It seems that the MSN software isn't free. To use it, you have to essentially rent it from MSN for $10/month.
Anyone remember when they made Internet Explorer free, to price-gouge the competition out of the market? Now we see why: no longer fearing competition, they're charging again. Highly uncool, no?
OK, so I'm installing this thing, because I want to see what improvements -if any- they've made to the standards support of the once-great Tasman engine.
What's this version 2.0.0 bit, though? I mean, if it's the first release, then how can it possibly be 2.0?
The only way you can possibly make electronic voting machines acceptably secure is to not network them at all. This isn't so much a measure to prevent hacking as it is a measure to control the amount of damage a hacker can do; if only one machine at a time can be hacked, then damage remains localized. Here's my idea for such a system:
The user shows up at the polling place, and is given a token, which will be used to operate the voting machine. The user then goes to one of several voting booths, which can be chosen at random.
The user presents the token to the machine, which marks that token as used (such that it can never be used to operate another machine). Only then is the user allowed to begin the voting process.
The user chooses a language for onscreen text and voice instructions. Ideally, instructions should be phrased in such a way that they can be reused between elections.
The user is presented with a list of candidates, including names and pictures. One by one, each candidate is highlighted; as this occurs, a voice sample is played of the candidate saying his or her name. This is important, because it allows for a person to recognize the proper candidate based on written name, picture, spoken name, and sound of voice. This is pretty much everything that can reasonably be done to ensure that a person knows which candidate is being voted for.
The vote can be controlled in two ways: by touching the candidate's name onscreen, or by pressing a button as that candidate's name is being read. This latter is a measure to accommodate blind voters., or others who could not effectively use a touch screen.
Each vote is confirmed twice, onscreen and by voice -again using the sample of the candidate- to ensure that the voter is absolutely certain that this is the proper choice.
Once the voting process is completed, a paper ballot is printed for the user (there will be strong warnings onscreen and in voice to ensure that the user understands to take the ballot). This ballot is marked with a barcode stating what machine it came from, but no information which could identify the user (this is why it is important to let the user pick a booth at random). The purpose of this barcode is so that if a machine is known to be tampered with, votes cast using that machine can be tracked down.
The ballot is then taken by the user to a ballot box, where it will be shipped to the usual facilities for counting purposes.
The advantages to this system are many:
Every possible method of recognizing candidates is taken into account. This won't totally eliminate confusion -some people are so monumentally stupid that nothing will get through to them- but this minimizes that problem.
There is a paper trail which can be consulted. The value of this cannot be overestimated.
There is no single point of failure. Tampering with a single machine cannot in and of itself damage any other machines, so the number of votes which must be considered suspect due to machine tampering is minimized.
Counting is still done by machines, which are not prone to bias as humans are, but because the ballot os filled out by machine, the process is somewhat more controlled.
And one final note, particular to US elections: poll results should be considered classified information until the polls are closed in all fifty states. Timezones being what they are, this exit-poll crap is causing election results in East Cost states to affect West Coast states, however slightly, and that needs to be dealt with. Each state's results must be completely independent of the results of any other state, and measures need to be taken to ensure that.
If it happened, then there will be proof of it. Even the CIA couldn't cover up a roadblock of that magnitude; there will be thousands of witnesses. A handful of witnesses is easy to fake, or to silence, but you can't do that in the numbers that such a "voter roadblock" would produce.
Show me anything more than a hanfdul, and I might be convinced. But the previous poster was correct: if these roadblocks had really occurred, there would have been more than enough evidence for Gore -or, if not him personally, any number of voter groups- to sue. He has not done so. That, I think, is the most telling thing about this.
Just because we don't accept accusations without proof doesn't make us blind followers of The Establishment. "Innocent until proven guilty" is the cornerstone of our legal system. So prove them guilty.
Macs have a dead-key scheme of their own. Option-character, and then the character you want accented.
On a US keyboard layout, the keys are as follows:
U - ümlaüt
E - gravé accént
I - cîrcumflex
N - tilde (ñ)
C - çedilla (not actually a dead-key, since it only works with C, but it's common enough to be mentioned here).
` - àcute àccent
This is pretty US-centric, because each character used is the letter which people in the US usually see most commonly with that accent (none of these are common in US English, but they are common enough in loanwords and in snippets of other languages seen sometimes). The exception to this is the acute accent, which is seldom seen in the US at all, so it was given the ` key, which looks like an acute accent anyway.
Incidentally, this is not a new feature on Mac OS X. It has worked this way since at least the System 6 days, and probably even earlier than that. Although some of the bad Carbon ports out there don't provide the same visual feedback that Cocoa and ATSUI do, the key combinations will still work. They even work in the Terminal.
Seriously. There are viable alternatives, even from a do-it-yourself standpoint. Others here have already mentioned generic PowerPC and Sparc systems. Thanks to the wonders of Open-Source, most Linux software skates through the translation with a simple recompile, and porting the rest generally isn't inhumanly difficult.
Does it cost more? Right now, in the short term, yes. Show some demand for systems like this, and someone will move in to fill the void with cheaper boxes, I guarantee it. For now, it's down to your choice: your money or your rights. I know which one I'll take.
That's the positively-spun way of putting it. In the interest of balance, here's a negatively-spun take on the same issue.
According to the GPL, software is, as thought, not something which can be "owned". As such, withholding it from the public is tantamount to stealing, and therefore it prohibits you from doing so. The BSD license basically lets you do whatever you want, including stealing the code from the public domain.
I would prefer to GPL my own software, simply because if I want to give my code to the masses, I don't want others stealing it away from them. But to each his own, I guess; if you're really that trusting of humanity, or if you simply don't care, then knock yourself out.
...under one condition. Namely, that anyone selling merchandise with RFID tags is required by law to physically remove those tags at the time of purchase. As a corollary, any manufacturer which puts RFID tags into merchandise would be required to do so in such a way that this could be done.
All the benefits of RFID, but minus the privacy concerns, since any legitimately-purchased merchandise would be de-tagged before it left the store.
According to everything I've read, you can change the list of computers allowed to share the files at any time. You couldn't do that if you embedded a key into the file, because you'd have to track the changes across all of the machines.
More likely, the mechanism used is nothing more than a list stored on the machine that downloaded the files. Weak, yes, but quite in keeping with Apple's previous attempts at preventing copying, which basically just made the copying technique nonobvious, not impossible.
So, does Godwin's Law apply to parodies? I mean, in one case, this could be seen as yet another voice in an Internet debate, and therefore could be considered a legitimate invocation, thus forfieting the argument for Penny Arcade.
On the other hand, it's clearly a parody, and thus not meant to be taken seriously; does that count? What are the rules on parodies and Godwin?
Really? Being able to play a song I legally bought on any of the devices I own (audiotron, non-apple media players, etc.) isn't fair use that I'm entitled to?
That's only a function of the file format, which is no more restricted than MP3 is. Apple is not placing any restrictions on that; thus, once the AudioTron and other media players come up to speed with the latest technologies, they will be able to plat it just fine. This is not like, say, WMA, where you have the problem of its being controlled by a single vendor which actively works to prevent others from implementing it. is AAC the most open file format out there? No. But neither is MP3.
Or, to put it another way, would you be complaining if Apple provided bought tunes in the OggVorbis format?
C, as a language, is not inherently unsafe. It gives you the freedom to do unsafe things, it even makes it easy for you, but it doesn't cause it. I use C a lot. I prefer it to most of its descendants, in fact. But that doesn't mean I particularly like swinging on a trapeze above a pit of crocodiles with no net, which is what your average C programmer is doing.
Even the best programmers make mistakes. One need only look at the CVS changelogs for any program written in C or other languages of its ilk to see that. Most of these inane little problems are caught before they ever reach the public, but some always creep through. It's just the nature of programming at such a low level. Compilers like StackGuard and Insure don't force you to change the way you program or anything. They're just another line of defense. And with Open-Source versions of such tools out there, there is no reason not to be using these.
I'm not saying that hackers are not a problem. People are responsible for their own actions. But there is a way to flush them into using higher-level (and therefore higher-visibility) attacks without violating the rights of innocent people, and I would say that this makes it worth doing.
As for "giving up your C compiler", no one is asking you to do that. Take a look at the article again; it links, among other things, to StackGuard, a C compiler which manages to close some of the more glaring holes that C can let through. And yes, it's Open-Source.
The idea of a clean-needle program is to provide a safer way to commit the crime. Applied to hacking, this would be more like providing free public honeypot servers which the hackers could 0wn to their heart's content.
Closing the security holes -making it impossible to hack- would be more like actually eradicating the drugs themselves. Worthy goals in both cases, I think, but it means that the analogy is more like the current War on Drugs than the idea of clean-needle programs.
This isn't about letting hackers go free. It's about making systems more secure without having to violate civil liberties by enforcing draconian security measures.
Or, to put it another way, alleviating a symptom (rampant hacking) of a problem (programs with security holes) by actually solving the problem (using safer programming methods to close the security holes) while still punishing those who continue to try to hack, who, with these lower-level holes closed, will have to resort to higher-visibility methods where they are easy to catch using ethical (i.e. strictly-reactive) methods of law enforcement, rather than violating the rights of 10,000 innocent people for the sake of catching a single wrongdoer.
If you want that "Microsoft" effect (which, it should be noted, was pioneered by Apple many years ago), set your font-smoothing prefs to Medium. That's the only one which does that wierd color-halo-effect from Windows that people inexplicably seem to love so much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the poster never mentioned diamonds.
All he said was that the engagement ring was a "touchy subject". Perhaps she feels the same way you do, or perhaps he does. I don't claim to know.
It is true that some diamonds end up going through the hands of terrorist groups. Others do not. Believe it or not, there are even ways of finding out where a given diamond comes from, and thus one can be careful not to "support terror" when buying a diamond. For example, hty www.wholesalecanadiandiamonds.com.
My point: don't jump to conclusions so quickly. Very rarely is anything truly as simple as it might originally seem. Your first clue should have been when he spoke of wedding bands, not engagement rings; weeding bands often don't have stones in them at all, diamond or otherwise.
As for the monopoly bit: yes, that sucks. Big time. I don't like the idea of shelling out mad cash for a small rock any more than you do. Keep in mind, however, that some things have value beyond money.
A Palladium computer doesn't suddenly get morals, and I doubt anyone will be harmed if you can't pirate the latest pop sensation. No, but people are harmed when their rights to fair use -which is not the same as piracy- are forcibly taken away, which Palladium does. Is it physical harm? No. But it's just as real.
The second law is even more laughable, since Palladium improves the ability to verify that commands are coming from a trusted source. So you can't spoof the commands from a valid user. There is only one valid user for a computer: the actual user. Not the maker. Not the one who sold a product and thus should have no further influence. No one else.
(The second law is stupid anyway, since it gives no indication of how to deal with conflicting orders. The ensign should not be able to override the captain's orders!)
Simply because the hierarchy of command is not defined in the law does not invalidate it. Indeed, that's the great strength of the law, because it allows any arbitrary hierarchy to be defined, and yet the law will still fit.
Likewise, this helps towards the third law. A Palladium-enabled computer prevents untrusted code from trying to destroy it.
Ah, but it helps a company which is known to hold back the state of the art to do so. Is that not harm? OK, so it's a bit more of a stretch, but that doesn't make it invalid.
Safari doesn't appear to respect your preferred FTP client setting. I used MoreInternet (the successor to Vince; it's by the same guy in fact) to change my preferred FTP client to Transmit, and Safari still insists on using the Finder.
No "Start" or "Select-Start" or "B-A-B-A-Start" or anything like that.
Pressing A ends the code. After that, nothing else counts. This is why there are so many variants of the code floating around. B-A-B-A-Start works, but that's because the second B-A doesn't mean anything. Same with Select (actually, pressing Select happens to move the cursor down to the two-player option; this was how you could play with two players, 30 lives each).
...is the utterly abysmal security. Seriously; the potential for privacy invention all stems from this.
It's already well-established that parents have a right to know their children's grades, conduct, and such. This is why we have report cards; they're one manifestation of this right, and there are good reasons for it. It's also been established that parents have a right to know what's going on assignment-wise.
The question is, what reason is there for this right to be limited to once or maybe twice a quarter or semester, rather than in realtime (or as close to realtime as is feasible)? The simple fact is, there's no reason for that. Thus, the concept of a system such as this is a Good Thing, because it allows parents to better exercise their responsibility to their children, but it doesn't act as a babysitter, so it doesn't absolve parents of that responsibility.
The problem is, this information must be made available to the parents in a secure manner. This SSN/name crap is simply not good enough. The parents have a right to know what's going on in their kids' lives, but the whole world doesn't have that right, and such a trivial-to-hack system as this just doesn't cut it for defending that. To be perfectly frank, using systems this insecure to transmit such personal data as this should be illegal, but alas, there's really not a way to quantify security in such a manner that you could put it into law.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that the MSN software isn't free. To use it, you have to essentially rent it from MSN for $10/month.
Anyone remember when they made Internet Explorer free, to price-gouge the competition out of the market? Now we see why: no longer fearing competition, they're charging again. Highly uncool, no?
OK, so I'm installing this thing, because I want to see what improvements -if any- they've made to the standards support of the once-great Tasman engine.
What's this version 2.0.0 bit, though? I mean, if it's the first release, then how can it possibly be 2.0?
The only way you can possibly make electronic voting machines acceptably secure is to not network them at all. This isn't so much a measure to prevent hacking as it is a measure to control the amount of damage a hacker can do; if only one machine at a time can be hacked, then damage remains localized. Here's my idea for such a system:
The advantages to this system are many:
And one final note, particular to US elections: poll results should be considered classified information until the polls are closed in all fifty states. Timezones being what they are, this exit-poll crap is causing election results in East Cost states to affect West Coast states, however slightly, and that needs to be dealt with. Each state's results must be completely independent of the results of any other state, and measures need to be taken to ensure that.
Where is the proof?
If it happened, then there will be proof of it. Even the CIA couldn't cover up a roadblock of that magnitude; there will be thousands of witnesses. A handful of witnesses is easy to fake, or to silence, but you can't do that in the numbers that such a "voter roadblock" would produce.
Show me anything more than a hanfdul, and I might be convinced. But the previous poster was correct: if these roadblocks had really occurred, there would have been more than enough evidence for Gore -or, if not him personally, any number of voter groups- to sue. He has not done so. That, I think, is the most telling thing about this.
Just because we don't accept accusations without proof doesn't make us blind followers of The Establishment. "Innocent until proven guilty" is the cornerstone of our legal system. So prove them guilty.
On a US keyboard layout, the keys are as follows:
This is pretty US-centric, because each character used is the letter which people in the US usually see most commonly with that accent (none of these are common in US English, but they are common enough in loanwords and in snippets of other languages seen sometimes). The exception to this is the acute accent, which is seldom seen in the US at all, so it was given the ` key, which looks like an acute accent anyway.
Incidentally, this is not a new feature on Mac OS X. It has worked this way since at least the System 6 days, and probably even earlier than that. Although some of the bad Carbon ports out there don't provide the same visual feedback that Cocoa and ATSUI do, the key combinations will still work. They even work in the Terminal.
Get out of Wintel.
Seriously. There are viable alternatives, even from a do-it-yourself standpoint. Others here have already mentioned generic PowerPC and Sparc systems. Thanks to the wonders of Open-Source, most Linux software skates through the translation with a simple recompile, and porting the rest generally isn't inhumanly difficult.
Does it cost more? Right now, in the short term, yes. Show some demand for systems like this, and someone will move in to fill the void with cheaper boxes, I guarantee it. For now, it's down to your choice: your money or your rights. I know which one I'll take.
That's the positively-spun way of putting it. In the interest of balance, here's a negatively-spun take on the same issue.
According to the GPL, software is, as thought, not something which can be "owned". As such, withholding it from the public is tantamount to stealing, and therefore it prohibits you from doing so. The BSD license basically lets you do whatever you want, including stealing the code from the public domain.
I would prefer to GPL my own software, simply because if I want to give my code to the masses, I don't want others stealing it away from them. But to each his own, I guess; if you're really that trusting of humanity, or if you simply don't care, then knock yourself out.
...under one condition. Namely, that anyone selling merchandise with RFID tags is required by law to physically remove those tags at the time of purchase. As a corollary, any manufacturer which puts RFID tags into merchandise would be required to do so in such a way that this could be done.
All the benefits of RFID, but minus the privacy concerns, since any legitimately-purchased merchandise would be de-tagged before it left the store.
According to everything I've read, you can change the list of computers allowed to share the files at any time. You couldn't do that if you embedded a key into the file, because you'd have to track the changes across all of the machines.
More likely, the mechanism used is nothing more than a list stored on the machine that downloaded the files. Weak, yes, but quite in keeping with Apple's previous attempts at preventing copying, which basically just made the copying technique nonobvious, not impossible.
So, does Godwin's Law apply to parodies? I mean, in one case, this could be seen as yet another voice in an Internet debate, and therefore could be considered a legitimate invocation, thus forfieting the argument for Penny Arcade.
On the other hand, it's clearly a parody, and thus not meant to be taken seriously; does that count? What are the rules on parodies and Godwin?
Really? Being able to play a song I legally bought on any of the devices I own (audiotron, non-apple media players, etc.) isn't fair use that I'm entitled to?
That's only a function of the file format, which is no more restricted than MP3 is. Apple is not placing any restrictions on that; thus, once the AudioTron and other media players come up to speed with the latest technologies, they will be able to plat it just fine. This is not like, say, WMA, where you have the problem of its being controlled by a single vendor which actively works to prevent others from implementing it. is AAC the most open file format out there? No. But neither is MP3.
Or, to put it another way, would you be complaining if Apple provided bought tunes in the OggVorbis format?
C, as a language, is not inherently unsafe. It gives you the freedom to do unsafe things, it even makes it easy for you, but it doesn't cause it.
I use C a lot. I prefer it to most of its descendants, in fact. But that doesn't mean I particularly like swinging on a trapeze above a pit of crocodiles with no net, which is what your average C programmer is doing.
Even the best programmers make mistakes. One need only look at the CVS changelogs for any program written in C or other languages of its ilk to see that. Most of these inane little problems are caught before they ever reach the public, but some always creep through. It's just the nature of programming at such a low level. Compilers like StackGuard and Insure don't force you to change the way you program or anything. They're just another line of defense. And with Open-Source versions of such tools out there, there is no reason not to be using these.
I'm not saying that hackers are not a problem. People are responsible for their own actions. But there is a way to flush them into using higher-level (and therefore higher-visibility) attacks without violating the rights of innocent people, and I would say that this makes it worth doing.
As for "giving up your C compiler", no one is asking you to do that. Take a look at the article again; it links, among other things, to StackGuard, a C compiler which manages to close some of the more glaring holes that C can let through. And yes, it's Open-Source.
This isn't like a clean-needle program.
The idea of a clean-needle program is to provide a safer way to commit the crime. Applied to hacking, this would be more like providing free public honeypot servers which the hackers could 0wn to their heart's content.
Closing the security holes -making it impossible to hack- would be more like actually eradicating the drugs themselves. Worthy goals in both cases, I think, but it means that the analogy is more like the current War on Drugs than the idea of clean-needle programs.
This isn't about letting hackers go free. It's about making systems more secure without having to violate civil liberties by enforcing draconian security measures.
Or, to put it another way, alleviating a symptom (rampant hacking) of a problem (programs with security holes) by actually solving the problem (using safer programming methods to close the security holes) while still punishing those who continue to try to hack, who, with these lower-level holes closed, will have to resort to higher-visibility methods where they are easy to catch using ethical (i.e. strictly-reactive) methods of law enforcement, rather than violating the rights of 10,000 innocent people for the sake of catching a single wrongdoer.
If you want that "Microsoft" effect (which, it should be noted, was pioneered by Apple many years ago), set your font-smoothing prefs to Medium. That's the only one which does that wierd color-halo-effect from Windows that people inexplicably seem to love so much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the poster never mentioned diamonds.
All he said was that the engagement ring was a "touchy subject". Perhaps she feels the same way you do, or perhaps he does. I don't claim to know.
It is true that some diamonds end up going through the hands of terrorist groups. Others do not. Believe it or not, there are even ways of finding out where a given diamond comes from, and thus one can be careful not to "support terror" when buying a diamond. For example, hty www.wholesalecanadiandiamonds.com.
My point: don't jump to conclusions so quickly. Very rarely is anything truly as simple as it might originally seem. Your first clue should have been when he spoke of wedding bands, not engagement rings; weeding bands often don't have stones in them at all, diamond or otherwise.
As for the monopoly bit: yes, that sucks. Big time. I don't like the idea of shelling out mad cash for a small rock any more than you do. Keep in mind, however, that some things have value beyond money.
Well, then, probably every politician currently active in the US (and most other places) ought to be fired immediately.
And it seems someone needs to read Les Miserables.
A Palladium computer doesn't suddenly get morals, and I doubt anyone will be harmed if you can't pirate the latest pop sensation.
No, but people are harmed when their rights to fair use -which is not the same as piracy- are forcibly taken away, which Palladium does. Is it physical harm? No. But it's just as real.
The second law is even more laughable, since Palladium improves the ability to verify that commands are coming from a trusted source. So you can't spoof the commands from a valid user.
There is only one valid user for a computer: the actual user. Not the maker. Not the one who sold a product and thus should have no further influence. No one else.
(The second law is stupid anyway, since it gives no indication of how to deal with conflicting orders. The ensign should not be able to override the captain's orders!)
Simply because the hierarchy of command is not defined in the law does not invalidate it. Indeed, that's the great strength of the law, because it allows any arbitrary hierarchy to be defined, and yet the law will still fit.
Likewise, this helps towards the third law. A Palladium-enabled computer prevents untrusted code from trying to destroy it.
Ah, but it helps a company which is known to hold back the state of the art to do so. Is that not harm? OK, so it's a bit more of a stretch, but that doesn't make it invalid.
Safari doesn't appear to respect your preferred FTP client setting. I used MoreInternet (the successor to Vince; it's by the same guy in fact) to change my preferred FTP client to Transmit, and Safari still insists on using the Finder.
The real one is Up-Up-Down-Down-B-A, not Up-Down-Up-Down-B-A.
:)
That'll teach me not to use the preview button...
Up-Down-Up-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A
No "Start" or "Select-Start" or "B-A-B-A-Start" or anything like that.
Pressing A ends the code. After that, nothing else counts. This is why there are so many variants of the code floating around. B-A-B-A-Start works, but that's because the second B-A doesn't mean anything. Same with Select (actually, pressing Select happens to move the cursor down to the two-player option; this was how you could play with two players, 30 lives each).
Honest question: why would any update to IE they might make have to be Cocoa? It's possible to embed WebCore without using Cocoa, after all.
But doesn't Apple's PowerSchool do this and more, more securely, in any Web browser without needing Java?
That "more securely" bit is the most important part of that equation, mind you.
...is the utterly abysmal security. Seriously; the potential for privacy invention all stems from this.
It's already well-established that parents have a right to know their children's grades, conduct, and such. This is why we have report cards; they're one manifestation of this right, and there are good reasons for it. It's also been established that parents have a right to know what's going on assignment-wise.
The question is, what reason is there for this right to be limited to once or maybe twice a quarter or semester, rather than in realtime (or as close to realtime as is feasible)? The simple fact is, there's no reason for that. Thus, the concept of a system such as this is a Good Thing, because it allows parents to better exercise their responsibility to their children, but it doesn't act as a babysitter, so it doesn't absolve parents of that responsibility.
The problem is, this information must be made available to the parents in a secure manner. This SSN/name crap is simply not good enough. The parents have a right to know what's going on in their kids' lives, but the whole world doesn't have that right, and such a trivial-to-hack system as this just doesn't cut it for defending that. To be perfectly frank, using systems this insecure to transmit such personal data as this should be illegal, but alas, there's really not a way to quantify security in such a manner that you could put it into law.