Years ago I worked for a company where one of the first things I did was point out to them that all their internal user identifiers was easily guessable, and would allow anyone to do free international phone conferencing on 30 channels per session. The crack team of developers at corporte HQ then got to work, and proudly presented an update that was "secure" according to the guy that wrote it because they base64 "encrypted" the ID. Not only did they have some silly notion that base64 magically provided security, but they also hadn't done anything about the non-random allocation of user identifiers.
They finally got the point after I e-mailled them a base64 decoder (after first shocking them by demonstrating how I could instantaneously "decrypt" the ids), and a separate script that would brute force all their user identifiers with wget in minutes... (I think presenting them with the user IDs that would have allowed me to download the CEO's address book and charge conference calls to his account was the most enjoyable part)
Let's just say that it wasn't the last security vulnerability...
The X protocol IS extensible. Exactly what do you think the shared memory extension uses? Or Xv? Or DRI? Or XRender? The X protocol was designed specifically with extension in mind. Now, I can think of quite a few thing in the X protocol that sucks, but lack of extensibility is not one of them.
The "slowdown" of optimizations for X is not a result of the protocol, but of the complexity of the task. Look at all the alternative GUI's available for Linux, and take a look at the number of drivers they support and the feature set - most of them are highly specialized because the amount of work that needs to go into a general purpose GUI system to make it useful is simply staggering, and few people have the skills to do it well.
Extending the X protocol is the easy, almost trivial, bit.
And why exactly do you think providing the minimum set of X primitives that is needed to support most widget sets is any harder than porting several widget sets?
They can, but it stops them from abusing someone elses from address, meaning at least the domain name can be tracked back to them, which would be a huge win. One of the largest problems with spam today is that you can be 90% sure that the from address of the message is invalid, and you might have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where the spam originated if you want to complain. With this proposal spammers would be forced to use domains that had a connection of some sort with who they are or where they are sending from.
The most important consequence though, would be for all the people who wouldn't have their mail boxes made useless by spammers who abuse their address in the from field, resulting in tens of thousands of complaints and bounces suddenly ending up with them (in my previous job we operated a webmail service for a while, and saw that happen all the time, including at least one time as a malicious attack on an anti-spammer by a spammer who apparently found it entertaining to mail out fake ads for child porn with the anti-spammers e-mail address in the from field and his phone number and home address in the body of the message)
Presumably your from address contains a domain name? So how will this stop you from sending mails from machines without a domain? The suggestion is that the domain you claim to be sending from publishes a list of accepted IPs to send from. The only consequences is that you will have to either route your e-mail through a server that "knows" you by some means (SMTP AUTH for instance) OR the IPs in question needs to be on the list for your from address.
The term "natural law" is usually applied to basic principles that have more or less held throughout most civilisations. In that respet intellectual "property" rights are certainly not elements of "natural law". In fact calling it intellectual "property" in the first place is misleading, since it's certainly not property - patents and copyrights grant you much narrower rights.
More significantly, these laws are relatively new - they come from British common law, when the crown used to grant monopolies as favors or to make money.
Keep in mind that a large part of the early US progress was a result of blatantly violating those laws. Later, both patents and copyrights have been adopted as tools that may spur innovation, and thus may warrant the limitation in what is seen as the natural right to copy, use and spread information temporarily because it will ultimately lead to more work that will enter the public domain.
It's a cute idea to assume that natural law is based just on opinion and belief, but that's just not true. Copyright and patent law on the other hand is historically a recent phenomenon.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Try again. Public domain in this case refers to copyright, where it has a very specific meaning: it is the exact opposite of copyright. If a work is in the public domain, it is NOT copyrighted, and no copyright restrictions apply to it. Putting a work in the public domain means you are explicitly relinquishing your copyright protections. If you want to use a public domain work for commercial purposes, you can, as much as you want, including "making it properietary" if you are able to prevent other people from gaining access to the source.
Comparing access to property and copyright is futile, since copyright was conceived specifically because ideas and information is so fundamentally different from property.
Your comparison gets weaker, because parks and roads most certainly is not in the "public domain" in any sensible way. Parks and roads are owned property. Often they are owned by a national government, or a local government. Sometimes by companies or private individuals. But almost always there are clear property rights.
An unclaimed territory would be mostly equivalent to public domain software - anybody could take it and claim ownership of it and do as they please with it. And yes, in that case, you could just occupy some space of it and start using it for your commercial purpose.
Yes, well, I'd assume that you don't usually get computer viruses from your snail mail in the first place anyway, and I haven't so far seen any reports of biological viruses turning into scripts when scanned, so I don't really see how automatically generated PDF would make your snail mail any safer...
Which is kind of hard to do if you happen to be on the other side of the world... Redirecting your mail just to get it scanned is kind of pointless. Redirecting your mail to get it made available to you independent of your physical location is not.
Re:You have got to be kidding!!!
on
Snail Mail As E-Mail
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Presumably a company making a living of this will be careful about who they hire. So the reduction in risk of identity theft would be from having a small set of strangers who rely on their customers trust to make money open your mail instead of some strangers who happen to be a criminal intent on stealing everything you've got going on a rampage through your mailbox every now and again.
Re:No Thanks: If They Scan It, They Can Read It
on
Snail Mail As E-Mail
·
· Score: 1
Read their site - if you need a hardcopy, you ask them to forward it to whatever address you're currently at. They store all the mail for you until you tell them what to do with it.
And yeah, if you're in the UK obviously you'd be stupid to redirect all your mail to Australia, which is why they specifically say that their service is only available for Australia...
As for security, of course they can read it. If they do, and do something with the information, they would quickly go out of business - wait and see whether they develop a good reputation if you're worried.
Re:explain again why this is a value add??
on
Snail Mail As E-Mail
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You miss the main purpose: If I'm out travelling a lot it would be a hassle to make arrangements to make sure I receive any important mail. I might not stay long enough in one place to be able to rely on normal mail forwarding. Or I might simply want to be able to check my snail mail from whenever I happen to be, instead of waiting for a pile of paper when I get home.
"fast flash" is an oxymoron. Flash is slow slow slow. You most certainly don't want to execute code straight from flash unless your system is ridiculously slow anyway.
Just copying a kernel or a suspend image from flash will give a quite noticeable delay.
And take a look at swsusp - restarting a suspended kernel is NOT trivial. You need to reinitialise hardware, some of which may not allow you to read back their state (graphics cards being a common culprit) so that you need to know what state they were in on suspend.
In order for them to be violating the GPL all they have to do is distribute a SINGLE copy of a GPL'd program and not abide by the license terms. They don't need to have as much as looked at the code for that to be the case.
In this case they are trying to insist that parts of Linux is not GPL'd, and that recipients of the code therefore don't have the rights awarded under the license - the downside of that is that if that is the case the software can't legally be distributed without violating the copyright of every single copyright holder who do assert the GPL as the license of THEIR contribution to the kernel. Since IBM is one of them, they are suing.
Compression on high bandwidth links will usually INCREASE latency, not reduce it (but increase effective capacity). Compression on low bandwidth links may sometimes reduce latency as a side effect if the compression is high enough to allow a compressed packet to be received fast enough to make up for the lag introduced by the compression. Keep in mind that compression takes time, and so the higher your bandwidth, the higher chance that the time taken to compress a package is higher than the time you save because of reduced transmission time.
Latency today is often more a result of distance (speed of light DOES make a significant difference for interactive protocols once you start getting distances like across the atlantic) and equipment - every router will slow things down, even if it just briefly evaluate package headers and shove the package onto the next network as quickly as it can, both because of processing, but also because encoding/decoding a package to/from whatever wire format is used always take time.
One argument would be that the Republican party wouldn't be carrying out commercial speech by calling you - commercial speech has much less protection than other speech. This is a long standing doctrine in US constitutional law.
Denying political speech would essentially set the bill up for a potential legal challenge on first ammendment basis that would be much tougher to defend it from than a bill that restricts only commercial speech.
Now all they need to do is sue IBM and threaten all Linux users with license fees, and announce merger talks with SCO and they'll be on Slashdots front page continuously.
(No offence meant to the Lindows guys - I'm in no way comparing them to SCO - just pointing out another way of getting free publicity on Slashdot:-) )
I agree about Cygnus Ed - I still haven't found any editor I'm even remotely as comfortable with as that. Jed is the closest I've gotten to something usable.
And Arexx. The language is a nightmare, but having almost every app scriptable with a common scripting language, letting you "remote control" one app from any other was heaven.
And Screens. Even thought splitting the screen with multiple resolutions isn't really doable on modern hardware, it would still be nice (though I think some version of Enlightenment supported it for X).
And placing the application menubar at the top of the screen - frees up so much screen real estate.
Deluxe Paint, or a similar quality SIMPLE paint program (sorry, Gimp just doesn't cut it - not even remotely - Photogenics sort of works on X, but it's bug ridden)
Datatypes!
Assigns, though that is FINALLY making an appearance of sorts in X based desktops with multi rooted virtual filesystem support.
A quick, responsive GUI - my 2GHz x86 based PC with a GeForce, and 512MB RAM is still less responsive most of the time than my Amiga 500 was...
AsmOne, now that actually made assembly programming pleasurable (of course 68k assembly was a dream compared to the horrible hack that is x86)
And DiskMaster II or DOpus...
And Workbench. It's embarrassing that file managers under X either are slower, or is a nightmare to work with compared to a basic file management interface that's didn't change fundamentally after '86.
Damn, I want my Amigas again now... Maybe it's time to give Aros a spin:)
In "Starmaker", Olaf Stapledon, 1937, wrote "Stars are best regarded as living organisms, but organisms which are physiologically and psychologically of a very peculiar kind. The outer and middle layers of a mature star apparently consists of 'tissues' woven of currents of incandescent gases. These gasous tissues live and maintain the stellar consciousness by intercepting part of the immense flood of energy that wells from the congested and furiously active interior of the star". So plasma as living cells isn't exactly a new thing in scifi.
Any references older than 1937?:)
(Btw. Starmaker is quite interesting, though I find Stapledons writing rather tedious - it's essentially fictional history of life in the universe, from beginning to end; spanning billions of years in a few hundred pages)
China is changing, but it is changing slowly. The current government survives on ignorance. As more of the population becomes educated, democracy will assert itself. I think most Americans would be surprised by how much the Chinese government is already influenced by the will of the people.
I think this is key. Most people seem to look at China, look at the censorship, and the fact that it IS for all practical purposes a dictatorship (yes, there are elections, and it is theoretically possible for candidates not favoured by the central government to get elected, but only because it won't make a difference), and assume the government is doing whatever it can to shaft people.
What they forget is that the Chinese government still is heavily controlled by people who were involved in the revolution/civil war or the rebuilding, who were certainly not in it for personal power for the most part, and who in many cases spent years fighting a war for a chance to rebuild China.
While they don't accept any considerable amount of dissent, and while there certainly has been plenty of incompetence, especially early on, they have been focusing hard on bringing China from a poor agricultural economy exploited by the British and the Japanese to one of the fastest growing economies ever.
They have also put in a huge effort to increase education, to build infrastructure, a health system and social security (though it's still weak compared to Europe, for instance) and essentially reshape Chinese society.
It doesn't in any way excuse lack of democracy, but it does perhaps explain why they aren't facing widespread organized resistance. The government survives on ignorance as you said perhaps, but it also survives because most of its faults and most of its oppression is a result of ignorance and self protection rather than the outright malice of for instance the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Slashdot Mirror
They finally got the point after I e-mailled them a base64 decoder (after first shocking them by demonstrating how I could instantaneously "decrypt" the ids), and a separate script that would brute force all their user identifiers with wget in minutes... (I think presenting them with the user IDs that would have allowed me to download the CEO's address book and charge conference calls to his account was the most enjoyable part)
Let's just say that it wasn't the last security vulnerability...
This is a patent workaround, not a "feature". It's not meant to add value. They might as well make it say "Work around broken paten system? [YES]"
The "slowdown" of optimizations for X is not a result of the protocol, but of the complexity of the task. Look at all the alternative GUI's available for Linux, and take a look at the number of drivers they support and the feature set - most of them are highly specialized because the amount of work that needs to go into a general purpose GUI system to make it useful is simply staggering, and few people have the skills to do it well.
Extending the X protocol is the easy, almost trivial, bit.
And why exactly do you think providing the minimum set of X primitives that is needed to support most widget sets is any harder than porting several widget sets?
Let Google and thousands of news servers archive all your data for you.
The most important consequence though, would be for all the people who wouldn't have their mail boxes made useless by spammers who abuse their address in the from field, resulting in tens of thousands of complaints and bounces suddenly ending up with them (in my previous job we operated a webmail service for a while, and saw that happen all the time, including at least one time as a malicious attack on an anti-spammer by a spammer who apparently found it entertaining to mail out fake ads for child porn with the anti-spammers e-mail address in the from field and his phone number and home address in the body of the message)
Presumably your from address contains a domain name? So how will this stop you from sending mails from machines without a domain? The suggestion is that the domain you claim to be sending from publishes a list of accepted IPs to send from. The only consequences is that you will have to either route your e-mail through a server that "knows" you by some means (SMTP AUTH for instance) OR the IPs in question needs to be on the list for your from address.
More significantly, these laws are relatively new - they come from British common law, when the crown used to grant monopolies as favors or to make money. Keep in mind that a large part of the early US progress was a result of blatantly violating those laws. Later, both patents and copyrights have been adopted as tools that may spur innovation, and thus may warrant the limitation in what is seen as the natural right to copy, use and spread information temporarily because it will ultimately lead to more work that will enter the public domain.
It's a cute idea to assume that natural law is based just on opinion and belief, but that's just not true. Copyright and patent law on the other hand is historically a recent phenomenon.
The fact that you became a "convert to FreeBSD" clearly show that you're not part of "most Windows users"...
Comparing access to property and copyright is futile, since copyright was conceived specifically because ideas and information is so fundamentally different from property.
Your comparison gets weaker, because parks and roads most certainly is not in the "public domain" in any sensible way. Parks and roads are owned property. Often they are owned by a national government, or a local government. Sometimes by companies or private individuals. But almost always there are clear property rights.
An unclaimed territory would be mostly equivalent to public domain software - anybody could take it and claim ownership of it and do as they please with it. And yes, in that case, you could just occupy some space of it and start using it for your commercial purpose.
Yes, well, I'd assume that you don't usually get computer viruses from your snail mail in the first place anyway, and I haven't so far seen any reports of biological viruses turning into scripts when scanned, so I don't really see how automatically generated PDF would make your snail mail any safer...
Which is kind of hard to do if you happen to be on the other side of the world... Redirecting your mail just to get it scanned is kind of pointless. Redirecting your mail to get it made available to you independent of your physical location is not.
Presumably a company making a living of this will be careful about who they hire. So the reduction in risk of identity theft would be from having a small set of strangers who rely on their customers trust to make money open your mail instead of some strangers who happen to be a criminal intent on stealing everything you've got going on a rampage through your mailbox every now and again.
And yeah, if you're in the UK obviously you'd be stupid to redirect all your mail to Australia, which is why they specifically say that their service is only available for Australia...
As for security, of course they can read it. If they do, and do something with the information, they would quickly go out of business - wait and see whether they develop a good reputation if you're worried.
You miss the main purpose: If I'm out travelling a lot it would be a hassle to make arrangements to make sure I receive any important mail. I might not stay long enough in one place to be able to rely on normal mail forwarding. Or I might simply want to be able to check my snail mail from whenever I happen to be, instead of waiting for a pile of paper when I get home.
Just copying a kernel or a suspend image from flash will give a quite noticeable delay.
And take a look at swsusp - restarting a suspended kernel is NOT trivial. You need to reinitialise hardware, some of which may not allow you to read back their state (graphics cards being a common culprit) so that you need to know what state they were in on suspend.
In this case they are trying to insist that parts of Linux is not GPL'd, and that recipients of the code therefore don't have the rights awarded under the license - the downside of that is that if that is the case the software can't legally be distributed without violating the copyright of every single copyright holder who do assert the GPL as the license of THEIR contribution to the kernel. Since IBM is one of them, they are suing.
Latency today is often more a result of distance (speed of light DOES make a significant difference for interactive protocols once you start getting distances like across the atlantic) and equipment - every router will slow things down, even if it just briefly evaluate package headers and shove the package onto the next network as quickly as it can, both because of processing, but also because encoding/decoding a package to/from whatever wire format is used always take time.
Denying political speech would essentially set the bill up for a potential legal challenge on first ammendment basis that would be much tougher to defend it from than a bill that restricts only commercial speech.
Are you really so naive that you believe that telemarketers needs that list to get peoples contact details?
(No offence meant to the Lindows guys - I'm in no way comparing them to SCO - just pointing out another way of getting free publicity on Slashdot :-) )
Price was another. The 68k was ridiculously expensive in the beginning.
And Arexx. The language is a nightmare, but having almost every app scriptable with a common scripting language, letting you "remote control" one app from any other was heaven.
And Screens. Even thought splitting the screen with multiple resolutions isn't really doable on modern hardware, it would still be nice (though I think some version of Enlightenment supported it for X).
And placing the application menubar at the top of the screen - frees up so much screen real estate.
Deluxe Paint, or a similar quality SIMPLE paint program (sorry, Gimp just doesn't cut it - not even remotely - Photogenics sort of works on X, but it's bug ridden)
Datatypes!
Assigns, though that is FINALLY making an appearance of sorts in X based desktops with multi rooted virtual filesystem support.
A quick, responsive GUI - my 2GHz x86 based PC with a GeForce, and 512MB RAM is still less responsive most of the time than my Amiga 500 was...
AsmOne, now that actually made assembly programming pleasurable (of course 68k assembly was a dream compared to the horrible hack that is x86)
And DiskMaster II or DOpus...
And Workbench. It's embarrassing that file managers under X either are slower, or is a nightmare to work with compared to a basic file management interface that's didn't change fundamentally after '86.
Damn, I want my Amigas again now... Maybe it's time to give Aros a spin :)
Any references older than 1937? :)
(Btw. Starmaker is quite interesting, though I find Stapledons writing rather tedious - it's essentially fictional history of life in the universe, from beginning to end; spanning billions of years in a few hundred pages)
I think this is key. Most people seem to look at China, look at the censorship, and the fact that it IS for all practical purposes a dictatorship (yes, there are elections, and it is theoretically possible for candidates not favoured by the central government to get elected, but only because it won't make a difference), and assume the government is doing whatever it can to shaft people.
What they forget is that the Chinese government still is heavily controlled by people who were involved in the revolution/civil war or the rebuilding, who were certainly not in it for personal power for the most part, and who in many cases spent years fighting a war for a chance to rebuild China.
While they don't accept any considerable amount of dissent, and while there certainly has been plenty of incompetence, especially early on, they have been focusing hard on bringing China from a poor agricultural economy exploited by the British and the Japanese to one of the fastest growing economies ever.
They have also put in a huge effort to increase education, to build infrastructure, a health system and social security (though it's still weak compared to Europe, for instance) and essentially reshape Chinese society.
It doesn't in any way excuse lack of democracy, but it does perhaps explain why they aren't facing widespread organized resistance. The government survives on ignorance as you said perhaps, but it also survives because most of its faults and most of its oppression is a result of ignorance and self protection rather than the outright malice of for instance the Soviet Union under Stalin.