"Inserting an easter-egg is now a fireable offense"
This should result in less easter eggs. Great. It's not the easter eggs I was worried about, they're harmless. I'm more worried about the auditing process that allows several pages of code with unknown or unapproved funcionality to be slipped past management and into shipping.
And once again Micrsoft does something to create the 'appearance' of improved security, without doing the slightest thing about the underlying problem.
This has always worried me. Microsoft have at one time or another made a lot of fuss about how 'some unknown person could slip a backdoor into Linux'
If some programmers at Microsoft with too much free time can slip an entire fucking _flight simulator_ into a business product and get it shipped past management, how safe does that make you feel about Microsoft products in general?
In New Zealand just a few years ago, an induhvidual was spoofing his number through an ISDN connection (probably ANI rather than caller-ID) to access the voicemail of local politicians, media personalities, and police stations.
It's _very_ common for voicemail systems to trust caller-ID and/or ANI and skip other authentication based on it, by default. It's also become a lot more common (with digital phone sytems and VoIP gateways) for small business and private phone users to get direct access to this level of the phone system, where previously it was only accessable to the largest customers and within the phone system itself.
Standard procedure for a really huge number of websites; after you enter your credit card via 128-bit SSL it gets mailed in plaintext from the webhost to the company handling the orders. That's if you're lucky. Sometimes it will get appended to a textfile of orders which is accessable via the webserver if you know the right 'secret' url.
Also don't hang out on 'carding' irc channels. Credit card details are so freely available those guys trade a minumum of 1,000 at a time for a few dollars. If you only want a dozen you can just sit around and collect the free samples..
mofo is a trademark of Morrison & Foerster. I'm not sure if they actually registered it as such, but their website is www.mofo.com and they're rather fond of the image that they're 'nobody to be messed with'.
And considering that they are in fact a law firm of approximately a thousand lawyers spread through 19 global offices, they probably aren't the kind of firm you want to get into a trademark war with.
... ability to use javascript is for simple things like form validation and contacting websites. It can be used to authenicate a user trying to read a document with a security server, for example.
Because what the world really needs is yet another document and/or image format that lets you includecode or download code when the document is opened.
I think we should try to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Why limited times? copyright is a tradeoff between providing the incentive to create, and the harm that a monopoly on ideas creates. Incentive falls off exponentially; Walt Disney made films believing they would only be protected for 14 years, and it's unlikely he would have been any more inspired knowing that his heirs would continue to profit for another 90 years beyond his death.
On the other hand, harm is at least directly proportional. A copyright lasting 28 years keeps the material out of the public domain twice as long as a copyright of 14 years. It may even be worse, since a copyright of 90 years beyond the authors death means copyright holders are often unknown and many works of art will have perished before they can be legally copied and archived on a more long-life media.
'Exclusive rights' should extend only to publishing; where money is paid for copies. Personal copying and any sort of transformative use should be no business of the copyright holder.
"He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The first and foremost consideration should always be "progress of the sciences and useful arts" as a whole. Always ask yourself "Where is the promotion of progress?" Without that, there is no foundation of Congressional power and therefore no basis in law.
What percentage of hardware currently has drivers for FreeBSD on Intel vs. the percentage that has drivers for XP on Intel?
It's not just a different chipset, it's a different operating system. If Apple have the source to build their OSX-on-PPC drivers or the hardware is already supported in FreeBSD, they can probably port that 'relatively easily'. The existence of Windows drivers is utterly, totally irrelevent.
I'm using kubuntu, which is one of the more user-friendly distributions.
The printmanager dialog gives me a choice of print server;
cups
generic
LPD
LPR/LPRng
RLPR
I'm a big advocate of Linux on the desktop, but there are too many different ways of doing things and they do not all need to be included in every distribution by default. Ubuntu is a step in the right direction; they've mostly chosen one way of doing things and packaged all the software to be consistent with that. The printer management still needs work.
Third-party apps don't always work out so well.
vlc provides a good example of 'how to do things right' - there's a default option that works. All the other options are still available but hidden with an 'advanced settings' checkbox.
mplayer is an example of how not to do it. The defaults for mplayer didn't work too well on my system.
I get the following choices for audio output;
arts
esound
alsa
oss
sdl
mpegp
polyp
jack
nas
and for video output;
xv
x11
gl
gl2
sdl
xmga
dfbmga
xvidix
I had to play for quite a while to find a combination that worked.
Yeah, that was a pain. A few years back I was trying to get certs issued for the small webhosting operation I was working at, and we didn't _have_ letterheads. I had to mock something up in Gimp to fax to them. Real security there!
If you hadn't thought about it I assume you'd be keeping those records on your computer, where Google gets access to them almost as fast as you write them.
If you had thought about it and decided it was a serious risk you'd probably go for the simpler and more sensible option; remove google desktop search completely.
I have a similar complaint. Trying to find drivers for any particular hardware is quite difficult. When I search for "s3 trio" I would like to end up somewhere in "www.s3graphics.com" who make the fscking card, not "softwarepatch.com" or those total fucking leeches at "driversguide.com" who do nothing but collect your email address, leech drivers that were available from the manufactureres anyhow, and host (for googlebait) messageboard full of lamers asking for drivers that they could have found first hit from the OEM if sites like driversguide didn't exist!
Imagine the quality of the Linux kernel if anyone could submit a patch, and we relied on people noticing harmful patches and reversing them. Would Linux even be useable?
Now imagine the quality of infomation Wikipedia could scale to if it applied the same model the kernel uses; a number of mailing lists which host open discussion of each proposed change, and a group of knowledgable editors that accept revisions only only when the group agrees that they're factually correct.
Microsoft could easily have crushed him like a bug, and you know it. They only didn't because the whole world was watching and it would have been bad PR.
Not true. They listen first. A farady cage stops signals getting -in- as well as -out-.
Cellphone towers send out their ID almost continuously, sort of like WIFI access points. If the phone can't hear a cell tower broadcasting it won't even bother transmitting.
Only if they can hear a tower they'll try transmitting, and then step up the power until the tower acknowledges them.
Linus doesn't really give a shit about the whole Free Software philosophy. Sure Linux is GPL but he really doesn't care about binary drivers like nVidia, propriatory applications that run on Linux, or even DRM and Trusted Computing.
Thus it's called the "Linus" model (gratis) and not the "Richard" model (libre)
I understand Google also mentions at the bottom of the page when results have been omitted, much the same as they do for DMCA removals.
Besides the government of china is blocking those websites, not google. As much as anything google's just removing results that the chinese won't be able to see anyhow. I'd be pretty annoyed if I look something up on Google and the first few pages of results are all 404.
The only other alternative would be for google to stay out of china. That'd be a loss for the 99.9% of chinese who don't know or particularly care about tianimen square or falungong and just want to do regular, non-controversial searches on stuff that interests them. It'd be a loss for the 0.1% that do, and aren't being told by yahoo or msn that their results are being censored by the government.
I've thought long and hard about the issue and I can't think of anything less evil that google could have done in this situation.
I've often left cans of beer in the freezer to cool them, and occasionally I forget and leave them in there a few hours too long. The beer remains liquid as long as it's still under pressure, but when you open the can it freezes into an unpourable slush in seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
"Inserting an easter-egg is now a fireable offense"
This should result in less easter eggs. Great. It's not the easter eggs I was worried about, they're harmless. I'm more worried about the auditing process that allows several pages of code with unknown or unapproved funcionality to be slipped past management and into shipping.
And once again Micrsoft does something to create the 'appearance' of improved security, without doing the slightest thing about the underlying problem.
This has always worried me. Microsoft have at one time or another made a lot of fuss about how 'some unknown person could slip a backdoor into Linux'
If some programmers at Microsoft with too much free time can slip an entire fucking _flight simulator_ into a business product and get it shipped past management, how safe does that make you feel about Microsoft products in general?
Who says they never used that ability?
How do you think they found out about the explosives?
Foam insulation my ass.
You wish.
In New Zealand just a few years ago, an induhvidual was spoofing his number through an ISDN connection (probably ANI rather than caller-ID) to access the voicemail of local politicians, media personalities, and police stations.
It's _very_ common for voicemail systems to trust caller-ID and/or ANI and skip other authentication based on it, by default. It's also become a lot more common (with digital phone sytems and VoIP gateways) for small business and private phone users to get direct access to this level of the phone system, where previously it was only accessable to the largest customers and within the phone system itself.
and the advantage of this over an RFID card using a challenge-response sequence is.. ?
Don't ever work in web hosting then..
Standard procedure for a really huge number of websites;
after you enter your credit card via 128-bit SSL it gets mailed in plaintext from the webhost to the company handling the orders. That's if you're lucky. Sometimes it will get appended to a textfile of orders which is accessable via the webserver if you know the right 'secret' url.
Also don't hang out on 'carding' irc channels. Credit card details are so freely available those guys trade a minumum of 1,000 at a time for a few dollars. If you only want a dozen you can just sit around and collect the free samples..
mofo is a trademark of Morrison & Foerster. I'm not sure if they actually registered it as such, but their website is www.mofo.com and they're rather fond of the image that they're 'nobody to be messed with'.
And considering that they are in fact a law firm of approximately a thousand lawyers spread through 19 global offices, they probably aren't the kind of firm you want to get into a trademark war with.
... ability to use javascript is for simple things like form validation and contacting websites. It can be used to authenicate a user trying to read a document with a security server, for example.
Because what the world really needs is yet another document and/or image format that lets you include code or download code when the document is opened.
One day they'll learn. Apparently it isn't today.
I think we should try to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Why limited times? copyright is a tradeoff between providing the incentive to create, and the harm that a monopoly on ideas creates. Incentive falls off exponentially; Walt Disney made films believing they would only be protected for 14 years, and it's unlikely he would have been any more inspired knowing that his heirs would continue to profit for another 90 years beyond his death.
On the other hand, harm is at least directly proportional. A copyright lasting 28 years keeps the material out of the public domain twice as long as a copyright of 14 years. It may even be worse, since a copyright of 90 years beyond the authors death means copyright holders are often unknown and many works of art will have perished before they can be legally copied and archived on a more long-life media.
'Exclusive rights' should extend only to publishing; where money is paid for copies. Personal copying and any sort of transformative use should be no business of the copyright holder.
"He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The first and foremost consideration should always be "progress of the sciences and useful arts" as a whole. Always ask yourself "Where is the promotion of progress?" Without that, there is no foundation of Congressional power and therefore no basis in law.
Sanity check? YOU FAIL!
What percentage of hardware currently has drivers for FreeBSD on Intel vs. the percentage that has drivers for XP on Intel?
It's not just a different chipset, it's a different operating system. If Apple have the source to build their OSX-on-PPC drivers or the hardware is already supported in FreeBSD, they can probably port that 'relatively easily'. The existence of Windows drivers is utterly, totally irrelevent.
I'm using kubuntu, which is one of the more user-friendly distributions.
The printmanager dialog gives me a choice of print server;
cups
generic
LPD
LPR/LPRng
RLPR
I'm a big advocate of Linux on the desktop, but there are too many different ways of doing things and they do not all need to be included in every distribution by default. Ubuntu is a step in the right direction; they've mostly chosen one way of doing things and packaged all the software to be consistent with that. The printer management still needs work.
Third-party apps don't always work out so well.
vlc provides a good example of 'how to do things right' - there's a default option that works. All the other options are still available but hidden with an 'advanced settings' checkbox.
mplayer is an example of how not to do it. The defaults for mplayer didn't work too well on my system.
I get the following choices for audio output;
arts
esound
alsa
oss
sdl
mpegp
polyp
jack
nas
and for video output;
xv
x11
gl
gl2
sdl
xmga
dfbmga
xvidix
I had to play for quite a while to find a combination that worked.
Yeah, that was a pain. A few years back I was trying to get certs issued for the small webhosting operation I was working at, and we didn't _have_ letterheads. I had to mock something up in Gimp to fax to them. Real security there!
and you'd be keeping those details where?
If you hadn't thought about it I assume you'd be keeping those records on your computer, where Google gets access to them almost as fast as you write them.
If you had thought about it and decided it was a serious risk you'd probably go for the simpler and more sensible option; remove google desktop search completely.
I have a similar complaint. Trying to find drivers for any particular hardware is quite difficult. When I search for "s3 trio" I would like to end up somewhere in "www.s3graphics.com" who make the fscking card, not "softwarepatch.com" or those total fucking leeches at "driversguide.com" who do nothing but collect your email address, leech drivers that were available from the manufactureres anyhow, and host (for googlebait) messageboard full of lamers asking for drivers that they could have found first hit from the OEM if sites like driversguide didn't exist!
I'll go take my meds now..
Imagine the quality of the Linux kernel if anyone could submit a patch, and we relied on people noticing harmful patches and reversing them. Would Linux even be useable?
Now imagine the quality of infomation Wikipedia could scale to if it applied the same model the kernel uses; a number of mailing lists which host open discussion of each proposed change, and a group of knowledgable editors that accept revisions only only when the group agrees that they're factually correct.
Microsoft could easily have crushed him like a bug, and you know it. They only didn't because the whole world was watching and it would have been bad PR.
Don't expect them to last. Just ask Samantha Bucks or Mike Rowe.
But not too difficult if it's in a copper-mesh bag.
Not true. They listen first. A farady cage stops signals getting -in- as well as -out-.
Cellphone towers send out their ID almost continuously, sort of like WIFI access points. If the phone can't hear a cell tower broadcasting it won't even bother transmitting.
Only if they can hear a tower they'll try transmitting, and then step up the power until the tower acknowledges them.
He never seemed to care before. Richard must be getting to him :-)
Linus doesn't really give a shit about the whole Free Software philosophy. Sure Linux is GPL but he really doesn't care about binary drivers like nVidia, propriatory applications that run on Linux, or even DRM and Trusted Computing.
Thus it's called the "Linus" model (gratis) and not the "Richard" model (libre)
I understand Google also mentions at the bottom of the page when results have been omitted, much the same as they do for DMCA removals.
Besides the government of china is blocking those websites, not google. As much as anything google's just removing results that the chinese won't be able to see anyhow. I'd be pretty annoyed if I look something up on Google and the first few pages of results are all 404.
The only other alternative would be for google to stay out of china. That'd be a loss for the 99.9% of chinese who don't know or particularly care about tianimen square or falungong and just want to do regular, non-controversial searches on stuff that interests them. It'd be a loss for the 0.1% that do, and aren't being told by yahoo or msn that their results are being censored by the government.
I've thought long and hard about the issue and I can't think of anything less evil that google could have done in this situation.
KHAAAAN!
That's a great arguement.
Now all you need is to match the RIAA dollar-for-dollar in lawyers fees and you just might have a case!
Or beer.
I've often left cans of beer in the freezer to cool them, and occasionally I forget and leave them in there a few hours too long. The beer remains liquid as long as it's still under pressure, but when you open the can it freezes into an unpourable slush in seconds.