In the modern world "education" is a chiefly Russian word. Not only Russinas have good education, they are just about the only ones who still do. That's why USA is crawling across former USSR territories on its knees tearfully begging people to come to work for the USA.
The Skype blog had info being posted all during the outage, and will have a summary of what happened soon. They never indicated it was anything related to any outside intrusion.
Then you know it's true; nobody's ever lied on a blog before.
In Skype's case nothing will help them with that signal other than a significant re-working of the service which allows, say, a supernode to act as a man-in-the-middle between what would otherwise be an uncrackable P2P link.
1) Uncrackable my ass.
2) What on earth makes you think that the only way to make these changes is to knock the whole system offline for two days? I cannot conceive of any situation in which that would be necessary or even helpful.
The only way I could see Xen, in its current state, being superior is if you absolutely had to use only text based console management. You can, and often must, manage xen from the terminal. If you want to use a GUI, to ease management and hide the details of all those command-line tools, Xen just doesn't measure up.
To be fair, that describes my situation. I am in Malaysia and the servers I administer are in the USA. With 300ms latency and 1-megabit DSL, using VMware's GUI tools over X or VNC is positively hellish.
But I prefer text-based interfaces in general, and I like how easy it is to script my work with Xen using familiar tools.
It probably has more to do with Skype retooling for eavesdropping requirements under the new wiretap law. Skype handles a lot of international traffic, encrypted and often in a P2P fashion, so a major change is necessary in order to comply.
You remind me of my mother. Every time she hears a click on the phone, she thinks it's the CIA spying on her.
What she doesn't seem to get is that the CIA isn't some kid hanging from her drainpipe and fiddling with alligator clips. When they listen in on your phone, you don't know about it.
Same with Skype. If they were to install CALEA compliance software, it would certainly not result in two days of downtime. There would be no outside sign that it had ever happened.
What Xen _really_ blows at is usability / manageability. Setting up Xen is a pain in the ass, especially if you're on something other than 32bit x86. Figuring out obscure command line options and text config file syntax won't take them very far.
Maybe if you only use the Xen-provided tools, but that's not necessary the real-world usage scenario.
We use Debian on Xen on AMD64.
Converting a stock Debian Etch install to a Xen dom0 takes about 5 minutes, including the reboot. Creating a new domU takes about 2 minutes, from deciding to do it until I have an up-and-running virtual server.
When I compare that to the hell that was setting up (and remotely administering) VMWare, I realise I'd never want to go back. And that's without even getting into VMWare's habit of eventually swallowing up all RAM and swap on the host until everything grinds to a clanking halt.
Maybe, but my DSL provider changes my IP every few weeks, and I'm pretty sure the rarely-used machines don't all get it installed/upgraded that closely to each other.
I try to use FF, but if I have a complaint, it is not the memory thing (got lots of that), but it is that often FF just seems to stops loading pages and I have to restart it. I think it is more of an adblock thing, but that is speculation on my part. It could also be the plethora of badly coded sites out there.
I see that too with Firefox. After a while (sometimes as little as a day), I'll click links and nothing will happen - the wheel will spin for half a second but it clearly isn't trying to load anything. I'll kill the process and restart it again to get my tabs back.
I don't think it can be blamed on the sites, because other browsers don't do this to me.
Likewise. I have three laptops here, plus a few virtual machines, all of which are different platforms and so required their own Firefox downloads.
But only one of those gets 95% of the use, the others probably appear to be relatively "inactive". In reality it's because those machines are only used for testing in IE, or surfing on the john, or whatever.
But let's say someone out there is using Bittorrent to download stuff they're not supposed to. Why use a change in the protocol to monitor usage when big media can just force ISPs to open up their logs?
They can't force my ISP; like almost half the world's population, I'm in Asia. They probably can't even communicate with my ISP.
However, if they change the protocol, they could stop me from using the client to exchange content they don't like.
Which is why I imagine that this half of the world's population will have little use for the Official Fork.
Did anyone else read that Nokia 9300 review that Gadget Guy linked to and have their brain start to hurt? It reads like it was originally written in Japanese, then sequentially babelfished to German, Spanish, Korean, and finally to 18th Century English (does Babelfish have such an option?). Bizarre.
How else would you get passages like these:
But the manufacturers decreased the motion and made it minimum in the device. That means that when typing you won't feel the pressure at all and your finger rests on the utmost confinement.
The process of getting accustomed takes not so long and then you'll never pay any attention to this trifle. Comparing the quality of the realization with Nokia 9210i I may surely say the manufacturers improved the ergonomics of the device and decreased its size.
The joystick is medium in comfort and can't be called comfortable, it rouses compound feelings. And if one gets used to the keypad with time the experience of the colleagues shows the joystick is not the same. A user either accepts it at once or refuses at all.
Your files may be also disposed here. The ideology is really the same as in a usual PC. Let's consider standard functions and their realization.
The reception quality is average for Nokia phones and rouses no cavils.
The antiterrorism law everyone's talking about (ISA) goes back to the 1960s. It's not about September-11 terrorism, it's about domestic political activity.
Over the past decades, it's morphed into an excuse to stifle free speech and association in just about every way, cementing one-party rule. Malaysia no longer has any meaningful press, other than online. Opposition politicans are harassed and even jailed for no reason.
This should be a lesson to the USA, and what you'll have to look forward to if Bush's anti-freedom laws stay in place.
Now, the obvious vector of attack to circumvent these laws would be to argue that the punishment employed is not on this list, and therefore does not constitute cruel or unusual punishment. This is where discretion would kick in, but that is also where the sunset clause would kick in. If in five years, it was determined that the law was truly broken, then the bill could be modified and resubmitted with the terms. And chances are, in five years, the idiot who enacted the law would have little power.
So as long as I can think of a new cruel and unusual punishment every five years (and I believe I can), then I can torture people all I want?
There's a very good reason why the law is left to interpration. It goes hand in hand with the reason why the courts were created.
How many times has the opposition party won "elections" in Malaysia since independence?
Every time it looks like they're going to win, something exciting happens.
In 1965 it resulted in separation from Singapore.
In 1969 it resulted in the riots and racial violence against Chinese that brought Malaysia the corrupt apartheid system now in place. Chinese consent to this because most of them are not interested in more violence against them. Instead, they have been slowly migrating out of the country, a trend that has accelerated in recent years.
The upcoming elections are going to be very interesting. PM Badawi's government has been a failure, and they seem to know it, based on the amount of effort that's recently been going into pre-empting criticism - such as the harassment against bloggers, and the ban against newspapers publishing discussion about public comments made by the Deputy Prime Minister.
It's starting to look like this tactic is backfiring, as the arrests have been widely discussed, and are mainly serving to increase mistrust in the incumbent government. What were marginal, fringe web sites are now focal points of a growing political awareness.
It's a tricky juncture.
If UMNO (never mind its impotent BN puppets) continues to win elections and push its racist agenda, Chinese emigration will continue to accelerate. The government cannot prevent the brain drain, but at some point they will step in to prevent the outward capital flows from them expatriating their assets. The combination of these measures and the loss of the educated Chinese will leave an unmanageable economy. 30 years of poorly-conceived racial preferences have left too much of the Malay population under-educated, under-motivated, and under-experienced. I suspect Malaysia will sink back into the swamps from which it was formed. Political opportunists in the peninsula will push through shariah law and the East Malaysian states will secede, as is their right in that case. What will be left is a peninsula with a lot of decaying buildings, no oil revenue, and no productive economic activity - after all, you can't run a country on bribes alone, somebody somewhere has to actually be generating the money before it feeds into the graft machine. In its last gasp, it will become embroiled in military conflict with Thailand over support for Muslim rebels in the south of that country. UMNO's term for this future they have engineered is "Wawasan 2020".
Bumiputra is a political construct, not an ethnicity. It includes Malays as well as indigenous people. Indian Muslims can also be bumis if they pretend to be Malay.
About half the population is ethnic Chinese (concentrated in the cities), with a small percentage of ethnic Indians.
No.
Half the population is ethnic Malay. Chinese are about 25%.
62%??? Even UMNO (the racial chauvenist Malay ruling party) doesn't proffer numbers that preposterous.
Malays are about 50% of the population.
Wilfully or out of ignorance, you may be confusing "Malay" with "Bumiputra", which is a disingenous political construction used by Malays to usurp the legitimacy of the true indigenous people (who make up about 11% of the population).
By creating this term that combines both in the same artificial grouping, the Malays on the one hand assert primacy over the Chinese and Indian minorities on the basis of indigenous status, and on the other hand subsume the real indigenous people into a grouping that is totally dominated by Malays.
While the Malay-dominated federal government likes to publish stats that combine Malays and indigenous as bumiputra, the East Malaysian state governments tend to break things down more accurately, with separate stats for Iban, Kadazan-Dusun, Dayak, etc.
Malaysia has some strange laws that only apply to Malays. For example, by law all Malays are considered Muslim at birth.
In fact that is the only law that applies only to Malays.
In theory, a person has the right to change their religion in Malaysia, but in reality it cannot be done if the holder is Malay and therefore a Muslim. Converts to Christianity have lost law suits over this. I am sure that this law is not directed at Malays but is actually a way to keep the 38% non-Malay population in line
How do you see this as keeping the 50% non-Malay population in line?
The linguistically nouveau riche, who have recently tried to score a little upward social mobility by learning some Python or Ruby, resent nothing more than the teeming masses of hungry PHP developers underbidding them.
One needs gasoline about as much as one needs electricity.
I don't need gasoline at all. Some of my vendors do, but then again, they also need liability insurance and forklifts and a whole host of other things I don't personally need. Are the insurance companies and forklift manufacturers public utilities too?
Yes, crime is unacceptable in South Africa & needs serious attention, but it's not as bad as you make out and unlikely that it would be a dealbreaker for Google.
I beg to differ. How many people do you think would want to relocate from Mountain View - where you can lock your bike by leaning it down on the ground, and then sit in the park until midnight with your brand-new MacBook Pro - to Johannesburg - where people get lethal anti-carjacking systems installed in their vehicles?
I sure as hell wouldn't. As someone who's experienced both extremes, I'd say the ambient crime level is a crucial quality-of-life factor, and South Africa is about as bad as it gets on this planet of ours.
Get real. South Africa has good all-round IT talent.
For Africa. But please q.f. Brain Drain.
There would certainly more than enough good IT people clamouring to work in a Google office. I expect the real reasons are more likely to be the location and the surrounding population within easy reach of cellphones & wi-fi access.
I don't understand what you mean. You think Nairobi has more wifi users than Joburg or Cape Town?
Kenya is located a few short ms away from Europe, the Middle East, and India, as the packet flies. And South Africa, for that matter. It's got a reasonably well educated population, for the region, and something approaching stability. It's on a coast soon to be blessed with life-giving fibre-optic cable. Labour costs are very low, English is widely spoken, and people would be very grateful for a nice white-collar IT job. It's an unconventional choice but far from an illogical one.
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1) No one has a shred of evidence that Skype is still using the crypto that they had audited years ago. Or, really, that they ever were.
2) Huh? Nothing like adding auditing and tapping to a data stream has ever been done before? I don't even know how you can say that.
And it's also why all the jobs are in the USA?
Then you know it's true; nobody's ever lied on a blog before.
1) Uncrackable my ass.
2) What on earth makes you think that the only way to make these changes is to knock the whole system offline for two days? I cannot conceive of any situation in which that would be necessary or even helpful.
To be fair, that describes my situation. I am in Malaysia and the servers I administer are in the USA. With 300ms latency and 1-megabit DSL, using VMware's GUI tools over X or VNC is positively hellish.
But I prefer text-based interfaces in general, and I like how easy it is to script my work with Xen using familiar tools.
You remind me of my mother. Every time she hears a click on the phone, she thinks it's the CIA spying on her.
What she doesn't seem to get is that the CIA isn't some kid hanging from her drainpipe and fiddling with alligator clips. When they listen in on your phone, you don't know about it.
Same with Skype. If they were to install CALEA compliance software, it would certainly not result in two days of downtime. There would be no outside sign that it had ever happened.
Maybe if you only use the Xen-provided tools, but that's not necessary the real-world usage scenario.
We use Debian on Xen on AMD64.
Converting a stock Debian Etch install to a Xen dom0 takes about 5 minutes, including the reboot. Creating a new domU takes about 2 minutes, from deciding to do it until I have an up-and-running virtual server.
When I compare that to the hell that was setting up (and remotely administering) VMWare, I realise I'd never want to go back. And that's without even getting into VMWare's habit of eventually swallowing up all RAM and swap on the host until everything grinds to a clanking halt.
I'm using Safari and I get the block message too (when I go to http://www.jacklewis.net./ I had to dust off a copy of IE to get it to show up.
Maybe, but my DSL provider changes my IP every few weeks, and I'm pretty sure the rarely-used machines don't all get it installed/upgraded that closely to each other.
I see that too with Firefox. After a while (sometimes as little as a day), I'll click links and nothing will happen - the wheel will spin for half a second but it clearly isn't trying to load anything. I'll kill the process and restart it again to get my tabs back.
I don't think it can be blamed on the sites, because other browsers don't do this to me.
Which government? If it's the US, they can't really do that, Section 508 accessibility rules require that it work with text-only browsers.
Likewise. I have three laptops here, plus a few virtual machines, all of which are different platforms and so required their own Firefox downloads.
But only one of those gets 95% of the use, the others probably appear to be relatively "inactive". In reality it's because those machines are only used for testing in IE, or surfing on the john, or whatever.
They can't force my ISP; like almost half the world's population, I'm in Asia. They probably can't even communicate with my ISP.
However, if they change the protocol, they could stop me from using the client to exchange content they don't like.
Which is why I imagine that this half of the world's population will have little use for the Official Fork.
Did anyone else read that Nokia 9300 review that Gadget Guy linked to and have their brain start to hurt? It reads like it was originally written in Japanese, then sequentially babelfished to German, Spanish, Korean, and finally to 18th Century English (does Babelfish have such an option?). Bizarre.
How else would you get passages like these:
They are rousing my cavils, that's for sure.
The antiterrorism law everyone's talking about (ISA) goes back to the 1960s. It's not about September-11 terrorism, it's about domestic political activity.
Over the past decades, it's morphed into an excuse to stifle free speech and association in just about every way, cementing one-party rule. Malaysia no longer has any meaningful press, other than online. Opposition politicans are harassed and even jailed for no reason.
This should be a lesson to the USA, and what you'll have to look forward to if Bush's anti-freedom laws stay in place.
So as long as I can think of a new cruel and unusual punishment every five years (and I believe I can), then I can torture people all I want?
There's a very good reason why the law is left to interpration. It goes hand in hand with the reason why the courts were created.
Every time it looks like they're going to win, something exciting happens.
In 1965 it resulted in separation from Singapore.
In 1969 it resulted in the riots and racial violence against Chinese that brought Malaysia the corrupt apartheid system now in place. Chinese consent to this because most of them are not interested in more violence against them. Instead, they have been slowly migrating out of the country, a trend that has accelerated in recent years.
The upcoming elections are going to be very interesting. PM Badawi's government has been a failure, and they seem to know it, based on the amount of effort that's recently been going into pre-empting criticism - such as the harassment against bloggers, and the ban against newspapers publishing discussion about public comments made by the Deputy Prime Minister.
It's starting to look like this tactic is backfiring, as the arrests have been widely discussed, and are mainly serving to increase mistrust in the incumbent government. What were marginal, fringe web sites are now focal points of a growing political awareness.
It's a tricky juncture.
If UMNO (never mind its impotent BN puppets) continues to win elections and push its racist agenda, Chinese emigration will continue to accelerate. The government cannot prevent the brain drain, but at some point they will step in to prevent the outward capital flows from them expatriating their assets. The combination of these measures and the loss of the educated Chinese will leave an unmanageable economy. 30 years of poorly-conceived racial preferences have left too much of the Malay population under-educated, under-motivated, and under-experienced. I suspect Malaysia will sink back into the swamps from which it was formed. Political opportunists in the peninsula will push through shariah law and the East Malaysian states will secede, as is their right in that case. What will be left is a peninsula with a lot of decaying buildings, no oil revenue, and no productive economic activity - after all, you can't run a country on bribes alone, somebody somewhere has to actually be generating the money before it feeds into the graft machine. In its last gasp, it will become embroiled in military conflict with Thailand over support for Muslim rebels in the south of that country. UMNO's term for this future they have engineered is "Wawasan 2020".
No.
Bumiputra is a political construct, not an ethnicity. It includes Malays as well as indigenous people. Indian Muslims can also be bumis if they pretend to be Malay.
No.
Half the population is ethnic Malay. Chinese are about 25%.
62%??? Even UMNO (the racial chauvenist Malay ruling party) doesn't proffer numbers that preposterous.
Malays are about 50% of the population.
Wilfully or out of ignorance, you may be confusing "Malay" with "Bumiputra", which is a disingenous political construction used by Malays to usurp the legitimacy of the true indigenous people (who make up about 11% of the population).
By creating this term that combines both in the same artificial grouping, the Malays on the one hand assert primacy over the Chinese and Indian minorities on the basis of indigenous status, and on the other hand subsume the real indigenous people into a grouping that is totally dominated by Malays.
While the Malay-dominated federal government likes to publish stats that combine Malays and indigenous as bumiputra, the East Malaysian state governments tend to break things down more accurately, with separate stats for Iban, Kadazan-Dusun, Dayak, etc.
In fact that is the only law that applies only to Malays.
How do you see this as keeping the 50% non-Malay population in line?
It's too street to have any snob value.
The linguistically nouveau riche, who have recently tried to score a little upward social mobility by learning some Python or Ruby, resent nothing more than the teeming masses of hungry PHP developers underbidding them.
Your DSL line had 100ms more latency than FIOS? That's just weird. DSL adds about 8-30ms depending on the type of link.
You know about sarcasm, right?
I don't need gasoline at all. Some of my vendors do, but then again, they also need liability insurance and forklifts and a whole host of other things I don't personally need. Are the insurance companies and forklift manufacturers public utilities too?
I beg to differ. How many people do you think would want to relocate from Mountain View - where you can lock your bike by leaning it down on the ground, and then sit in the park until midnight with your brand-new MacBook Pro - to Johannesburg - where people get lethal anti-carjacking systems installed in their vehicles?
I sure as hell wouldn't. As someone who's experienced both extremes, I'd say the ambient crime level is a crucial quality-of-life factor, and South Africa is about as bad as it gets on this planet of ours.
For Africa. But please q.f. Brain Drain.
I don't understand what you mean. You think Nairobi has more wifi users than Joburg or Cape Town?
Kenya is located a few short ms away from Europe, the Middle East, and India, as the packet flies. And South Africa, for that matter. It's got a reasonably well educated population, for the region, and something approaching stability. It's on a coast soon to be blessed with life-giving fibre-optic cable. Labour costs are very low, English is widely spoken, and people would be very grateful for a nice white-collar IT job. It's an unconventional choice but far from an illogical one.
Thanks! Just playing with it now, it looks excellent. That tip alone was worth all the time I wasted on Slashdot today.