Err, it's SLACKware. The idea has ALWAYS been that it was to be user-friendly, and not involve unnecessary work. They just never joined the camp that decided to mangle a good vanilla Linux install with all sorts of upstream changes.
If you really want l33t points, for every package you want to install, write your own slackbuild script. For those more geared toward efficiency, however, there's checkinstall.
Oh, and of course, in the meantime, I wouldn't worry too much about not seeming l33t by using slackware. That it's an ncurses based installation process is l33t enough to frighten off most noobs these days, who've been spoiled by GUI livecd's with a single-click to "install". Arch seems to be the only other mainstream distro whose primary installation method is non-GUI...even Gentoo has a livecd these days.
The thing is, every WiFi access point I've come across ships with instructions, which have all (again, in my experience) advised enabling security on the router. That people may not read these instructions, or follow them, seems nothing worth basing a law on. And I'd certainly not advocate it being legal to crack WPA/WPA2/WEP (even it if may at times be trivial), based on the fact that by setting security settings on the router, the owner has indicated that access to it and the traffic that it handles is to be private. Irresponsible use of technology (which is exactly what failure to read the minimal documentation that comes in the manual routers ship with is) is nothing that government should have any business reinforcing.
Beyond this, it also boils down to a simple matter of legislation offering nothing but a false sense of security to begin with, as passive sniffers are just about impossible to detect in action. The only thing making use of them on unencrypted wifi illegal would change would be the subsequent steps taken once data has been gathered. So instead of sniffing the traffic, and then using what was captured directly as evidence (in the case of a law enforcement sniff), the police would instead sniff the traffic, and then proceed to using the data to direct further investigation to acquire admissible evidence. In the meantime, absolutely nothing would be done to change the fact that due to ignorance, people are still leaving their personal information wide out in the open for anyone with a wifi card and tcpdump (or any of the other tools that'll do the job) to grab. Personally, I'd much favor the relatively brief growing pains while people realize how their radio transceiver equipment works and subsequent GAINS in privacy than using simple legislation to provide a false sense of security.
And that is correct. I do admit there will be growing pains. I'm sure a few people will get pinched for illegal or unseemly activity while they (unreasonably) expected it to be a private matter. While this is regrettable, I fully expect the subsequent large-scale changes in behavior will prevent far more people from having their privacy breached, by criminals rather than law enforcement (if we insist on distinguishing between the two in the first place...). And I think that, given that reality, even your average still-as-yet ignorant American, would agree that in the long run, this court decision is the right one. I could be wrong (or simply putting too much faith in the rational capacities of the average American), but that's the way I see it.
Even better: Bio-luminiscent color e-ink, to remove the need to use as much power for a display that is yet still visible in the dark (though to be fair, there are some VERY energy-efficient booklights on the market which do the job well enough, even if a bit clunky). As for what kind of stimulus would be needed to trigger the bioluminescence, well, that's beyond my knowledge.
It actually takes far less knowledge and far simpler equipment to tap a land-line telephone than to intercept wifi content. So by your logic, it should be legal to tap telephones. After all, the wires are right there in public. You can see them on the poles and running to the houses, with your own eyes. No electronics needed.
The difference here is that the wires are private property, and tapping them requires attaching something to them (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this Slashdot...this would surprise me). Radio waves, on the other hand, are not, and listening to them in no way affects any private property, but rather, is simply a matter of grabbing signal from a public radio frequency. There should be no problem with this.
The problem is that people are ignorantly using devices that transmit radio waves. It is similar to speaking about private matters in front of a microphone that is on, which a hypothetical subect owns and placed in front of himself in the on position because he didn't know what a microphone was, and then being surprised that his privately spoken words were audible to the public. This does occasionally happen in the world (though usually, not in as simple a way). It's embarassing, and may potentially cause problems. It's in particular a good anecdote for why people probably shouldn't use technology which they do not bother to first learn to use, lest they invite peril.
I'm not convinced that we need a law to protect ignorant use of tools. Tools that are dangerous to other people, we often require licensing to own or use (as in the case of automobiles and certain types of weaponry, among other things). But there isn't a good case to be made for requiring a license for using the technologies in question, as the risks tend to fall to the user, rather than those around the user (though I do believe anyone operating a computer-based service that egregiously mishandles customer information should be liable for the results thereof). Basically, I think people should probably recognize that like many tools, using wireless networking technology is not without risk. If they choose to educate themselves or not is up to them, but they should expect to have no one to blame for their ignorance but themselves. The alternative invites a very awkward legal future.
Having drank Coke that was at least a few years old (but definitely no more than 10 at the very most), and felt the ensuing gastrointestinal holocaust, I will assure you that it will stay fresh for far less time than you seem to be assuming. God...I think that just triggered a PTSD flashback response...
I think there may be something to be said in regards to this being the field of Psychiatry. This may be weird, but honestly, for both myself and other people I've known, there's a strong disconnect with how we view telephones and VoIP, simply due to the computer element (Don't ask me to explain it; I can't. I know that modern phones ARE computers, but give me a computer to talk through, and I'm fairly comfortable. Make me do it via a phone, and all I'm thinking about is finally getting to hang the damn thing up). Now, that probably can't be all that universalized, but to say that there's no difference may be to ignore the nuances of the human psyche. Technologically speaking, of course, you're correct. Both are merely transporting voice communications.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, it's SLACKware. The idea has ALWAYS been that it was to be user-friendly, and not involve unnecessary work. They just never joined the camp that decided to mangle a good vanilla Linux install with all sorts of upstream changes.
If you really want l33t points, for every package you want to install, write your own slackbuild script. For those more geared toward efficiency, however, there's checkinstall.
Oh, and of course, in the meantime, I wouldn't worry too much about not seeming l33t by using slackware. That it's an ncurses based installation process is l33t enough to frighten off most noobs these days, who've been spoiled by GUI livecd's with a single-click to "install". Arch seems to be the only other mainstream distro whose primary installation method is non-GUI...even Gentoo has a livecd these days.
The thing is, every WiFi access point I've come across ships with instructions, which have all (again, in my experience) advised enabling security on the router. That people may not read these instructions, or follow them, seems nothing worth basing a law on. And I'd certainly not advocate it being legal to crack WPA/WPA2/WEP (even it if may at times be trivial), based on the fact that by setting security settings on the router, the owner has indicated that access to it and the traffic that it handles is to be private. Irresponsible use of technology (which is exactly what failure to read the minimal documentation that comes in the manual routers ship with is) is nothing that government should have any business reinforcing.
Beyond this, it also boils down to a simple matter of legislation offering nothing but a false sense of security to begin with, as passive sniffers are just about impossible to detect in action. The only thing making use of them on unencrypted wifi illegal would change would be the subsequent steps taken once data has been gathered. So instead of sniffing the traffic, and then using what was captured directly as evidence (in the case of a law enforcement sniff), the police would instead sniff the traffic, and then proceed to using the data to direct further investigation to acquire admissible evidence. In the meantime, absolutely nothing would be done to change the fact that due to ignorance, people are still leaving their personal information wide out in the open for anyone with a wifi card and tcpdump (or any of the other tools that'll do the job) to grab. Personally, I'd much favor the relatively brief growing pains while people realize how their radio transceiver equipment works and subsequent GAINS in privacy than using simple legislation to provide a false sense of security.
And that is correct. I do admit there will be growing pains. I'm sure a few people will get pinched for illegal or unseemly activity while they (unreasonably) expected it to be a private matter. While this is regrettable, I fully expect the subsequent large-scale changes in behavior will prevent far more people from having their privacy breached, by criminals rather than law enforcement (if we insist on distinguishing between the two in the first place...). And I think that, given that reality, even your average still-as-yet ignorant American, would agree that in the long run, this court decision is the right one. I could be wrong (or simply putting too much faith in the rational capacities of the average American), but that's the way I see it.
https://xkcd.com/435/
And physics is to sex as math is to masturbation.
Even better: Bio-luminiscent color e-ink, to remove the need to use as much power for a display that is yet still visible in the dark (though to be fair, there are some VERY energy-efficient booklights on the market which do the job well enough, even if a bit clunky). As for what kind of stimulus would be needed to trigger the bioluminescence, well, that's beyond my knowledge.
It actually takes far less knowledge and far simpler equipment to tap a land-line telephone than to intercept wifi content. So by your logic, it should be legal to tap telephones. After all, the wires are right there in public. You can see them on the poles and running to the houses, with your own eyes. No electronics needed.
The difference here is that the wires are private property, and tapping them requires attaching something to them (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this Slashdot...this would surprise me). Radio waves, on the other hand, are not, and listening to them in no way affects any private property, but rather, is simply a matter of grabbing signal from a public radio frequency. There should be no problem with this.
The problem is that people are ignorantly using devices that transmit radio waves. It is similar to speaking about private matters in front of a microphone that is on, which a hypothetical subect owns and placed in front of himself in the on position because he didn't know what a microphone was, and then being surprised that his privately spoken words were audible to the public. This does occasionally happen in the world (though usually, not in as simple a way). It's embarassing, and may potentially cause problems. It's in particular a good anecdote for why people probably shouldn't use technology which they do not bother to first learn to use, lest they invite peril.
I'm not convinced that we need a law to protect ignorant use of tools. Tools that are dangerous to other people, we often require licensing to own or use (as in the case of automobiles and certain types of weaponry, among other things). But there isn't a good case to be made for requiring a license for using the technologies in question, as the risks tend to fall to the user, rather than those around the user (though I do believe anyone operating a computer-based service that egregiously mishandles customer information should be liable for the results thereof). Basically, I think people should probably recognize that like many tools, using wireless networking technology is not without risk. If they choose to educate themselves or not is up to them, but they should expect to have no one to blame for their ignorance but themselves. The alternative invites a very awkward legal future.
Having drank Coke that was at least a few years old (but definitely no more than 10 at the very most), and felt the ensuing gastrointestinal holocaust, I will assure you that it will stay fresh for far less time than you seem to be assuming. God...I think that just triggered a PTSD flashback response...
I think there may be something to be said in regards to this being the field of Psychiatry. This may be weird, but honestly, for both myself and other people I've known, there's a strong disconnect with how we view telephones and VoIP, simply due to the computer element (Don't ask me to explain it; I can't. I know that modern phones ARE computers, but give me a computer to talk through, and I'm fairly comfortable. Make me do it via a phone, and all I'm thinking about is finally getting to hang the damn thing up). Now, that probably can't be all that universalized, but to say that there's no difference may be to ignore the nuances of the human psyche. Technologically speaking, of course, you're correct. Both are merely transporting voice communications.