MD5 doesn't use public/private keys. It actually doesn't use any keys at all. It just produces a short checkum (a short string such as "aa44cfb..."), that you can compare with another checksum later, in order to tell if anything has changed.
That said, it can still be useful-- for example if you get the MD5 checksums from the "main distribution site" or whatever, and then download the actual files from a mirror. That said, a (PGP|GPG) signature is still better.
This post isn't intended to be offensive, but given the thread that has developed about Biblical creation stories, it seemed somewhat appropriate, if also a bit offtopic. Let's go!
If you're going to make such strong claims please at least back them up [...]
I'm curious how one would come to the conclusion that the creation story of the Old Testament was inspired by the Judeo-Christian God. I am interested in having these strong claims backed up, if possible. The writer of the first post in this thread remarks that:
I believe Genesis was inspired by God, but written though a person.
However, I am not aware of any reason for holding such a belief vs. not holding such a belief. Perhaps there are two options, let's call them (A) and (B).
First, (A) someone might come up with a rational proof for the existance of the Judeo Christian God and the fact that He influenced the text of the Bible. Unfortunately, no such proof has ever been successful. The "Proof By Design", "Ontological Argument", "Cosmological Argument" and such have all been shown to be flawed. (For example, there seems to be an exhaustive
list
available. I know the source may be seen as biased, but the same information can be gleamed from any decent introductory book on this history of philosophy.)
The real problem behind the problem is the nature of God Himself. If you make the conception of God specific and complex, for example by claiming that He is benevolent or tripartite, rational undisputable proof becomes extremely difficult (impossible?). I'd wager that to justify the idea of a complex God, one would have to use (B) the justification by faith. None of the traditional proofs of God, such as those outlined by
Aquinas
get us closer to specific attributes; they only argue for raw existance. This other extreme, the claim that God is simple, takes such forms as: God is everything, God is love, etc. This won't do either, because then God just becomes synomonous with "Universe" (in the first case) and won't be able to be used to defend any particular creation story or moral teaching, at least as far as I am aware of.
Second, (B) someone might hold that God wrote the Bible on the basis of a justification by faith. The idea behind the justification by faith seems to be that somehow this knowledge is 'extra-rational', so one just has to have faith in the fact that it is true. If justification by faith is itself justified, what should we have faith in? There are three possible answers.
Take it as an assumption that justification by faith is correct.
1) Have faith in everything. This will lead us to have faith in the Christian conception of God, the Judaic conception of God, the Islamic conception of God and Greek Pantheon, etc. We will have to believe that the Quran is absolutely true, the Bible absolutely true, and Greek mythology is absolutely true. I don't think many people will want this. In the ethical sphere of religious teachings, it would necessarily lead to complete ethical relativism: i.e. anything anyone justified by faith would be justified (human sacrifice, murder, etc.). Furthermore-- and more importantly-- since we are admitting the general correctness of the justification by faith methodology, we will be unable to criticize others as having incorrect morality. For example if a murderer has faith that murder is what God wants, we are forced to accept his justification by faith (just as our own must be accepted) and cannot say that the murder is then wrong.
2) Have faith in nothing. This would lead to extreme skepticism, so we don't have to deal with it.
3) Have faith in some things but not others. This looks like it would have to be the method if we want to support belief in God without leading to complete ethical subjectivism like (1) did. Unfortunately, (3) is not a solution to the problem at all. If we are to have faith in some things and not others, what critera should we use to decide what to have faith in? If the answer is reason, then we have to deal with (A) again-- trying to determine rational proofs for the existance of the Judeo-Christian God and of His having influenced the writing of the Bible. But there are no good rational proofs. If the answer is faith itself, then we must go back to (B) and start over, which is clearly nonsensical.
Therefore, as (2) and (3) will not allow us to coherently achieve a justification by faith, (1) is the only option left. So when we start out assuming that a justification by faith is valid, we find that it necessarily requires us to be complete moral subjectivists. Since that kind of subjectivism undermines the project of the ethical teachings of the major monotheistic world religions (including Christianity), the justification by faith cannot be used to justifiy Christianity.
Imagine a person who'd been raised without the idea of religion at all, who has been presented with all the world's religions (past and present) and asked to choose. What choice should he make? Let's assume that all of them claim to be the true religion, and that we cannot hold all of them because many of them have conflicting teachings. Justification by faith appears inable to provide a method for correct choice in this situation. Unfortunately, reason seems also unable to help us without a valid argument.
I don't. If someone has replaced an RPM then they can probably replace a
simple MD5 sum as well. Unless of course the hashes are stored at a different, secure location. But how many vendors do that?
What you should be checking are PGP signatures.
Assuming, of course, that you can be sure that you have a legitimate public key. Even so, the damage that could be caused by replacing a company's public key on their website or a keyserver would be slim to none. Only the people who download the new key before the change is caught would be effected.
You obviously never had SUSEconfig re-generate your carefully handcrafter sendmail.cf. I just wondered if the guy who wrote it was being paid by Microsoft or a Debian nut when it first happened to me.
I've never used SUSE, but I used Slackware a long time ago, and have since then run a number of production Debian and Redhat servers. That said, I'm a bit puzzled by your comment, since it seems to imply that Debian eats local changes to configuration files. (I won't discuss Redhat.)
It's quite easy to set up Debian systems without any sort of automatic configuration. Changes to configuration files are always options provided for the user's convience, not something forced on him or her.
AFAIK there are only two possible ways that a configuration will have anything changed by the Debian package manager:
1. When you upgrade a package, your are given the *option* of using the package-supplied configuration file instead of your own. However, the default is to keep your own.
2. The first time you install a package, you are given the *option* of having debconf automatically manage the configuration files for you. (At least in the latest Debian versions; debconf didin't exist IIRC a few years ago.) Debconf is just a program that keeps track of configuration information. The configuration files (eg. XF86Config) that I've used it for are extensively commented as to what parts debconf will change, and what parts it will not. This makes it possible to change things by hand and still use the automatic configuration stuff.
Of course, if you chose to install linuxconf or one of the other GUI configuration utilities, it might overwrite your manual changes. But I don't think that it's legitimate to blame Debian for that. Linuxconf is just a package among others that Debian provides in order to give users the widest set of options possible. I'm sure that if you installed linuxconf on Slackware you'd get the same resuslts.
Is there any specific example of Debian destroying a configuration file that I'm missing here?
You really should be careful about when to brand MS a monopoly and hate them for it, and when not to.
I tried to phrase the last paragraph of my post in a was that was neutral with regards to one's actual position on the monopolism of Microsoft. Since, obviously, this is a not uncommon thing to happen in buisness, I didin't want to go the next step and say that it's somehow "wrong", or "evil", but only to suggest that for some people it might be considered "wrong-for-monopolies".
What MS did with Halo was typical of *any* business. They do not deserved to be punished for it. Punish them for what they're doing wrong.
If I am reading this correctly, what you are suggesting is that "right" and "wrong" are to be defined in terms of what is normative for a particular group. This is not an inconsistant view, but I don't think that upon reflection everyone will agree with it.
This is a little bit of a digression, but it may prove enlightening so I'll proceed anyways. Please note the implications of such a move. Sweatshops may be claimed to be "right" for the garment industry, in this sense, because they are so common. Or, in the early 19th century United States, slave labor could be said to be "right" for cotton growing buisnesses in the south because it was the most common way to do buisness. This may seem like an extreme example. However, it's only meant to show that most people seem to consider "right" and "wrong" to be somehow seperated from what it simply the norm for a group. Of course, arguments for these kinds of teleogical ethical theories can be made, but they have been shown time and time again to imply unwanted consequences. (See, for example, John Rawls's criticism of Utilitarianism and teleological views in general in _A Theory Of Justice_).
Don't let your hatred for MS cause you to give power to somebody who's WORSE.
I actually agree with what you say, for the most part, about Sony and Nintendo being ruthless. However, please don't assume that by one making the claim that what Microsoft did was bad-for-monopoly necessarily entails that one hold that Sony or Nintendo are good and/or that one must suppport said companies by purchasing from them. If one thinks that the XBox is bad because it's made by a bad company, there is no reason to infer that one must necessarily support any other video game console maker. It seems entirely possible for one to be ethically consistant by supporting none of them.
To return to the original question at hand-- because I feel that we may have veered off course a little bit-- I still am not convinced that Microsoft actively stopped the porting of Halo for reasons having to do with the game itself. I am also still not convinced that there is a good reason to purchase an XBox. As I stated previously, "Microsoft just wanted to push the XBox." Let's assume for a moment that it is not a monopoly, and even that it was never convicted of being one. Even in this hypothetical case, there would be a good reason for someone to not buy an XBox. For example, if someone valued similtaneous multi-platform releases, it would be perfectly rational for such a person to intentionally not buy the XBox/Halo combo. By not making such a purchase, one is showing that they do not agree with single-platform game releases.
I should also add that I think that supporting multi-platform releases is a good thing, or at least seems so prima fascie, for the consumer. I would imagine that being able to play a game that I enjoyed on both my XBox, Windows PC, or whatever, would be much more useful and more conductive to enjoyment that single-platform releases; after all, I might want to play somewhere where there is one type of computer/OS/console and not the other.
Your argument is based on the assumption that they designed the game initially for the XBox and then would have to exert large amounts of resources to port it to other systems. After all, if the game already more or less ran on a multitude of systems, releasing it on as many as possible would obviously make the greatest amount of raw sales of the game possible.
The fact of the matter is that the company that designed the game, Bungie, had an extensive history of releasing multi-platform games similtaneously (for example, Myth II). That is, before they were bought by Microsoft.
When Halo was in development, the official line was that, again, it was going to be a similtaneous MacOS/Windows release. That's why Steve Jobs could show it to everyone at Macworld. Extensive work had already been done on the MacOS version. It was only after Microsoft bought the company that the game was delayed for other platforms than the XBox.
Also, if the APIs for the XBox and Windows are the same (or so similar, apparently both use DirectX or Direct3D or whatever) then it would suggest that even extensive development work done after the takeover would easily apply to both platforms. So, even assuming that continued MacOS development was too costly or time consuming, (even though the game had been in development for a long time before the similtaneous release was nixed), what would MS have to lose by also releasing it for Windows? Only sales.
MS probably did this because it wanted to get a flagship game on the XBox: one that wasn't available anywhere else, and would act as an incentive to buy their console. This seems much more reasonable than the claim that the sales on anything other than XBox are just too horrible to support such a release.
Microsoft just wanted to push the XBox. It wanted it's console to succeed. Such a thing may or may not be so bad depending on your world view. To those that think MS is a monopoly, it probably seems like another example of it squashing competing platforms in favor of their own.
Before you rush to place the usual blame on intellectual property, look at the results of the study.
Clearly, self-interest is at play here -- not an unlikely quest for riches from patenting (the odds of which are somewhat akin to playing the lottery), but the more mundane quest for tenure and grant funding.
Although everything you state is factually accurate, I can't help but wonder about this. The results of the study as published by JAMA are from cards that they mailed out to people. In other words, the study is simply examining the claims that the respondants chose to make, not the truth.
Now, I would expect people to be fairly straightforward about whether or not they had been denied in a request for additional information. There is really no reason that I can concieve of to misrepresent this. But how open are people going to be if they're engaged in a pursuit for money which requires secrecy?
Of course, one might point out that this is a fairly-anonymous sort of survey, and that because of this people might tend to be truthful and open. But that doesn't give us any conclusive evidence about the intentions of the people in filling in these cards. Outside of the fact that information is not being shared, I myself consider much of the rest of the survey of little value, leaving the question of greed (be it for grants or patenting) an open one.
Slashdot Mirror
MD5 doesn't use public/private keys. It actually doesn't use any keys at all. It just produces a short checkum (a short string such as "aa44cfb..."), that you can compare with another checksum later, in order to tell if anything has changed.
That said, it can still be useful-- for example if you get the MD5 checksums from the "main distribution site" or whatever, and then download the actual files from a mirror. That said, a (PGP|GPG) signature is still better.
This post isn't intended to be offensive, but given the thread that has developed about Biblical creation stories, it seemed somewhat appropriate, if also a bit offtopic. Let's go!
If you're going to make such strong claims please at least back them up [...]I'm curious how one would come to the conclusion that the creation story of the Old Testament was inspired by the Judeo-Christian God. I am interested in having these strong claims backed up, if possible. The writer of the first post in this thread remarks that:
I believe Genesis was inspired by God, but written though a person.However, I am not aware of any reason for holding such a belief vs. not holding such a belief. Perhaps there are two options, let's call them (A) and (B).
First, (A) someone might come up with a rational proof for the existance of the Judeo Christian God and the fact that He influenced the text of the Bible. Unfortunately, no such proof has ever been successful. The "Proof By Design", "Ontological Argument", "Cosmological Argument" and such have all been shown to be flawed. (For example, there seems to be an exhaustive list available. I know the source may be seen as biased, but the same information can be gleamed from any decent introductory book on this history of philosophy.)
The real problem behind the problem is the nature of God Himself. If you make the conception of God specific and complex, for example by claiming that He is benevolent or tripartite, rational undisputable proof becomes extremely difficult (impossible?). I'd wager that to justify the idea of a complex God, one would have to use (B) the justification by faith. None of the traditional proofs of God, such as those outlined by Aquinas get us closer to specific attributes; they only argue for raw existance. This other extreme, the claim that God is simple, takes such forms as: God is everything, God is love, etc. This won't do either, because then God just becomes synomonous with "Universe" (in the first case) and won't be able to be used to defend any particular creation story or moral teaching, at least as far as I am aware of.
Second, (B) someone might hold that God wrote the Bible on the basis of a justification by faith. The idea behind the justification by faith seems to be that somehow this knowledge is 'extra-rational', so one just has to have faith in the fact that it is true. If justification by faith is itself justified, what should we have faith in? There are three possible answers.
Take it as an assumption that justification by faith is correct.
1) Have faith in everything. This will lead us to have faith in the Christian conception of God, the Judaic conception of God, the Islamic conception of God and Greek Pantheon, etc. We will have to believe that the Quran is absolutely true, the Bible absolutely true, and Greek mythology is absolutely true. I don't think many people will want this. In the ethical sphere of religious teachings, it would necessarily lead to complete ethical relativism: i.e. anything anyone justified by faith would be justified (human sacrifice, murder, etc.). Furthermore-- and more importantly-- since we are admitting the general correctness of the justification by faith methodology, we will be unable to criticize others as having incorrect morality. For example if a murderer has faith that murder is what God wants, we are forced to accept his justification by faith (just as our own must be accepted) and cannot say that the murder is then wrong.
2) Have faith in nothing. This would lead to extreme skepticism, so we don't have to deal with it.
3) Have faith in some things but not others. This looks like it would have to be the method if we want to support belief in God without leading to complete ethical subjectivism like (1) did. Unfortunately, (3) is not a solution to the problem at all. If we are to have faith in some things and not others, what critera should we use to decide what to have faith in? If the answer is reason, then we have to deal with (A) again-- trying to determine rational proofs for the existance of the Judeo-Christian God and of His having influenced the writing of the Bible. But there are no good rational proofs. If the answer is faith itself, then we must go back to (B) and start over, which is clearly nonsensical.
Therefore, as (2) and (3) will not allow us to coherently achieve a justification by faith, (1) is the only option left. So when we start out assuming that a justification by faith is valid, we find that it necessarily requires us to be complete moral subjectivists. Since that kind of subjectivism undermines the project of the ethical teachings of the major monotheistic world religions (including Christianity), the justification by faith cannot be used to justifiy Christianity.
Imagine a person who'd been raised without the idea of religion at all, who has been presented with all the world's religions (past and present) and asked to choose. What choice should he make? Let's assume that all of them claim to be the true religion, and that we cannot hold all of them because many of them have conflicting teachings. Justification by faith appears inable to provide a method for correct choice in this situation. Unfortunately, reason seems also unable to help us without a valid argument.
Come on, how many of you check those MD5s?
I don't. If someone has replaced an RPM then they can probably replace a simple MD5 sum as well. Unless of course the hashes are stored at a different, secure location. But how many vendors do that?
What you should be checking are PGP signatures.
Assuming, of course, that you can be sure that you have a legitimate public key. Even so, the damage that could be caused by replacing a company's public key on their website or a keyserver would be slim to none. Only the people who download the new key before the change is caught would be effected.
You obviously never had SUSEconfig re-generate your carefully handcrafter sendmail.cf. I just wondered if the guy who wrote it was being paid by Microsoft or a Debian nut when it first happened to me.
I've never used SUSE, but I used Slackware a long time ago, and have since then run a number of production Debian and Redhat servers. That said, I'm a bit puzzled by your comment, since it seems to imply that Debian eats local changes to configuration files. (I won't discuss Redhat.)
It's quite easy to set up Debian systems without any sort of automatic configuration. Changes to configuration files are always options provided for the user's convience, not something forced on him or her. AFAIK there are only two possible ways that a configuration will have anything changed by the Debian package manager:
1. When you upgrade a package, your are given the *option* of using the package-supplied configuration file instead of your own. However, the default is to keep your own.
2. The first time you install a package, you are given the *option* of having debconf automatically manage the configuration files for you. (At least in the latest Debian versions; debconf didin't exist IIRC a few years ago.) Debconf is just a program that keeps track of configuration information. The configuration files (eg. XF86Config) that I've used it for are extensively commented as to what parts debconf will change, and what parts it will not. This makes it possible to change things by hand and still use the automatic configuration stuff.
Of course, if you chose to install linuxconf or one of the other GUI configuration utilities, it might overwrite your manual changes. But I don't think that it's legitimate to blame Debian for that. Linuxconf is just a package among others that Debian provides in order to give users the widest set of options possible. I'm sure that if you installed linuxconf on Slackware you'd get the same resuslts.
Is there any specific example of Debian destroying a configuration file that I'm missing here?
You really should be careful about when to brand MS a monopoly and hate them for it, and when not to.
I tried to phrase the last paragraph of my post in a was that was neutral with regards to one's actual position on the monopolism of Microsoft. Since, obviously, this is a not uncommon thing to happen in buisness, I didin't want to go the next step and say that it's somehow "wrong", or "evil", but only to suggest that for some people it might be considered "wrong-for-monopolies".
What MS did with Halo was typical of *any* business. They do not deserved to be punished for it. Punish them for what they're doing wrong.
If I am reading this correctly, what you are suggesting is that "right" and "wrong" are to be defined in terms of what is normative for a particular group. This is not an inconsistant view, but I don't think that upon reflection everyone will agree with it.
This is a little bit of a digression, but it may prove enlightening so I'll proceed anyways. Please note the implications of such a move. Sweatshops may be claimed to be "right" for the garment industry, in this sense, because they are so common. Or, in the early 19th century United States, slave labor could be said to be "right" for cotton growing buisnesses in the south because it was the most common way to do buisness. This may seem like an extreme example. However, it's only meant to show that most people seem to consider "right" and "wrong" to be somehow seperated from what it simply the norm for a group. Of course, arguments for these kinds of teleogical ethical theories can be made, but they have been shown time and time again to imply unwanted consequences. (See, for example, John Rawls's criticism of Utilitarianism and teleological views in general in _A Theory Of Justice_).
Don't let your hatred for MS cause you to give power to somebody who's WORSE.
I actually agree with what you say, for the most part, about Sony and Nintendo being ruthless. However, please don't assume that by one making the claim that what Microsoft did was bad-for-monopoly necessarily entails that one hold that Sony or Nintendo are good and/or that one must suppport said companies by purchasing from them. If one thinks that the XBox is bad because it's made by a bad company, there is no reason to infer that one must necessarily support any other video game console maker. It seems entirely possible for one to be ethically consistant by supporting none of them.
To return to the original question at hand-- because I feel that we may have veered off course a little bit-- I still am not convinced that Microsoft actively stopped the porting of Halo for reasons having to do with the game itself. I am also still not convinced that there is a good reason to purchase an XBox. As I stated previously, "Microsoft just wanted to push the XBox." Let's assume for a moment that it is not a monopoly, and even that it was never convicted of being one. Even in this hypothetical case, there would be a good reason for someone to not buy an XBox. For example, if someone valued similtaneous multi-platform releases, it would be perfectly rational for such a person to intentionally not buy the XBox/Halo combo. By not making such a purchase, one is showing that they do not agree with single-platform game releases.
I should also add that I think that supporting multi-platform releases is a good thing, or at least seems so prima fascie, for the consumer. I would imagine that being able to play a game that I enjoyed on both my XBox, Windows PC, or whatever, would be much more useful and more conductive to enjoyment that single-platform releases; after all, I might want to play somewhere where there is one type of computer/OS/console and not the other.
Your argument is based on the assumption that they designed the game initially for the XBox and then would have to exert large amounts of resources to port it to other systems. After all, if the game already more or less ran on a multitude of systems, releasing it on as many as possible would obviously make the greatest amount of raw sales of the game possible.
The fact of the matter is that the company that designed the game, Bungie, had an extensive history of releasing multi-platform games similtaneously (for example, Myth II). That is, before they were bought by Microsoft.
When Halo was in development, the official line was that, again, it was going to be a similtaneous MacOS/Windows release. That's why Steve Jobs could show it to everyone at Macworld. Extensive work had already been done on the MacOS version. It was only after Microsoft bought the company that the game was delayed for other platforms than the XBox.
Also, if the APIs for the XBox and Windows are the same (or so similar, apparently both use DirectX or Direct3D or whatever) then it would suggest that even extensive development work done after the takeover would easily apply to both platforms. So, even assuming that continued MacOS development was too costly or time consuming, (even though the game had been in development for a long time before the similtaneous release was nixed), what would MS have to lose by also releasing it for Windows? Only sales.
MS probably did this because it wanted to get a flagship game on the XBox: one that wasn't available anywhere else, and would act as an incentive to buy their console. This seems much more reasonable than the claim that the sales on anything other than XBox are just too horrible to support such a release.
Microsoft just wanted to push the XBox. It wanted it's console to succeed. Such a thing may or may not be so bad depending on your world view. To those that think MS is a monopoly, it probably seems like another example of it squashing competing platforms in favor of their own.
Before you rush to place the usual blame on intellectual property, look at the results of the study.
Clearly, self-interest is at play here -- not an unlikely quest for riches from patenting (the odds of which are somewhat akin to playing the lottery), but the more mundane quest for tenure and grant funding.
Although everything you state is factually accurate, I can't help but wonder about this. The results of the study as published by JAMA are from cards that they mailed out to people. In other words, the study is simply examining the claims that the respondants chose to make, not the truth.
Now, I would expect people to be fairly straightforward about whether or not they had been denied in a request for additional information. There is really no reason that I can concieve of to misrepresent this. But how open are people going to be if they're engaged in a pursuit for money which requires secrecy?
Of course, one might point out that this is a fairly-anonymous sort of survey, and that because of this people might tend to be truthful and open. But that doesn't give us any conclusive evidence about the intentions of the people in filling in these cards. Outside of the fact that information is not being shared, I myself consider much of the rest of the survey of little value, leaving the question of greed (be it for grants or patenting) an open one.