"... a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat... "
Any news source or any so-called "expert" that labels any and every very different subset of internet-bound network protocols as "The Web" oughta be shot before having their balls severed.
"The Web" refers to HTTP.
IRC is not the web.
The internet is not the web.
CNN already never bore much credibility in my book. Such shallow and poorly-researched article, clearly begging for "public's attention", filled with buzz-words, and offering such a one-sided vision of issues at hand, clearly proves what I have believed all along.
Here's a free clue to CNN editors: when hackers *need* a way, they find it. If it's not IRC, then they'll gather on bulletin board systems. That'll be their big come-back. Because that's where they used to gather before that. And if that still doesn't do it, they'll gather on public web forums. And if that doesn't work, they'll come up with a peer-to-peer chat protocols with emphasis on communities. Most Instant Messaging systems already offer you that. It'll just get expanded. And if that still doesn't work, trust me, the demand *will* be there, and new network protocols will be created. To accomodate grass-roots communities. It is amazing the things you can do with TCP/IP. If the more popular IRC networks get snooped or shut-down, then many more little irc servers will rise. Anyone with a DSL connection a shitty old PC can download many free, open-source flavors of the popular "IRC Daemon" software, "ircd", and set-up a very reliable and fairly scalable IRC server. Get two people together on different connections and you have a network. Each server can have thousands of simultaneously connected users.
The point i'm trying to bring home here, is that there will *never* be a shortage of venues for hackers to go about their illicit business. It clearly is sad, as such practices and articles like this one tend to focus the public's opinion on restricting our own liberties to *absolutely NO CONCLUSIVE END*.
That article clearly mingles without any distinction the "underground" aspect of IRC with "anti-corporation" stance and "identity-theft hackers".
Lemme make this clear:
it is NOT OKAY to steal identity and be a hacker. it's lame too.
it IS OKAY to be against corporation-hosted chat networks and for grass-roots communities such as IRC.
it IS OKAY to prefer "less-popular" communities to find like-minded geeks, such as ones we'll find on IRC.
If CNN had any clue, any journalistic integrity, they would at least try to bring some of those points home in their article. But they keep quoting that same guy, over and over, with scary buzz-phrases and words your average american will just eat-up.
Next thing you know, parents will only allow their children to "hang out" on AOL chat-rooms. "No more IRC for you son, it's evil, CNN sez so, mm-MMM".
No. JavaScript *is* a *good* thing. when used properly that is. I understand the potentials for evil, but still, the gains way outweigh the cons.
There are numerous form-interaction, form-validation, elements of user interface which are *key* to basic functionality on many sites. And those are used properly. It alleviates the necessity for redundant back-and-forth clientserver interactions while allowing for early capture of user input.
What frustrated me in the first movie was Wesley Snipes in an intendedly tear-jerking soliloque telling that doctor he had rescued, the mysterious tale of his deeply tormented life, in a blatantly failed attempt to draw you into the character and offer some sort of unique insight into his "complex psyche". Had to love this quote "you have no idea... what it's like... to be me... *deep, tormented look*".
This was just an example. There were a few other similar scenes.
FORGET THAT. Get to the ass-whoopin' already.
Blade 2 fixed that. Less plot. Less dialogs. A couple good lines ("You... do not... KNOW... who you ARE... MESSING WITH !@(#") ("..OOOoooohh"). And more action. This was the whole reason why i went to see the movie. I wanted to see Snipes kick ass.
Oh yeah and also they introduced a hot vampire chick. Dark, mysterious, tight-fitted outfit, just like Trinity in the Matrix. mm-mmMM. Add some subtle erotism with blood-sucking action between Blade and Nisa. Most definetly gratifying. The first movie had no good lookin' chick whatsoever.
What I did like about the story, was Blade getting in closer touch with his vampire-side, partly thru unspoken romance/understanding with the vampire chick. I found this to be far more effective to show conflicts within Blade, than long-strung dialogs from the first movie. Blade is a man of action. not words. Whose ass he kicks and the manner in which he does it defines his relationship or attachment to other characters.
While flash would certainly allow one to greatly enhance a site's visual appeal, it will always have fundamental design and user-interface flaws, while steering sites away from valuable standards efforts.
One should not underestimate the importance industry-wide adoption, openness, and transparency of standards.
Flash files are binary files. Hence, their creation, authoring and implementation, rely *heavily* on macromedia's authoring tools, thereby "locking-you-in" a very restricted platform. Such authoring tools may be released for free at first, but easily "upgraded" to commercial versions in a near future. While you can easily author, maintain, update, enhance any web applications whose content and presentation layer are based on standards-implementation text files in a highly distributed and modular environment, authoring of flash files pretty much restricts access to your web application 's components to a single person, on a single computer. Then forget about source-control and revision-control, 'diffing' files for differences. It's all one big binary file.
Flash is a closed standard. Macromedia is the only, largely corporate entity to have full-control over their specifications.
Again, flash files are binary files. You cannot look inside them, re-author them, crawl them, search them for keywords without depending on macromedia opening-up text-only access to content of flash files.
Standards like CSS and XHTML are developed and enhanced to allow an end-user to have somewhat of a control over the resulting user-interface, by overriding a site's font faces, font colors, link styles, font sizes. Believe it or not but yes, there ARE, a *significant* amount of people out there who do have issues with what most web developers call "standards font faces and sizes" and allowing them to override those in the browser is a key factor in making a site accessible.
While it is highly possible to develop bandwidth-efficient compelling content in standards-based web applications, while giving users quick and selective access to the content they are looking for, it is overly tempting to create bloat-ware in the form of flash files. Flash does give you some form of control over an animation's behaviour while it is being downloaded, but a user remains "stuck" waiting for the animation to load. Forget about 56k users. Enter the DSL-only zone.
It breaks the HTTP model, with its derivative page navigation, page caching, history navigation paradigms. A flash file essentially becomes its own mini-browser, its own entire site, where screens are not individually cached, where the navigation cannot be overriden with "back" and "forward" buttons, where any ever-so-small flaw in the 'animation's' user-interface design, is bitterly fellt by the end-user.
A whole separate protocol would need to be developed to properly handle navigation within flash animations in order to fully fulfill macromedia's vision. And i honnestly do not thing they are up to the task.
You could also kiss any form of web applications' platform-independence good-bye. While I am sure macromedia is ready and eager to develop their plugin for os x/linux/windoz to work with ie/opera/mozilla/omniweb/navigator, the 'desktop computer' with a traditional web browser is no longer the only web-surfing paradigm. Sites like Google allow you to search HTTP/HTML sites on your cell-phone, while doing its best to "cast" HTML into a "WML" visualisation scheme. It is possible for hand-held device developers to build mini-browsers which understand a subset of the HTML standard, thereby allowing non-specially-authored sites to "gracefuly" degrade on those platforms. Now, what do we do with monolothic.swf binary files?
There are valuable standards being developed and already widely-adopted which allow site authors to greatly enhance a site's usability and appeal with "DHTML" features.
Don't get me wrong, I believe flash is a great site "spicer-upper", but solely relying on this technology within mission-critical and content-driven web applications would represent a real danger to the web-surfing community, which developers at-large should be aware of when deciding which technologies to adopt on their sites. Be sure to *know* exactly what audience you are catering to. *resist* hopping on the "next-cool-whizzbang-nifty-thing" band-wagon.
the above post shows exactly why everyone should be buying apple stuff. i've used x86 machines running windows 95 thru XP, redhat linux, apple machines from the old 'mac classic' with 40MB HD and 4MB RAM to early PCI macs (7500) to today's titanium powerbook, on system 6 (with multifinder) thru system 7, 7.6 (very stable), OS 9, linuxPPC Q4 2000 and now...
OS X on a titanium powerbook.
apple hardware and software has NEVER let me down thru various upgrades off either.
don't get me started on x86/windoz platforms.
i've had my gripes about apple OS 9 bloatware and lack of stability. 'tis why i was on windows 2000 for a while. boy was that painful. right when windows corrupted my hard drive with bad sectors and turned my dell laptop into a door-stop, apple's OS 10.1 was out.
So i switched.
boy. lemme tell you.
computing has never, EVER, been this fun, reliable, painless, stable, solid... sweet. And every single upgrade to OS 10, to today's 10.1.3 has been painless and brought a whole world of enhancements.
do you have any idea of the uptimes i get on my titanium powerbook? i've gone thru a whole MONTH without rebooting it. And that was to install the next upgrade.
Again, this is a LAPTOP, not a desktop server or workstation.
I take it home, i take it to work, i take it to my gilrfriend's place, i play DVDs, i import photos from my sony digital camera into iPhoto without installing any sony software, i rip CD's in iTunes and stick the songs on my iPod, i connect to the internet thru corporate LAN/static-ip, wireless LAN at my home, modem at my girl's place.
I export iPhoto albums to 'web site' directories in my home directory's linux-equivalent to public_html (~/Sites), i tar'em, i gzip'em, and upload them via ftp to a shell account of mine where i untar/gunzip'em for everyone to see (here). And that's because i was going a little crazy with iPhoto prior to this and filled-up my free 20MB account.
i run the NetBeans java IDE while coding web applications, i do heavy testing of those applications by running them off of a separate installation of tomcat, perform complex and very demanding 'ant' builds. i write shell scripts to perform common tasks. i grep/sed/awk/sort/uniq thru my filesystem.
I have a 435-lines/etc/hosts file filled with hosts pointing to 127.0.0.1 to filter ads.
I removed administrator privileges from my default/every-day user. So any application I run can only write stuff to my home directory. And this is how all OS X apps are designed anyway. Any aspect of an application's preferences are stored in a user's home directory. I can create a small roaming mirror of my home directory with all its libraries and apps preferences onto my iPod. I can go to a friend's house who's also running OS X. He can add me as a user on his box and point my home directory to the one located on my iPod.
and now...
I can finally run Photoshop.
woohooo.
it just gets sweeter and sweeter:)
Steve has done it. totally. I believe I can say with ample confidence that I'm His Bitch. He has taken me to the Nirvana of Computing and boy, i'm hooked.
And i fucking swear to you, give me 30 minutes with ANY GEEK who has been in the trenches of trying to run a powerful, reliable, flexible operating system for any length of time, for productive and mission-critical use, working out hardware/software/drivers incompatibilities to get it to do what they wanted it to. I'll open a few terminal windows in OS X, point them to a few applications, let them play around. I'll show'em how to 'force quit' out of an application that doesn't respond anymore while not affecting any other resource on the OS. I'll start clicking thru all the application icons i have in my 'dock' and watch them all launch at the same time, independently, while being able to switch thru individual windows of those applications, while the operating system appears to just be sitting there waiting for you to ask more from it.
yes. it is THAT sweet. and more.
why am i rambling? heck i don't know. i don't even own apple stock. Apple has turned the "cool" on, in a big freakin' way, and i just wanna make sure everyone knows about it. bah. just ignore me. i'm owned. heh:)
I'll second this opinion by adding that i've seen interesting conversations between technical support representatives and customers about "what mouse button to click", while walking around the call-center trenches of this fairly big ISP I work for. Trust me, if you worked here, you would just wish every novice computer user out there only had to deal with *one* mouse button. This way you could spend more time explaining them the differences between an "operating system" and a "web browser"... which is becoming harder and harder to explain to a windows user.
I personally get along fine using the control key for all right-click-equivalent shortcuts in OS X. The rest of the time I enjoy running my fingers over a very simple, nicely finished, slickly designed titanium powerbook track pad with *one* mouse button.
Face it. Apple makes cool shit. Anyone who bitches them out for doing so is 1) too poor to afford one, 2) jealous. Well. sux 2 b u guys >:D
First, keep in mind that we are not talking about "direct government involvment" in punishing bad software vendors. The government is merely pushing to have laws written to deal with flawed software. This should essentially enable common citizens and business entities to seek compensation from software vendors. So I just want to make sure everyone understands there really isn't a "big brother" thing going on here.
Second, if any laws are written, my guess is they would merely extend already existing more generic laws regarding false advertisement. Under such circumstances, software vendors would not be *required by law* to produce secure software. But, if their advertising campaign, sales representatives, software packages blatantly lead potential consumers to believe that their product is of "enterprise-level", "mission-critical-caliber", "secure", "reliable" or any such wording which implies "secure software", then the law could provide for some serious compensations to the harmed consumer.
To avoid endless legal battles over wording, the government should define an entity whose role would be to design, draft and maintain a *very specific* scale of security levels which defines strong standards for security features within software packages. The scale could not only provide very precise security requirements for software, but also standards type of compensation to the consumer for failure to meet each of its levels' standards.
Such scale should be massively advertised thru all media so consumers would know to look for a software package's rating on such scale before purchasing it for any mission-critical purpose.
We could let software vendors rate their own software packages according to this scale. If the scale is *specific-enough* and clearly defines levels of security, then consumers should have very strong cases to bring to class-action law-suits to seek compensation in the case such software should fail to meet all of the requirements defined by their advertised grade on the scale.
Such model would keep the government's involvment minimal and place all of the liabilities on the software vendor, so consumers don't ever have to seek compensation from some government-sanctioned entity which would assign ratings to software packages. We must keep in mind that computer software is by nature a highly volatile, constantly evolving, and rarely flawless type of product, as every new piece of software written is by nature "cutting-edge".
nifty gadgettery and score helper
on
Merry Christmas
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- i got my dad a really nice pair of sunglasses so he can scope chicks while looking insanely cool... that is... for the two weeks of the year where it doesn't rain in paris... but hopefuly he'll be able to scrounge some dough to come see me in los angeles.
- i sent my mom DHEA and a bunch of other bone-decay-and-other-menopause-symptoms-fighting dietary supplements which the french customs seized and are sending back to me. Next time i'll write "christmas candies" on the box. duh.
Dad gave me an iPod. sweet little toy. I had been wanting to buy one for myself, but was still on the fence. He read my mind.
Mom gave me a leather jacket! She pittied me when i showed up in Paris for the holiday in that dinky little jacket i wear in l.a. . Wait 'till my girl sees it when i get back huhuhuhu.
I just called that number per Fat Chuck's instructions and they're telling me that they don't have precise rules on clear labelling for CD's and stuff like that. They tell me they mainly handle other household appliances like fridges, heaters, and even clothing.
The lady gave me another phone number for california/los angeles area:
it is still very simple. their software license agreement, tho u may never read it, but explicetely forbids you from reverse-engineering or altering their code. Trashing CheckForOSX is doing just that. That hole was never documented for anyone to exploit it.
Apple clearly did not want you to use it, the fact that you "found it" is far from being relevant to the situation. Exploiting the hole clearly involves somehow altering their software. It is hence against the agreement u *contractually* accept by installing the software. You are contractually bound. The fact that you didn't read the contract doesn't render you immune to prosecution.
you are absolutely *totally* missing the point here.
It is not about "macfixit being the poor victim of some evil corporation bashing their constitutional rights with an army of law-sharks", it's simply about macfixit publishing information that is highly sensitive and potentially harmful to Apple's interests and Apple simply trying to defend themselves against obvious attempts of software piracy.
Just because that hole was easy to find, or because, you, with your "extensive programming experience", find the way they went about shipping a much-needed upgrade on-time... DUMB, does not give you any MORAL nor LEGAL right to go expose that security hole, nor should it give you any particular reason to feel like bashing Apple for trying to protect what's legally AND, i think, morally their legitimate intellectual property.
And Freedom-of-Speech does absolutely NOT give you the right to expose those holes. Freedom-of-Speech in fact, does not give you the right to divulge any infomation you *contractually* (purchasing the software, accepting the license agreement) accepted not to divulge.
1) Apple has absolutely every LEGAL RIGHT to send that cease-and-desist and chances are they'd win in court, hands-down. MacFixIt knows it. Again, their intention weren't bad, and pulling it out was the right thing to do and I doubt Apple would pursue any legal action since they complied.
2) I believe they have every MORAL RIGHT to do so as well. just read my original post again for the reasons. Again, Apple did not do anything wrongful to their user-base by shipping the 10.1 upgrade for free. It's not like Apple users have anything to protect themselves against which would warrant exploiting that hole. Their package-hole was *not* meant to be used, and exploiting it clearly goes against their license agreement. Now if you happen to have found the hole, congratulations, more power to you, it'll save you some time and headache, BUT it sure as hell is not "your holy duty" to go out there and shout it over the roofs just so you can look cool and let everyone get the full software for free. Because by doing that, you essentially are doing the exact same thing as publishing CD-KEYS for m$ windoz to everyone, which, of course, is illegal. If you do publish that information, then you play a gamble. You may get caught. You must accept the consequences. MacFixIt unintentionally gambled, got caught, got some *serious publicity* and acted responsibly. It is in both Apple's and MacFixIt's interests to stay in good terms anyway. MacFixIt got their bragging rights and a bunch of geeks on slashdot got to stupidly laugh at Apple by calling this whole thing "Apple Stupidity Leak", when most of those bad-mouthers, while at best savvy perl hackers, have no fucking idea what it takes to develop a complex piece of software that works and meet *strategic* deadlines with stockholders breathing down your neck.
3) anyone has the right to tell anyone to shut the fuck up. plz *resist* trolling this one.
4) i've never owned any Apple stock, in fact, until recently, i was a windoz user for over a year, since i got a pc laptop from my work. When i saw the power and potential of OS X, and with help from my boss, i got to score this nifty TiBook. Since then my productivity has quadrupled, and work has been more fun. Thanks to OS X. So yeah you're damn right i'm guna defend such a fine piece of software.
5) I really absolutely *HATE IT* when people make devious claims to Liberties I most definetly cherish and stand for just to make some noise and random bashing, or just because they don't think. Man, you wanna push my buttons, you just do that. And people sure do. heh. Oh well. After all, we're all exercising our Freedom of Speech.
You gotta give Apple developers some credit for crying out loud. If they packaged the upgrade the way they did, running the risk of someone mucking with their packages, it clearly had to be because it was easier *and* faster to do it that way.
Mac OS X 10.1 is a pure Jewel of an Operating System, and I for one like to see frequent major upgrades that acutally render my work more productive. And this one sure did.
Chances are I am not the only one thinking that.
So Apple saved time and figured their money would be better spent on lawyers sending out semi-generic cease-and-desist letters, rather than delaying the release of their upgrade by a few more months and miss the X-Mas rush.
Are they dumb? NO. It's about money. Time-to-Market translates directly into money. I'm sure they knew the risks they were taking and carefuly measured them.
Does the fact that they released a full working version of an operating system on a demo-disk harm the user in any way? NO. But that's what is unconsciously implied: "oh Apple made a quick upgrade hack that can easily be worked around, quick hacks are dumb, quick hacks are bad, so *I* as a geek, must absolutely go out there and make a big fucking fuss out of it so I can look cool and get some publicity out of it". Again, this is not microsoft quickly hacking their "Passport architecture", loading it with obvious security holes to make a deadline, thereby harming the greater computer user community, we're talking about a legitimate software upgrade that happens to give you more, MUCH more than what you bought.
Exploiting this for any other purpose than recovering from a failed upgrade is *wrong* and, indeed illegal. Beside, keep in mind that even if leveraging this weakness to shorten the installation process to recover from a broken upgrade may be *very* convenient *and* tempting, doing it the regular way, which was installing OS X 10.0.x and *then* using the OS X 10.1 upgrade as just that, an upgrade, still works. While this appears to be a cool, convenient hack to share with close friends and family to save them time, I do believe this information to be a little too sensitive to be permantently published on a web site for everyone to leverage. Again, this is *not* like a security hole, this is publishing information which deliberately violates the Software License Agreement.
MacFixIt most likely understands that.
Are they trashing freedom-of-speech? FUCK NO. Stay real guys and look at this whole thing for what it really is: a very simple, dumb hack which violates a very clear, simple, software license agreement. Software Vendors have those agreements so they can actually make money off of the shit they make. Duh.
MacFixIt handled the situation very maturely but anyone here invoking "freedom of speech" rights for this particular case is merely making a devious use of one of our most cherished inallienable rights, and such behaviour can easily become one day its most threatening enemy.
I found the exchange of letters to be fair and legitimate, I think both parties did have good reasons to do what they did. Apple are not sharks, neither are their lawyers, they build cool shit, *really* cool shit, and I think they're only legitimately attempting to protect their intellectual property. Nobody's rights are being violated, there is no reason to get on high horses.
On the other hand, if a company is actively supporting an particular immoral
Please. define immoral. Immoral according to whom? OUR system of beliefs? It is not OUR place to say what is immoral or not, it is up to the people of Saudi Arabia to define their own morality. The fact that these companies are actively pursuing business with Saudia Arabian leaders to enforce their censorship is highly irrelevant to the current situation. The point is that censorship software does not prevent or in any way limit the people of Saudi Arabia's ability to potentially overthrow their government. If anything they're offering a better alternative to more totalitarian measures their government would have to resort to without censorship.
And as I said in a previous post, *stop* hiding behind ideological rhetoric and assuming the way we currently live our lives is fit for any other country in the world. Remember that we got to where we are thru a painful evolution in our society, along with many other countries of what we consider "the free world". But not everyone is there. Not everyone is ready.
Just *think* for a second about the consequences of suddenly opening unrestricted access to the Internet to all Saudi Arabian citizens? Social changes can't happen overnite without complete chaos, and granting unrestricted access to the 'Net has to come from a deep yearning from the population who *will* have to change their society first to be ready it, and censored Internet can be a good way to give'em an idea that there is something out there, to spark curiosity.
Listen. If Saudi Arabia wants censorship software, i guarantee you they will find it. If it doesn't come from "those evil corporations" it'll come from a couple of greedy geeks ANYWHERE in the world. And if they can't find the technology, then guess what? They will *not* be allowed to access the internet, and Saudi Arabia's leaders' last recourse would be to get inside homes and confiscate computers and use force. At least filtering software can be worked around, hacked, backdoored, flaws can be found, information has chances of leaking. If anything, every time a Saudi citizen sees that "site not allowed" message, they *know* "something" is out there, they *know* their government is restricting their access to information. It's a start. It's better than no access at all. It gives them a chance to know there is more out there, and if they really want to find out more, they *will* find ways. And then it will be up to them to attack the source of their problem, if they indeed consider their government to be a problem.
Also your argumentation really hides behind ideallistic rhetoric without even seriously considering practical consequences: Saudi Arabia has been a truly Islamic monarchy for centuries, with their system of beliefs based on a very austere way of life, and very conservative values. This is not wrong or right. It's just the way THEIR society is structured. Are their people happy? Hard to tell. Probably not. Then again, define happiness? I won't go there. But what do you think would happen if you were to open the flood gates and, overnight, grant all citizens of Saudi Arabia full unrestricted access to the Internet??? Are you out of your f*cking mind? "Click here for HOT XXX TEENS!!!" "Wet and Horny". "YOU HAVE A MESSAGE WAITING, CLICK HERE " . To a Muslim who's only supposed to look at his Wife? Who are YOU, who are WE to cause such a revolution overnight?
The Internet was built and developed by FREE countries. The material that lives on the Internet is simply an extension of our system of beliefs.
We, as a people, are trained, to not look at inappropriate material, we *know* to not let our kids watch HBO late at nite, we *know* we must establish a dialog and a relationship of trust with our kids, so they'll listen to us when we tell'em to not go surf for porn instead of doing home-work. We have a legal system in place that allows us to sue companies putting inappropriate content on-line without prior "over 18" warning. Because all of our countries in the free world have pretty-much agreed that you gotta be 18 or older to look at smut and have wild steamy sex with whomever you want.
Saudi Arabia could not be any more radically different from our "free societies". Their religion happens to be the Religion of Islam. The people of Saudi Arabia happen to have been raised in a society where just about everyone is a devout Muslim. It is their way of life. Unlike Muslims who live in the United States and other democratic countries, they are not yet part of a society where information flows freely, yet allows you to remain faithful to your Religion. Hence the inherent compatibility with unrestricted access to the Internet.
If a revolution must happen, it shouldn't happen by opening the flood-gates of the Internet onto their society. It should happen by reforming their entire socio-political structure FIRST. They, as A People, should clearly define the democratization path of their society.
And that may mean overthrowing their government. But this is where it's got to start. This is where fingers should point. THAT, is the root of the problem, and the only solution to the problem. Those American Corporations you are blaming are merely helping enforce a current system of beliefs while offfering a far softer and more promising alternative to more totalitarian measures Saudi Arabia leaders would otherwise resort to.
Jon, by saying, "let's completely open the Internet to the people of Saudi Arabia", you're basically saying "Let's impose our system of beliefs onto them and cause chaos in a society that is not YET prepared for it".
And your repetitive and very poorly argumentated snides at American Corporations merely point out the fact that they are indeed making money off of the whole situation, thereby implying that making money off of the leaders of a non-democratic country is wrong, because this makes those American Corporations "part-of-the-problem-by-association":
Saudia Arabian Leaders are the root of the problem.
We make business deals with them.
==> We're part of the problem too!, Hence we make things much worse.
This, in a nutshell, seems to be your rhetoric. You are pointing out problems and not offering any decent, more researched alternative, while not acknowledging the depth of the problem and considering potential roots of the problem.
I'm simply a geek, and frankly, writing is so far from being part of my job description, it's not even funny, it's not even a hobby, heck I hate reading or writing. Yet, I stil believe your rant sucks more than mine.
Well for one OS X, is BSD unix at its core. You're not talking about a younger operating system like windows or traditional macos to which we grafted UNIX-like features like cygwin.
You're talking about a *true* unix at the core of the operating system, interacting with well-defined hardware, with all peripherals already working. All user-friendliness shortcomings of traditional unices have been taken care of in a very friendly GUI, "Aqua".
If you do not use the "classic environment" which insures compatibility with legacy applications, this thing flies.
You're looking at a fare more secure and high-performance operating system than windoz.
Plus, OS X being a BSD variant, you benefit from all the open-source servers and applications. This is why I was able to install the samba daemon to allow PC's to mount shares from my laptop, by simply downloading the standard samba distro and passing a few extra parameters. What does this mean?
AppleTalk clients can mount shares from my laptop.
Unix NFS clients can mount shares from my laptop.
PC Samba clients can mount shares from my laptop.
All of which can simply be, the laptop's ~user home directories. You can set permissions within your home folder that can be reflected accross all those network services.
That's one example.
But really. Your question is just like asking me to compare the advantages of running a true unix with a friendly interface on a laptop versus windows.
Arguments can be made in favor of either operating system. However, in that guy's case, he seemed to be strongly inclined to run a BSD variant on his laptop, which means he seems to be the most comfortable with a unix variant, so the OS X solution seems to make more sense for him. Now you might want to try to convince him to not use unix at all.
OH YAH true, it truly does look amazingly cool. Both the TiBook and OS 10.1's "Aqua" GUI.
I really like the Dock too. To me it serves 2 functionalities:
1) the stuff i use often is always right there for me to click on.
2) it allows me to establish a little routine of icons to click on when i start my work day. Depending on what kind of work day it is, i glance my way from the left to the right, and will skip the Snak IRC, iTunes and DVD player icons if i'm starting a hectic day, and right away launch microsoft entourage, omniweb, terminal, and BBEdit.
Since the TiBook screen is *SO WIDE*, i made my "Dock" panel smaller in my system preferences (it comes defaulted with HUGE icon sizes, HEH), and i can easily have my 17 permanent icons sit there, with room to spare to the right for 5 temporarily docked icons of terminal windows with tail -f's of web application server logs, ssh connection to remote cvs server, ssh connection to my home linux box and an ssh connection to my personal email/everything shell account.
heh. and then i have a crap load of other term windows opened, two fit side by side with ample room to spare.
and then browser windows. two side by side do squeeze. kinda tight though. that's pushing it.
Get an Apple Titanium PowerBook running MACOS 10.1. Get the developer tools CD which installs all kinds of nifty stuff, gcc, cvs, project builder. And you're set to go. It's all bsd unix, you can open terminal and console windows and have full access to your system via shells.
MACOS 10.1 is the best thing to ever happen to computing and is the ultimate geek's operating system, and is also the best operating system you can ever run on a laptop.
Its networking configuration is very easily configurable and nicely abstracted behind a very nice interface. Check this:
1) At work, i am connected to the 'net via corporate LAN thru my ethernet port and static tcp/ip configuration.
2) At home, i have a dsl connection and multiple computers, all sharing the connection via a LinkSys DSL router, with DHCP enabled, and an Apple airport base station acting as a bridge to the rest of my ethernet LAN.
3) At my girlfriend's place, she just has a simple phone line and I can connect via dial-up only.
==> I work during the day as a web applications developer, and run the NetBeans java IDE on OS 10.1 which comes pre-installed with Java 1.3, while listening to mp3's with i-tunes, with 10 terminal windows opened with multiple ssh connections to various hosts, using shell scripts i wrote to manage files, quickly edit files with emacs, do complex file search and replaces in BBEdit. I also have my DVD player idling with my crouching tiger hidden dragon DVD just sitting there waiting to be watched during my lunch break.
Work day is over. I unplug the laptop's ethernet jack, unplug my desktop speakers and the power cord, drive home.
As soon as i get home, i open the laptop. This instantly wakes it up from sleep. It instantly detects that I am not using my ethernet port, but it also detects that there is an open wireless network at my home. It hops on it right away. Then automatically makes the DHCP request as I had configured to. BAM: I get home, I wake up my laptop, and it's connected to the net via its airport card.
Say I wanna go to my Girl's place rite now and check my e-mail from there. Put the laptop on 'sleep', get there, plug her phone jack into my modem port, and click the little modem icon on my status bar and select "connect". And there i am. Easy.
I recently downloaded, compiled and configured the standard samba daemon distro by passing a few flags to the configure script. OS 10.1 already comes with a couple samba clients built-in via command-line and is also handled at the URL/protocol level, but not samba SERVER. So that lets me share drives with windoz weinies, while i already had the built-in ability to share drives two-ways with AppleTalk clients and unix/linux NFS clients, via standard unix command-line as well as a couple GUI tools.
It really doesn't get any sweeter than this. Wether you are just getting your feet wet into Unix, or you only work in vi/emacs and swear by terminal and console windows, this puppy has everything you need to get your stuff done and your jollies off.
I guarantee you, there is absolutely NO cooler operating system than OS 10.1. They've still got improvements to make, and it's still unofficially considered 'betaware', but hey, I've been using it very intensively for weeks now, and it hasn't failed me. and the titanium powerbook with its wide screen and pretty colors and all its connectivity stuff is just way cool.
I agree that the passpord paradigm gives you a single point of failure. But whereas you may have smaller subsets of your personal information spread out on other sites, i.e., user name and password, maybe first name and last name, but maybe not *all* of your information, like personal banking, stocks trading account informations, home address, work address, phone, fax, cell phone addresses.
Say someone breaks into a site on which you only stored basic username/password and first/last name information, it's OK, it's not that a big deal, inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
NOW, say someone DOES break into that *single* point of failure you are mentioning, chances are they'll have access to users' *ENTIRE LIFE*. And looking at microsoft's track record of keeping systems secure with their close-source, I wouldn't trust them the least bit. CodeRed. Nimda.
Now Sun's approach may be slightly more secure, and if the open-source community does get involved, it could mature far faster than microsoft's product.
As far as *I* am concerned, though the idea of only having to maintain your information at a single location seems very appealing, I think I still want to go thru the discomfort of having to enter personal information at every site I shop at.
that's why laws could be *carefuly* worded to only allow actions to be taken upon eavesdropping if that eavesdropping clearly showed acts of terrorism in preparation. there's gotta be some way to compromise. I just don't wany any terrorist to walk in my country and carry on conversations over the phone knowing *their* privacy is protected while they plot to bomb our asses with their buddies.
As much as we wish to be safe forever from the horrors of last week, we simply cannot protect freedom by forsaking
freedom.
As much as we want relief from this time of national duress, we simply cannot make ourselves more secure by
making fundamental freedoms less secure.
Is privacy a freedom? that's debatable. Show me exactly what part of the First Amendment protects privacy.
Consider two situations:
You live in former USSR, you're talking to your mom over the phone and you say Communism sucks. KGB happens to be snooping on you and sends you to jail. In this case, privacy was violated as well as freedom of speech.
You live in the U.S., you're talking to your mom over the phone and you start telling her how badly you think Capitalism sucks. FBI is listening and nothing happens to you. Why? you just stated a mere opinion, you did not threaten to bomb anything. Your privacy was raped, and while this creates a natural feeling of discomfort, you know your freedom of speech is intact.
After all, you don't have a problem with your luggages, handbags, pockets being thoroughly searched at airports. While you may not be happy with a security agent seeing that big dildo you have in your suitcase on his screen, you're glad they'd arrest you if it was a bomb. After a while you don't even think of it. Well there.
I think a stronger focus should be placed on Freedom of Speech itself and ensure its integrity while allowing limited compromises on privacy to protect the safety of the citizens. And I'm pretty sure this could be carefuly worded in legalese.
Slashdot Mirror
but fair enuff. cheers.
Any news source or any so-called "expert" that labels any and every very different subset of internet-bound network protocols as "The Web" oughta be shot before having their balls severed.
"The Web" refers to HTTP.
IRC is not the web.
The internet is not the web.
CNN already never bore much credibility in my book. Such shallow and poorly-researched article, clearly begging for "public's attention", filled with buzz-words, and offering such a one-sided vision of issues at hand, clearly proves what I have believed all along.
Here's a free clue to CNN editors: when hackers *need* a way, they find it. If it's not IRC, then they'll gather on bulletin board systems. That'll be their big come-back. Because that's where they used to gather before that. And if that still doesn't do it, they'll gather on public web forums. And if that doesn't work, they'll come up with a peer-to-peer chat protocols with emphasis on communities. Most Instant Messaging systems already offer you that. It'll just get expanded. And if that still doesn't work, trust me, the demand *will* be there, and new network protocols will be created. To accomodate grass-roots communities. It is amazing the things you can do with TCP/IP. If the more popular IRC networks get snooped or shut-down, then many more little irc servers will rise. Anyone with a DSL connection a shitty old PC can download many free, open-source flavors of the popular "IRC Daemon" software, "ircd", and set-up a very reliable and fairly scalable IRC server. Get two people together on different connections and you have a network. Each server can have thousands of simultaneously connected users.
The point i'm trying to bring home here, is that there will *never* be a shortage of venues for hackers to go about their illicit business. It clearly is sad, as such practices and articles like this one tend to focus the public's opinion on restricting our own liberties to *absolutely NO CONCLUSIVE END*.
That article clearly mingles without any distinction the "underground" aspect of IRC with "anti-corporation" stance and "identity-theft hackers".
Lemme make this clear:
it is NOT OKAY to steal identity and be a hacker. it's lame too.
it IS OKAY to be against corporation-hosted chat networks and for grass-roots communities such as IRC.
it IS OKAY to prefer "less-popular" communities to find like-minded geeks, such as ones we'll find on IRC.
If CNN had any clue, any journalistic integrity, they would at least try to bring some of those points home in their article. But they keep quoting that same guy, over and over, with scary buzz-phrases and words your average american will just eat-up.
Next thing you know, parents will only allow their children to "hang out" on AOL chat-rooms. "No more IRC for you son, it's evil, CNN sez so, mm-MMM".
Can we see a corporate agenda here?
fuckingshit.
No. JavaScript *is* a *good* thing. when used properly that is. I understand the potentials for evil, but still, the gains way outweigh the cons.
There are numerous form-interaction, form-validation, elements of user interface which are *key* to basic functionality on many sites. And those are used properly. It alleviates the necessity for redundant back-and-forth clientserver interactions while allowing for early capture of user input.
A good April Fool's Joke.
This was just an example. There were a few other similar scenes.
FORGET THAT. Get to the ass-whoopin' already.
Blade 2 fixed that. Less plot. Less dialogs. A couple good lines ("You ... do not ... KNOW ... who you ARE ... MESSING WITH !@(#") ("..OOOoooohh"). And more action. This was the whole reason why i went to see the movie. I wanted to see Snipes kick ass.
Oh yeah and also they introduced a hot vampire chick. Dark, mysterious, tight-fitted outfit, just like Trinity in the Matrix. mm-mmMM. Add some subtle erotism with blood-sucking action between Blade and Nisa. Most definetly gratifying. The first movie had no good lookin' chick whatsoever.
What I did like about the story, was Blade getting in closer touch with his vampire-side, partly thru unspoken romance/understanding with the vampire chick. I found this to be far more effective to show conflicts within Blade, than long-strung dialogs from the first movie. Blade is a man of action. not words. Whose ass he kicks and the manner in which he does it defines his relationship or attachment to other characters.
Anyway. I'm a happy camper. Go Blade :)
One should not underestimate the importance industry-wide adoption, openness, and transparency of standards.
Flash files are binary files. Hence, their creation, authoring and implementation, rely *heavily* on macromedia's authoring tools, thereby "locking-you-in" a very restricted platform. Such authoring tools may be released for free at first, but easily "upgraded" to commercial versions in a near future. While you can easily author, maintain, update, enhance any web applications whose content and presentation layer are based on standards-implementation text files in a highly distributed and modular environment, authoring of flash files pretty much restricts access to your web application 's components to a single person, on a single computer. Then forget about source-control and revision-control, 'diffing' files for differences. It's all one big binary file.
Flash is a closed standard. Macromedia is the only, largely corporate entity to have full-control over their specifications.
Again, flash files are binary files. You cannot look inside them, re-author them, crawl them, search them for keywords without depending on macromedia opening-up text-only access to content of flash files.
Standards like CSS and XHTML are developed and enhanced to allow an end-user to have somewhat of a control over the resulting user-interface, by overriding a site's font faces, font colors, link styles, font sizes. Believe it or not but yes, there ARE, a *significant* amount of people out there who do have issues with what most web developers call "standards font faces and sizes" and allowing them to override those in the browser is a key factor in making a site accessible.
While it is highly possible to develop bandwidth-efficient compelling content in standards-based web applications, while giving users quick and selective access to the content they are looking for, it is overly tempting to create bloat-ware in the form of flash files. Flash does give you some form of control over an animation's behaviour while it is being downloaded, but a user remains "stuck" waiting for the animation to load. Forget about 56k users. Enter the DSL-only zone.
It breaks the HTTP model, with its derivative page navigation, page caching, history navigation paradigms. A flash file essentially becomes its own mini-browser, its own entire site, where screens are not individually cached, where the navigation cannot be overriden with "back" and "forward" buttons, where any ever-so-small flaw in the 'animation's' user-interface design, is bitterly fellt by the end-user. A whole separate protocol would need to be developed to properly handle navigation within flash animations in order to fully fulfill macromedia's vision. And i honnestly do not thing they are up to the task.
You could also kiss any form of web applications' platform-independence good-bye. While I am sure macromedia is ready and eager to develop their plugin for os x/linux/windoz to work with ie/opera/mozilla/omniweb/navigator, the 'desktop computer' with a traditional web browser is no longer the only web-surfing paradigm. Sites like Google allow you to search HTTP/HTML sites on your cell-phone, while doing its best to "cast" HTML into a "WML" visualisation scheme. It is possible for hand-held device developers to build mini-browsers which understand a subset of the HTML standard, thereby allowing non-specially-authored sites to "gracefuly" degrade on those platforms. Now, what do we do with monolothic .swf binary files?
There are valuable standards being developed and already widely-adopted which allow site authors to greatly enhance a site's usability and appeal with "DHTML" features.
Don't get me wrong, I believe flash is a great site "spicer-upper", but solely relying on this technology within mission-critical and content-driven web applications would represent a real danger to the web-surfing community, which developers at-large should be aware of when deciding which technologies to adopt on their sites. Be sure to *know* exactly what audience you are catering to. *resist* hopping on the "next-cool-whizzbang-nifty-thing" band-wagon.
the above post shows exactly why everyone should be buying apple stuff. i've used x86 machines running windows 95 thru XP, redhat linux, apple machines from the old 'mac classic' with 40MB HD and 4MB RAM to early PCI macs (7500) to today's titanium powerbook, on system 6 (with multifinder) thru system 7, 7.6 (very stable), OS 9, linuxPPC Q4 2000 and now
OS X on a titanium powerbook.
apple hardware and software has NEVER let me down thru various upgrades off either.
don't get me started on x86/windoz platforms.
i've had my gripes about apple OS 9 bloatware and lack of stability. 'tis why i was on windows 2000 for a while. boy was that painful. right when windows corrupted my hard drive with bad sectors and turned my dell laptop into a door-stop, apple's OS 10.1 was out.
So i switched.
boy. lemme tell you.
computing has never, EVER, been this fun, reliable, painless, stable, solid
do you have any idea of the uptimes i get on my titanium powerbook? i've gone thru a whole MONTH without rebooting it. And that was to install the next upgrade.
Again, this is a LAPTOP, not a desktop server or workstation.
I take it home, i take it to work, i take it to my gilrfriend's place, i play DVDs, i import photos from my sony digital camera into iPhoto without installing any sony software, i rip CD's in iTunes and stick the songs on my iPod, i connect to the internet thru corporate LAN/static-ip, wireless LAN at my home, modem at my girl's place.
I export iPhoto albums to 'web site' directories in my home directory's linux-equivalent to public_html (~/Sites), i tar'em, i gzip'em, and upload them via ftp to a shell account of mine where i untar/gunzip'em for everyone to see (here). And that's because i was going a little crazy with iPhoto prior to this and filled-up my free 20MB account.
i run the NetBeans java IDE while coding web applications, i do heavy testing of those applications by running them off of a separate installation of tomcat, perform complex and very demanding 'ant' builds. i write shell scripts to perform common tasks. i grep/sed/awk/sort/uniq thru my filesystem.
I have a 435-lines
I removed administrator privileges from my default/every-day user. So any application I run can only write stuff to my home directory. And this is how all OS X apps are designed anyway. Any aspect of an application's preferences are stored in a user's home directory. I can create a small roaming mirror of my home directory with all its libraries and apps preferences onto my iPod. I can go to a friend's house who's also running OS X. He can add me as a user on his box and point my home directory to the one located on my iPod.
and now
I can finally run Photoshop.
woohooo.
it just gets sweeter and sweeter
Steve has done it. totally. I believe I can say with ample confidence that I'm His Bitch. He has taken me to the Nirvana of Computing and boy, i'm hooked.
And i fucking swear to you, give me 30 minutes with ANY GEEK who has been in the trenches of trying to run a powerful, reliable, flexible operating system for any length of time, for productive and mission-critical use, working out hardware/software/drivers incompatibilities to get it to do what they wanted it to. I'll open a few terminal windows in OS X, point them to a few applications, let them play around. I'll show'em how to 'force quit' out of an application that doesn't respond anymore while not affecting any other resource on the OS. I'll start clicking thru all the application icons i have in my 'dock' and watch them all launch at the same time, independently, while being able to switch thru individual windows of those applications, while the operating system appears to just be sitting there waiting for you to ask more from it.
yes. it is THAT sweet. and more.
why am i rambling? heck i don't know. i don't even own apple stock. Apple has turned the "cool" on, in a big freakin' way, and i just wanna make sure everyone knows about it. bah. just ignore me. i'm owned. heh
I personally get along fine using the control key for all right-click-equivalent shortcuts in OS X. The rest of the time I enjoy running my fingers over a very simple, nicely finished, slickly designed titanium powerbook track pad with *one* mouse button.
Face it. Apple makes cool shit. Anyone who bitches them out for doing so is 1) too poor to afford one, 2) jealous. Well. sux 2 b u guys >:D
Second, if any laws are written, my guess is they would merely extend already existing more generic laws regarding false advertisement. Under such circumstances, software vendors would not be *required by law* to produce secure software. But, if their advertising campaign, sales representatives, software packages blatantly lead potential consumers to believe that their product is of "enterprise-level", "mission-critical-caliber", "secure", "reliable" or any such wording which implies "secure software", then the law could provide for some serious compensations to the harmed consumer.
To avoid endless legal battles over wording, the government should define an entity whose role would be to design, draft and maintain a *very specific* scale of security levels which defines strong standards for security features within software packages. The scale could not only provide very precise security requirements for software, but also standards type of compensation to the consumer for failure to meet each of its levels' standards.
Such scale should be massively advertised thru all media so consumers would know to look for a software package's rating on such scale before purchasing it for any mission-critical purpose.
We could let software vendors rate their own software packages according to this scale. If the scale is *specific-enough* and clearly defines levels of security, then consumers should have very strong cases to bring to class-action law-suits to seek compensation in the case such software should fail to meet all of the requirements defined by their advertised grade on the scale.
Such model would keep the government's involvment minimal and place all of the liabilities on the software vendor, so consumers don't ever have to seek compensation from some government-sanctioned entity which would assign ratings to software packages. We must keep in mind that computer software is by nature a highly volatile, constantly evolving, and rarely flawless type of product, as every new piece of software written is by nature "cutting-edge".
- i sent my mom DHEA and a bunch of other bone-decay-and-other-menopause-symptoms-fighting dietary supplements which the french customs seized and are sending back to me. Next time i'll write "christmas candies" on the box. duh.
Dad gave me an iPod. sweet little toy. I had been wanting to buy one for myself, but was still on the fence. He read my mind.
Mom gave me a leather jacket! She pittied me when i showed up in Paris for the holiday in that dinky little jacket i wear in l.a. . Wait 'till my girl sees it when i get back huhuhuhu.
I just called that number per Fat Chuck's instructions and they're telling me that they don't have precise rules on clear labelling for CD's and stuff like that. They tell me they mainly handle other household appliances like fridges, heaters, and even clothing.
The lady gave me another phone number for california/los angeles area:
213 974 1452
errm.
Apple clearly did not want you to use it, the fact that you "found it" is far from being relevant to the situation. Exploiting the hole clearly involves somehow altering their software. It is hence against the agreement u *contractually* accept by installing the software. You are contractually bound. The fact that you didn't read the contract doesn't render you immune to prosecution.
you are absolutely *totally* missing the point here.
It is not about "macfixit being the poor victim of some evil corporation bashing their constitutional rights with an army of law-sharks", it's simply about macfixit publishing information that is highly sensitive and potentially harmful to Apple's interests and Apple simply trying to defend themselves against obvious attempts of software piracy.
Just because that hole was easy to find, or because, you, with your "extensive programming experience", find the way they went about shipping a much-needed upgrade on-time ... DUMB, does not give you any MORAL nor LEGAL right to go expose that security hole, nor should it give you any particular reason to feel like bashing Apple for trying to protect what's legally AND, i think, morally their legitimate intellectual property.
And Freedom-of-Speech does absolutely NOT give you the right to expose those holes. Freedom-of-Speech in fact, does not give you the right to divulge any infomation you *contractually* (purchasing the software, accepting the license agreement) accepted not to divulge.
1) Apple has absolutely every LEGAL RIGHT to send that cease-and-desist and chances are they'd win in court, hands-down. MacFixIt knows it. Again, their intention weren't bad, and pulling it out was the right thing to do and I doubt Apple would pursue any legal action since they complied.
2) I believe they have every MORAL RIGHT to do so as well. just read my original post again for the reasons. Again, Apple did not do anything wrongful to their user-base by shipping the 10.1 upgrade for free. It's not like Apple users have anything to protect themselves against which would warrant exploiting that hole. Their package-hole was *not* meant to be used, and exploiting it clearly goes against their license agreement. Now if you happen to have found the hole, congratulations, more power to you, it'll save you some time and headache, BUT it sure as hell is not "your holy duty" to go out there and shout it over the roofs just so you can look cool and let everyone get the full software for free. Because by doing that, you essentially are doing the exact same thing as publishing CD-KEYS for m$ windoz to everyone, which, of course, is illegal. If you do publish that information, then you play a gamble. You may get caught. You must accept the consequences. MacFixIt unintentionally gambled, got caught, got some *serious publicity* and acted responsibly. It is in both Apple's and MacFixIt's interests to stay in good terms anyway. MacFixIt got their bragging rights and a bunch of geeks on slashdot got to stupidly laugh at Apple by calling this whole thing "Apple Stupidity Leak", when most of those bad-mouthers, while at best savvy perl hackers, have no fucking idea what it takes to develop a complex piece of software that works and meet *strategic* deadlines with stockholders breathing down your neck.
3) anyone has the right to tell anyone to shut the fuck up. plz *resist* trolling this one.
4) i've never owned any Apple stock, in fact, until recently, i was a windoz user for over a year, since i got a pc laptop from my work. When i saw the power and potential of OS X, and with help from my boss, i got to score this nifty TiBook. Since then my productivity has quadrupled, and work has been more fun. Thanks to OS X. So yeah you're damn right i'm guna defend such a fine piece of software.
5) I really absolutely *HATE IT* when people make devious claims to Liberties I most definetly cherish and stand for just to make some noise and random bashing, or just because they don't think. Man, you wanna push my buttons, you just do that. And people sure do. heh. Oh well. After all, we're all exercising our Freedom of Speech.
So KUMBA-FUCKING-YA.
You gotta give Apple developers some credit for crying out loud. If they packaged the upgrade the way they did, running the risk of someone mucking with their packages, it clearly had to be because it was easier *and* faster to do it that way.
Mac OS X 10.1 is a pure Jewel of an Operating System, and I for one like to see frequent major upgrades that acutally render my work more productive. And this one sure did.
Chances are I am not the only one thinking that.
So Apple saved time and figured their money would be better spent on lawyers sending out semi-generic cease-and-desist letters, rather than delaying the release of their upgrade by a few more months and miss the X-Mas rush.
Are they dumb? NO. It's about money. Time-to-Market translates directly into money. I'm sure they knew the risks they were taking and carefuly measured them.
Does the fact that they released a full working version of an operating system on a demo-disk harm the user in any way? NO. But that's what is unconsciously implied: "oh Apple made a quick upgrade hack that can easily be worked around, quick hacks are dumb, quick hacks are bad, so *I* as a geek, must absolutely go out there and make a big fucking fuss out of it so I can look cool and get some publicity out of it". Again, this is not microsoft quickly hacking their "Passport architecture", loading it with obvious security holes to make a deadline, thereby harming the greater computer user community, we're talking about a legitimate software upgrade that happens to give you more, MUCH more than what you bought.
Exploiting this for any other purpose than recovering from a failed upgrade is *wrong* and, indeed illegal. Beside, keep in mind that even if leveraging this weakness to shorten the installation process to recover from a broken upgrade may be *very* convenient *and* tempting, doing it the regular way, which was installing OS X 10.0.x and *then* using the OS X 10.1 upgrade as just that, an upgrade, still works. While this appears to be a cool, convenient hack to share with close friends and family to save them time, I do believe this information to be a little too sensitive to be permantently published on a web site for everyone to leverage. Again, this is *not* like a security hole, this is publishing information which deliberately violates the Software License Agreement.
MacFixIt most likely understands that.
Are they trashing freedom-of-speech? FUCK NO. Stay real guys and look at this whole thing for what it really is: a very simple, dumb hack which violates a very clear, simple, software license agreement. Software Vendors have those agreements so they can actually make money off of the shit they make. Duh.
MacFixIt handled the situation very maturely but anyone here invoking "freedom of speech" rights for this particular case is merely making a devious use of one of our most cherished inallienable rights, and such behaviour can easily become one day its most threatening enemy.
I found the exchange of letters to be fair and legitimate, I think both parties did have good reasons to do what they did. Apple are not sharks, neither are their lawyers, they build cool shit, *really* cool shit, and I think they're only legitimately attempting to protect their intellectual property. Nobody's rights are being violated, there is no reason to get on high horses.
Please. define immoral. Immoral according to whom? OUR system of beliefs? It is not OUR place to say what is immoral or not, it is up to the people of Saudi Arabia to define their own morality. The fact that these companies are actively pursuing business with Saudia Arabian leaders to enforce their censorship is highly irrelevant to the current situation. The point is that censorship software does not prevent or in any way limit the people of Saudi Arabia's ability to potentially overthrow their government. If anything they're offering a better alternative to more totalitarian measures their government would have to resort to without censorship.
And as I said in a previous post, *stop* hiding behind ideological rhetoric and assuming the way we currently live our lives is fit for any other country in the world. Remember that we got to where we are thru a painful evolution in our society, along with many other countries of what we consider "the free world". But not everyone is there. Not everyone is ready.
Just *think* for a second about the consequences of suddenly opening unrestricted access to the Internet to all Saudi Arabian citizens? Social changes can't happen overnite without complete chaos, and granting unrestricted access to the 'Net has to come from a deep yearning from the population who *will* have to change their society first to be ready it, and censored Internet can be a good way to give'em an idea that there is something out there, to spark curiosity.
Also your argumentation really hides behind ideallistic rhetoric without even seriously considering practical consequences: Saudi Arabia has been a truly Islamic monarchy for centuries, with their system of beliefs based on a very austere way of life, and very conservative values. This is not wrong or right. It's just the way THEIR society is structured. Are their people happy? Hard to tell. Probably not. Then again, define happiness? I won't go there. But what do you think would happen if you were to open the flood gates and, overnight, grant all citizens of Saudi Arabia full unrestricted access to the Internet??? Are you out of your f*cking mind? "Click here for HOT XXX TEENS!!!" "Wet and Horny". "YOU HAVE A MESSAGE WAITING, CLICK HERE " . To a Muslim who's only supposed to look at his Wife? Who are YOU, who are WE to cause such a revolution overnight?
The Internet was built and developed by FREE countries. The material that lives on the Internet is simply an extension of our system of beliefs.
We, as a people, are trained, to not look at inappropriate material, we *know* to not let our kids watch HBO late at nite, we *know* we must establish a dialog and a relationship of trust with our kids, so they'll listen to us when we tell'em to not go surf for porn instead of doing home-work. We have a legal system in place that allows us to sue companies putting inappropriate content on-line without prior "over 18" warning. Because all of our countries in the free world have pretty-much agreed that you gotta be 18 or older to look at smut and have wild steamy sex with whomever you want.
Saudi Arabia could not be any more radically different from our "free societies". Their religion happens to be the Religion of Islam. The people of Saudi Arabia happen to have been raised in a society where just about everyone is a devout Muslim. It is their way of life. Unlike Muslims who live in the United States and other democratic countries, they are not yet part of a society where information flows freely, yet allows you to remain faithful to your Religion. Hence the inherent compatibility with unrestricted access to the Internet.
If a revolution must happen, it shouldn't happen by opening the flood-gates of the Internet onto their society. It should happen by reforming their entire socio-political structure FIRST. They, as A People, should clearly define the democratization path of their society.
And that may mean overthrowing their government. But this is where it's got to start. This is where fingers should point. THAT, is the root of the problem, and the only solution to the problem. Those American Corporations you are blaming are merely helping enforce a current system of beliefs while offfering a far softer and more promising alternative to more totalitarian measures Saudi Arabia leaders would otherwise resort to.
Jon, by saying, "let's completely open the Internet to the people of Saudi Arabia", you're basically saying "Let's impose our system of beliefs onto them and cause chaos in a society that is not YET prepared for it".
And your repetitive and very poorly argumentated snides at American Corporations merely point out the fact that they are indeed making money off of the whole situation, thereby implying that making money off of the leaders of a non-democratic country is wrong, because this makes those American Corporations "part-of-the-problem-by-association":
- Saudia Arabian Leaders are the root of the problem.
- We make business deals with them.
- ==> We're part of the problem too!, Hence we make things much worse.
This, in a nutshell, seems to be your rhetoric. You are pointing out problems and not offering any decent, more researched alternative, while not acknowledging the depth of the problem and considering potential roots of the problem.I'm simply a geek, and frankly, writing is so far from being part of my job description, it's not even funny, it's not even a hobby, heck I hate reading or writing. Yet, I stil believe your rant sucks more than mine.
Well for one OS X, is BSD unix at its core. You're not talking about a younger operating system like windows or traditional macos to which we grafted UNIX-like features like cygwin.
You're talking about a *true* unix at the core of the operating system, interacting with well-defined hardware, with all peripherals already working. All user-friendliness shortcomings of traditional unices have been taken care of in a very friendly GUI, "Aqua".
If you do not use the "classic environment" which insures compatibility with legacy applications, this thing flies.
You're looking at a fare more secure and high-performance operating system than windoz.
Plus, OS X being a BSD variant, you benefit from all the open-source servers and applications. This is why I was able to install the samba daemon to allow PC's to mount shares from my laptop, by simply downloading the standard samba distro and passing a few extra parameters. What does this mean?
AppleTalk clients can mount shares from my laptop.
Unix NFS clients can mount shares from my laptop.
PC Samba clients can mount shares from my laptop.
All of which can simply be, the laptop's ~user home directories. You can set permissions within your home folder that can be reflected accross all those network services.
That's one example.
But really. Your question is just like asking me to compare the advantages of running a true unix with a friendly interface on a laptop versus windows.
Arguments can be made in favor of either operating system. However, in that guy's case, he seemed to be strongly inclined to run a BSD variant on his laptop, which means he seems to be the most comfortable with a unix variant, so the OS X solution seems to make more sense for him. Now you might want to try to convince him to not use unix at all.
OH YAH true, it truly does look amazingly cool. Both the TiBook and OS 10.1's "Aqua" GUI.
I really like the Dock too. To me it serves 2 functionalities:
1) the stuff i use often is always right there for me to click on.
2) it allows me to establish a little routine of icons to click on when i start my work day. Depending on what kind of work day it is, i glance my way from the left to the right, and will skip the Snak IRC, iTunes and DVD player icons if i'm starting a hectic day, and right away launch microsoft entourage, omniweb, terminal, and BBEdit.
Since the TiBook screen is *SO WIDE*, i made my "Dock" panel smaller in my system preferences (it comes defaulted with HUGE icon sizes, HEH), and i can easily have my 17 permanent icons sit there, with room to spare to the right for 5 temporarily docked icons of terminal windows with tail -f's of web application server logs, ssh connection to remote cvs server, ssh connection to my home linux box and an ssh connection to my personal email/everything shell account.
heh. and then i have a crap load of other term windows opened, two fit side by side with ample room to spare.
and then browser windows. two side by side do squeeze. kinda tight though. that's pushing it.
ok i'll stop now
Get an Apple Titanium PowerBook running MACOS 10.1. Get the developer tools CD which installs all kinds of nifty stuff, gcc, cvs, project builder. And you're set to go. It's all bsd unix, you can open terminal and console windows and have full access to your system via shells.
MACOS 10.1 is the best thing to ever happen to computing and is the ultimate geek's operating system, and is also the best operating system you can ever run on a laptop.
Its networking configuration is very easily configurable and nicely abstracted behind a very nice interface. Check this:
1) At work, i am connected to the 'net via corporate LAN thru my ethernet port and static tcp/ip configuration.
2) At home, i have a dsl connection and multiple computers, all sharing the connection via a LinkSys DSL router, with DHCP enabled, and an Apple airport base station acting as a bridge to the rest of my ethernet LAN.
3) At my girlfriend's place, she just has a simple phone line and I can connect via dial-up only.
==> I work during the day as a web applications developer, and run the NetBeans java IDE on OS 10.1 which comes pre-installed with Java 1.3, while listening to mp3's with i-tunes, with 10 terminal windows opened with multiple ssh connections to various hosts, using shell scripts i wrote to manage files, quickly edit files with emacs, do complex file search and replaces in BBEdit. I also have my DVD player idling with my crouching tiger hidden dragon DVD just sitting there waiting to be watched during my lunch break.
Work day is over. I unplug the laptop's ethernet jack, unplug my desktop speakers and the power cord, drive home.
As soon as i get home, i open the laptop. This instantly wakes it up from sleep. It instantly detects that I am not using my ethernet port, but it also detects that there is an open wireless network at my home. It hops on it right away. Then automatically makes the DHCP request as I had configured to. BAM: I get home, I wake up my laptop, and it's connected to the net via its airport card.
Say I wanna go to my Girl's place rite now and check my e-mail from there. Put the laptop on 'sleep', get there, plug her phone jack into my modem port, and click the little modem icon on my status bar and select "connect". And there i am. Easy.
I recently downloaded, compiled and configured the standard samba daemon distro by passing a few flags to the configure script. OS 10.1 already comes with a couple samba clients built-in via command-line and is also handled at the URL/protocol level, but not samba SERVER. So that lets me share drives with windoz weinies, while i already had the built-in ability to share drives two-ways with AppleTalk clients and unix/linux NFS clients, via standard unix command-line as well as a couple GUI tools.
It really doesn't get any sweeter than this. Wether you are just getting your feet wet into Unix, or you only work in vi/emacs and swear by terminal and console windows, this puppy has everything you need to get your stuff done and your jollies off.
I guarantee you, there is absolutely NO cooler operating system than OS 10.1. They've still got improvements to make, and it's still unofficially considered 'betaware', but hey, I've been using it very intensively for weeks now, and it hasn't failed me. and the titanium powerbook with its wide screen and pretty colors and all its connectivity stuff is just way cool.
I agree that the passpord paradigm gives you a single point of failure. But whereas you may have smaller subsets of your personal information spread out on other sites, i.e., user name and password, maybe first name and last name, but maybe not *all* of your information, like personal banking, stocks trading account informations, home address, work address, phone, fax, cell phone addresses.
Say someone breaks into a site on which you only stored basic username/password and first/last name information, it's OK, it's not that a big deal, inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
NOW, say someone DOES break into that *single* point of failure you are mentioning, chances are they'll have access to users' *ENTIRE LIFE*. And looking at microsoft's track record of keeping systems secure with their close-source, I wouldn't trust them the least bit. CodeRed. Nimda.
Now Sun's approach may be slightly more secure, and if the open-source community does get involved, it could mature far faster than microsoft's product.
As far as *I* am concerned, though the idea of only having to maintain your information at a single location seems very appealing, I think I still want to go thru the discomfort of having to enter personal information at every site I shop at.
that's why laws could be *carefuly* worded to only allow actions to be taken upon eavesdropping if that eavesdropping clearly showed acts of terrorism in preparation. there's gotta be some way to compromise. I just don't wany any terrorist to walk in my country and carry on conversations over the phone knowing *their* privacy is protected while they plot to bomb our asses with their buddies.
freedom.
As much as we want relief from this time of national duress, we simply cannot make ourselves more secure by
making fundamental freedoms less secure.
Is privacy a freedom? that's debatable. Show me exactly what part of the First Amendment protects privacy.
Consider two situations:
You live in former USSR, you're talking to your mom over the phone and you say Communism sucks. KGB happens to be snooping on you and sends you to jail. In this case, privacy was violated as well as freedom of speech.
You live in the U.S., you're talking to your mom over the phone and you start telling her how badly you think Capitalism sucks. FBI is listening and nothing happens to you. Why? you just stated a mere opinion, you did not threaten to bomb anything. Your privacy was raped, and while this creates a natural feeling of discomfort, you know your freedom of speech is intact.
After all, you don't have a problem with your luggages, handbags, pockets being thoroughly searched at airports. While you may not be happy with a security agent seeing that big dildo you have in your suitcase on his screen, you're glad they'd arrest you if it was a bomb. After a while you don't even think of it. Well there.
I think a stronger focus should be placed on Freedom of Speech itself and ensure its integrity while allowing limited compromises on privacy to protect the safety of the citizens. And I'm pretty sure this could be carefuly worded in legalese.