key by brute force. It would be cheaper for an attacker to break into your house and steal your disk.
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You know, I can't help but wonder how this kind of legislation will affect anonymizing projects like Freenet. After all, Freenet is designed to protect political dissidents from their own governments while providing a forum for free speech by protecting the identities of the speakers and the listeners alike. If everyone who uses P2P systems like this have to register their identities with some organization, that would defeat the purpose of something like Freenet in the first place. Would this result in Freenet being criminalized? How will this affect anonymous free speech?
i predict an MS-Linux release in 2-3 years.
It's MS-GNU/Linux, dammit!!
The mathematics are impeccable, but the human factor and the environment always constitute the weak point in any secure system.
We can use cryptographic constructs such as blinding and cut-and-choose to allow the right people to vote once and only once while preserving their anonymity. The problem lies at the point where the user selects the candidate and hits ``Submit''. If a rogue program is able to gain control of the system (trojan, virus, time bomb, etc.), then the program can simply substitute the user's selection for another one at the time of the vote submission. All the mathematics will work beautifully... to select the wrong candidate.
I am a believer in the power of technology, but I cannot place any faith in the viability of such a system. Unfortunately, a perfect Palladium-style environment is the only thing that may be able to fix the vulnerability I just described. Giving the keys to my hardware to a ``trusted'' third party is the last thing I will submit to, and any ``trusted computing'' implementation is bound to be flawed anyway.
I actually hunted down a copy the new HP book online the day it came out; after failing to find it in bookstores... Though I'm sure the author would love to sue me... I'm not saying Go forth and pirate books! I'm just saying that maybe having people get exposed to your book, no matter how it happens, results in drastically increased sales?
I noticed an interesting image in the article. It shows two kid sisters in a public library at 1:00am; one of them is dressed up as Harry Potter and it sitting by a bookshelf rack reading the new book. These kids did not pay a dime to read the book. I am quite sure that dozens upon dozens of people will be checking that copy out to read it, again with no money going to the author or to the publisher (except, of course, the money from the library's original purchase).
I cannot help but wonder what Ms. Rowling or other authors and publishers think of this kind of thing. Obviously, they cannot speak out against public libraries, without inciting the wrath from the public at large. Libraries are something that we grew up with. They are institutions of learning that our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, felt were essential for any progressive society.
Yet the same people who would become incensed about the public library being challenged would not think twice about condemning the sharing of a digital copy over the Internet. I am sorry, but I simply fail to see the fundamental difference between the two. Both mediums allow me to read the book without paying for it.
Perhaps this newfangled Internet thing and its implications are too radical a paradigm shift for the public at large, and they cannot deduce the obvious analogies to how things have been being done in the non-digital world for centuries.
Oh, and I can just as easily walk into my local library and checkout out a CD or a DVD. As the media oligopoly tightens its grip on our society (please, no Star Wars jokes), it seems that they will have to attack libraries themselves in order to follow through with many of the assertions they have been making to their inevitable conclusion.
I can take the unblinded, signed credential to the bookstore now
Forgive me, I got a bit ahead of myself here. The bookstore actually gets the complete set of signed and blinded credentials. I then unblind the entire set for the bookstore, and the bookstore verifies that the contents of all the credentials are identical (that they state the same thing about myself). Otherwise I would be able to slip one dishonest credential into the set originally signed by the school, and the school may not have checked it; I would then show only the falsified credential to the bookstore. By having the entire set be signed and shown to the bookstore, I eliminate the opportunity to do such a thing. I just want to make sure I'm absolutely clear on how this works.
Privacy and activity requiring "automated identification" (e.g., on-line, electronic banking, voting, commerce, etc.) are mutually exclusive. The only way you can be positively identified is if a trusted third party has sufficient knowledge of you that they can verify that you really are who you say you are (good-bye privacy) or you have some sort of unique identification that cannot be forged and that absolutely identifies you (hello government IDs).
Actually, there is some really cool cryptography that helps alleviate a lot of these kinds of privacy issues. For example, it is possible for me to approach my school and to ask them to give me cryptographic proof that I am a full-time student. I can then take that proof with me into a bookstore that is offering a student discount, and without revealing my identity, I can show to the bookstore that I am indeed a full-time student at my school. Even better than that, the bookstore and my school can then collude together to try to reveal my identity, and they will not be able to successfully do so, because of the mathematics involved.
Essentially, this is done through operations called ``cut-and-choose'' and ``blinded signatures.'' I can create a set of blinded digital credentials (credentials that I generate that state fact about myself, yet cannot be read without a special ``unblinding'' factor). I can present to my school, say, 10,000 different blinded copies of the same credential with different serial numbers in each one. I would ask my school to sign one of them, vouching that the school agrees with the information contained in the credential. Because the school cannot read the contents of the blinded credential, the school is warry of signing one of them. So, to test to see if I'm being honest, the school can ask for the ``unblinding factor'' for any number of the credentials in the set. The probability of my having guessed which ones the school would have picked is 1/(n choose m), where m is the number of credentials, and n is the number of credentials that the school asks to unblind. Once the school verifies in the information in the unblinded credentials, it signs the rest. I can then take my signed credentials and remove the blinding while preserving the original signature. I can take the unblinded, signed credential to the bookstore now, and show the bookstore the credential stating that my school asserts that the bearer of the credential (or, in other words, the one holding the associated private key to the public key in the attribute credential blindly signed by my school) is indeed a student. Voila'! I now have a discounted book, and neither the bookstore, nor my school, can track me based on my identity!
If you like this kind of stuff, I recommend that you look up some work done by Chaum. You would be surprised about what complex mathematics is capable of doing for preserving privacy.
N2H2's Bess currently blocks an extremely large amount of sites, including google's image search (but not the main google site).
I am behind an N2H2 censoring system, and it is currently blocking Google's news site too.
Any encryption can still be broken through though brute force.
This is simply not true. One-time pads are 100% unbreakable, and they will always be unbreakable (at least mathematically speaking), no matter how sophisticated technology gets in the future. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a one-time pad is a cryptographically random string of 1's and 0's, which is at least of the same length of the message itself. Two parties have a secure channel in which to exchange these pads; for example, if Alice and Bob wish to use one-time pads, Alice can generate a list of 10,000 cryptographically random strings, put them in a suitcase that is handcuffed to her wrist, and deliver them to Bob in person. Bob and Alice then have a set of one-time pads that they can use for all future communication. Each time they encrypt a message with one of the pads, they discard the pad and never use it again. Because the pad is at least the length of any messages they might pass back and forth, there is no way to analyze the encrypted message for patterns. It is mathematically impossible. You could easily come up strings of 1's and 0's that would ``decrypt'' the message into anything, be it passages from the Bible, or Ogg Vorbis encoded music. You would have no idea which set of 1's and 0's produced the actual original message. This is truly unbreakable encryption on a mathematical level.
Most companies claiming that their encryption is ``unbreakable'' are using one-time pads; the problem is reduced to finding a secure channel of communications in which to transmit those pads. This is usually not a feasible assumption, which is why we all prefer using, for example, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which depends on the difficulty of math involving discrete logarithms. The encryption we now use is breakable, but it is hard enough to break that it is generally considered secure.
Here is a script I hacked up a while back to automatically download trailers from Apple's website. Just pass the resulting filename to the player of your choice. It is written in Ruby, and I use MPlayer. You can use it by doing a copy-and-paste of the URL in the story as a parameter on the command line (watch out for the lameness filter putting a space in the filename near the end after an underscore character; they really need to fix the problem in a real way, like using CSS right :-):
playtrailer.rb http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/lxg/lxg_trailerGPG is freeware
No GnuPG is not ``freeware'' It is licensed under the GPL; hence, it is Free Software. ``Freeware'' refers to a classification of software that is distributed by the author (or his publishing company) at no monetary cost. You may still be restricted by anti-community clauses in the EULA and by the source code remaining secret. Free Software preserves your freedoms and guarantees that you have access to the source code for studying, modification, and redistribution.
One study I recall reading about (take it with a grain of salt) has shown that the average error rate in a program is 60 errors in 1000 lines of code. Some companies have managed to get that down to around 1 error per 1000 lines of code. Organizations that successfully incorporate the ISO 9000 model (Dilbert jokes barred) tend to have a much better rate. For example, code for a space shuttle only has 1 error per 420,000 lines of code - an astronomical (excuse the pun) figure as far as software engineering statistics go. Critical software development teams at Lockheed-Martin, for example, may spend up to two-tirds of their time in meetings and in design, rather than in actual coding. And the engineers tend to go home at 5:00 too. Just some food for thought.
I consider myself to be a seasoned Linux user. I have been using various distributions of Linux exclusively on my desktop for two years now.
My school's Unix Users Group runs a periodic Install Fest, where people bring in their desktops, and UUG members load Linux onto them.
Having settled in Debian myself, I figured I would be able to easily install it for someone else. While all my buddies were zipping through the RedHat 8.0 installation for others, I tenatiously stuck with Debian 3.0 for the guy who came to my station.
Things were complicated by the fact that his network card would not play nice with our switch, so I had to use the CD installation (I always prefer the net install with Debian). It took me about twice as long as the RedHat guys just to get a basic system installed and a command prompt. Then his USB mouse wasn't being recognized by the kernel at all.
Well, the guy went home, and then installed Mandrake over the Debian installation I had worked so hard to start up, because he couldn't figure out how to configure his network or his USB mouse, and he didn't want to go through the time or trouble to get it working. Mandrake just did it for him, and he was on his way with his classwork.
It wasn't until I replaced my own motherboard that I realized that you have to use UHCI for some USB chipsets and OHCI for other USB chipsets (he probably had a chipset that was different than that which came with the Debian kernel image). Mandrake and RedHat just figure all that out for you. I wish Debian would do the same.
Some of the guys on the UUG mailing list are claiming that since RedHat now has apt-get, there is no longer any good reason to keep using Debian. I argue that some of Debian's strongest points are that its developers are not blown about by every whim of the market, and when they say "stable," they mean it. Also, the unstable branch provides ample opportunity to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest packages, if that's what floats your boat.
Well, to make a long story short, for now, I tend to encourage newbies to just use RedHat or Mandrake ... but to keep their /home directories on a separate partition for the day that they will wipe their root partition and install Debian ;-)
Create a prototype system with all the software packages necessary installed and configured. Then, dd the partition into an image file and burn it onto a CD.
Make sure that the user's home drive is network mounted via NFS.
If the user inadvertently breaks something, tell him to pop the restore CD in and reboot. Have a script dd the image back onto his hard disk partition. Ta-da!
This may be your path of least resistance.
All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth.
Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.
It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly. :-)
In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the discs contained both the Windows and the Linux versions of the software. But given the context of this story, that should go without saying. We also had MacOS X discs for the occasional Mac user.
During the summer, I suggested to my local Unix Users Group that we put together a campaign on campus dubbed "Software for Starving Students." The idea is that we would advocate the use of Free Software among the student body at BYU.
The ball got rolling, and we put together a CD image that we burned and handed out to students from a booth in the student center. We selected OpenOffice, Mozilla, The Gimp, BZFlag, and AbiWord in the most recent incarnation.
Last week, we gave out 400 copies of the CD from the booth. I mentioned to the group that if we did the math the way Microsoft does math, with each disc, we saved a student around $1,300. The 400 copies from last week combined with the 180 copies we gave out during the summer comes to around 3/4 of a million dollars with of savings to the student body! :-)
I, of course, took every opportunity to explain to passerby who accepted the disc about the multiple meanings of the word "free." The club president was making people promise to copy the software and give it to their friends in exchange for receiving the disc. Our Linux Install Fest last Saturday kept the classroom packed with students who heard about Linux and wanted us to install it on their computers for them.
I'm happy to say that we're doing our part to keep Linux from getting "stomped."
As commercial vendors tend to provide schools and universities with cheap or free licenses for educational uses - to make the students familiar with their products so that they would buy them when they finally graduate and enter work-life. So, am I terribly wrong if I assume that there is not the cost benefit or atleast it is not very significant?
When pitting Free Software against commercial counterparts, it only makes sense to go for the commercial counterpart if the difference in functionality between the Free Software and the commercial software is worth at least the cost of the commercial software.
At my school, Microsoft Office is available to students for $65. Thus, for it to make sense for students to buy Microsoft Office rather than use OpenOffice, there must be some aspects of Microsoft Office that OpenOffice lacks which are worth at least $65 to the students. It turns out that frequently, the polished spelling and grammer checking, the 100% compatibility with MS Office files, or simply brand name recognition alone is worth $65 to most students.
However, buying something like Microsot Office under an educational license is somewhat short-sighted. For example, if a student is married, then that student's spouse (who isn't a student) is not supposed to use the software, according to the terms of the EULA. In addition, when you leave school, you can no longer use the software. If you want access to all your data, you must purchase the full retail version of MS Office, since educational versions are not elligible for upgrade prices.
Plus, you lock yourself into the ``Perpetual Upgrade Cycle.'' Your lifelong costs for using that software will long exceed the up-front cost while you're in school. When you look at it in these terms, it just doesn't make sense to purchase commercial software in most cases while you are in school.
I volunteer in a call referral center for my church. The church runs TV advertisements for free Bibles and videos, and people call in to get request a delivery.
We get lots of people who were trying to call DirectTV, but they misdialed the number and got us instead. Many times, even after we go through the introduction, "Hello. I'm Joe Smith. Thank you for calling for your free Bible for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints..." people still don't realize that we aren't DirectTV, and they proceed all the way through giving us their names and home addresses until we get to the part where we ask about where they heard about the offer. Then they exclaim, "Free Bible? What?! I want my DirectTV fixed!!"
It's like they fuzz out on many levels here. First of all, they don't listen to our introduction at all, and then they don't think there's anything out of the ordinary about the fact that they got a live human being the instant they called.
It's too bad that most of them wind up not wanting a free Bible anyway :-)
"I see it almost every day with my own two eyes: a young man in a suit, busily yapping away on his cell phone, totally ambivilous to the fact that he is crossing against a green light."
I am ambivalent on this one -- I can't decide whether you're slightly unskilled or just oblivious when it comes to English vocabulary...
It's actually a word game I play. I make up words that aren't "defined" words that can be derived from their roots and their context. I know, it's a bad habit, and it's going to haunt me some day. Don't be so criticismal :-)
At my university, the business college is in a building that is separated by the rest of campus by a road. Every Friday, all the business majors play dress up (the department has a policy that they all have to wear suits on Fridays).
They all have laptops and cell phones. They circle around tables in the building with their laptops open, busy hammering out assignments in Excel and taking important calls.
And they narrowly avoid getting sqashed on the crosswalk between the business building and the rest of campus. I see it almost every day with my own two eyes: a young man in a suit, busily yapping away on his cell phone, totally ambivilous to the fact that he is crossing against a green light. I saw a guy almost get creamed once; the driver slammed on his brakes and honked, stopping just inches from the business major. The business major didn't skip a beat in his conversation. He just waved and kept on chatting away as he crossed.
Someday, someone is going to get a "wake up call."
Some of you may be interested in Clean Flick's membership agreement terms.
How long before these machines come equipped with MP3 players? I can just see the RIAA exec's ranting to the press about it now...
(Uptight exec with nasal voice):
Copyright infringement in the LAUNDRY ROOM!
Copyright infringement by the NEW WASHER AND DRYER!!
(Apologies to Negativland.)
I was in a similar predicament. I have heard plenty of horror stories where LCD panels got cracked while being subjected to the pressure of books and odd objects in backpacks.
When I got my new laptop, I was worried about taking it on-campus in my backpack. So, I built a custom aluminum box to protect the screen.
I picked up a 12-foot aluminum bar from a nearby sheet metal warehouse. I took it to a machine shop near campus and spent a couple of hours measuring, cutting, and drilling holes in the aluminum. I put it together with machine screws and corner brackets, and then I covered the inside with cardboard. I have three bars spanning the width of the box. While it doesn't completely encase the laptop, it is sufficient to keep the pressures of books off the computer.
The result is a fairly lightweight protective box that fits in my backpack and then protects the LCD panel from cracking (you could stand on the box with the laptop in it, and it would not put any pressure on the laptop itself). So far, it's worked like a charm. I am still careful not to drop my laptop into my backpack while it's resting on the floor, since longitudinal forces on the screen can also do damage.
Filmmakers are successful because their audience likes to watch their films. They can't run around alienating the viewers by making unilateral decisions about how the audience is to appreciate their art. If people are spending money and effort to edit content out of films, then this should come as a message to the filmmakers that they are producing content that people don't care to see. Successful filmmaking needs to involve both the filmmakers and the film viewers.
I keep my gpg private key on a floppy. My ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg file is a symlink to /mnt/floppy/secring.gpg. When I need to sign or decrypt something I push the floppy in, mount it, use the key, unmount, and eject.
My box has been hacked a few times, but I like knowing for certain that the key wasn't taken.
Neat trick, but you need to find the disk, put it in the drive, mount the drive, read the key, unmount the drive, and eject the disk. Another more convenient thing to do is to encrypt your private key with a symmetric key, so you must enter the passphrase every time you wish to use it. Assuming you pick a strong passphrase, this can give you equivalent security against your private key being compromised. Even if your secret key ring is captured, it can be computationally infeasible to crack your private key by brute force. It would be cheaper for an attacker to break into your house and steal your disk.