You should also try Oracle's SQL Developer, which has MySQL support and does all the stuff you want. I haven't tried it against MySQL, but others say that it's pretty good. It's Free As In Beer and does a pretty good job on Oracle if you just want a query analyzer and live worksheet and stuff like that. Pure Java so you're at the mercy of the MySQL JDBC team to make the driver better, but you should take a look.
There are several behaviors in MySQL that are quite key to the core of the system, and which are still not being revisited. For example:
Lack of foreign key constraint even metadata maintenance in the core system schema
Row-at-a-time constraint checking of all kinds
Copy-on-schema-upgrades (meaning that you have to have at least twice the size of your largest schema element if you want to make a change, rather than making the physical change in-utero)
These affect performance of almost any large system. However, even with the new storage back-end, some of these fundamental "characteristics" aren't being revisited, in particular the universally derided failure to support foreign key constraint checking.
Why is MySQL so fundamentally incapable of revisiting decisions that have proven to be incorrect over time? I mean, Monty may have had reasons for making his database incapable of supporting key relational database constructs. But why are you incapable of accepting that for MySQL to have much wider scale adoption you have to remove the Monty Personality Constructs from the core limitations of the system?
For those of you who are interested, the key part here is that systems like InnoDB (which are able to process FK constraints internally) aren't able to do so efficiently, because the core locks them into row-at-a-time constraint processing, meaning that large inserts into fact tables with small dimension tables are painfully slow if you don't turn of FK constraint checking)
In TFA there's a reference to the fact that the trading standards body is responsible, essentially, for letting people know what's allowed and isn't when it comes to duplicating software. Essentially, if you come from a mentality of "all random copied CDs are wrong," then you're not going to easily understand the OSS phenomenon.
But the more interesting thing is honestly that OSS people essentially want everybody to be in the position of:
Seeing Random Software CD for sale.
Knowing whether the software is under copyright or not.
Knowing whether the license allows the Random Seller to sell that CD
before entering into a transaction. Yeah, for common stuff ("Linux") you might have some idea, but what if it's "Flibberty Gibbit v.1.2.1"? What's that? Can you safely buy it? What about "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"? It's got "Linux" in the name, but you can't actually grab the CDs unless you build them yourself (yada yada yada), which means that even "Linux" isn't always safe.
For everybody who reads Slashdot, that should be pretty self-explainatory: you know that it's open source, so it's okay (and you're probably not in the habit of buying software out of the back of a car). But think of someone's mother (probably not your own). Mine knows about OSS software because I used to work for an OSS software company and have her machine fully tricked out with Mozilla stuff, but her friends? They don't have a farking clue. They just know that they've had it drilled into their heads that software costs money, comes with your computer, and if someone's trying to sell you a CD with some software for a price that seems too low, it's probably pirated.
What this essentially indicates to me is that there's a whole separate marketing effort that needs to go on to make sure that society as a whole knows that there is such a thing as OSS software and some people will gladly give you some software, and some won't.
Oh, yeah, and the trading standards people are d00bs for not actually doing a google search on WTF OSS software is before contacting them. Foolios.
Re:Does it move sent mail into the appropriate fol
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Thunderbird 1.5 Arrives
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem is that it's pretty easy to get a pretty massive web-mail account these days (free for GMail, very little cost for anybody else), but try getting an IMAP account with 2GB+ of mail space. I mean, seriously. If I could find one, I would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money for it, but I've never seen one that offers:
A reasonable (1GB+) amount of disk space.
IMAP and webmail access.
I've seen various combinations (particularly a large amount of disk space with POP), but never a really good IMAP service. If someone knows of one please let me know!
I can only imagine that this is the case, since TFA states that M68k binaries will run unchanged, but Cobalt apps will require a minor recompile to run. In other words, as someone who's read TFA, I can only surmise that they're going to port/recompile their M68k emulator themselves and other stuff will require a recompile.
As someone else pointed out, there were so many people that were just ignoring the law, and according to my lawyer brother it's virtually impossible (read: takes an act of congress) to take your citizenship away from you against your will if you're born in the US, so they changed the law.
So now you're in the clear as long as you don't make an implicit act of citizenship. My attorney in the US (I'm a US citizen living in London and plan on getting citizenship here eventually) as well as that of my boyfriend (who's dual US-UK national) says that as long as you pay your US income taxes (or file the "I don't owe you anything" form every year), and always enter the US using a US passport (they're really strict on that, it's hit my boyfriend before) you're in the clear, but it can be tricky there.
Well, if it's a "Bash on the silly thoughts of the MySQL developers" thread, allow me to join in!
Does MySQL still silently ignore DDL constructs that it doesn't handle (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY)?
Does MySQL still refuse to allow the drivers to return metadata about foreign keys which are maintained by an underlying storage engine (n.b. FOREIGN KEY in InnoDB: the storage system knows about them, but the JDBC driver can't return metadata about them)? (Of course it does! After all, you don't want to use foreign keys anyway, you moron!)
Does MySQL still silently ignore it when you create a table on a storage engine which does support foreign keys (i.e. InnoDB) but haven't created the right indexes to support it?
It was was of the first to get the 600. However, that was still IIRC substantially after the first two carriers in the US (one CDMA, Sprint, the other one of the GSM providers) had theirs. Given the fact that even today you can basically only get the Treo 600 through Orange anyway, I would expect that you'd be able to get it through orange pretty quickly, but I still expect a couple of month lag between first customer ship in the US and first customer ship in the UK. Even today, it doesn't show up on the Orange web site (again, much like it doesn't show up on the PalmOne web site for the UK either).
My point is that the phone is basically almost ready, but given how much stuff happens over the next couple of months here, we'll get the phone so late as to miss the entire holiday season, which matters quite a bit. In other words, I have no doubt that we'll get it pretty early, but even a couple of month delay basically shows where the priorities lie.
Besides, Orange blows. I actually specifically moved away from them when I made my recent purchase and really don't want to go back to them.
I used to live in the US, and got very used to my Palms (I've been using them for years, starting with a Handspring Visor through a Sony Clie), and I was just looking to upgrade my phone, and I ended up getting something that Wasn't The Treo. Why? Because even though I waited until the "official" announcement, and thus knew everything about it, I still don't have any idea when it'll be available here in the UK.
This is pretty lame. Here in Europe (at least in the UK) Palm Pilots and other PDAs don't have nearly as high penetration as in the US, because everybody's got their mobile with them at all times and doesn't want to carry around two devices. However, given past performance, the GSM Treo (which is a worldphone, so you can just buy it in the US and bring it on a plane here and it'll work perfectly with your local coverage) won't be available for several months at best, unlike in the US. Even now, although the Treo 650 is all over the US PalmOne site, it's nowhere to be found on the UK site.
This makes very little sense, given that the biggest competition for the Treo (namely the blackberry and the Sony Ericsson P910i) are available here as soon as the US, if not sooner. Moreover, the SIM-free (i.e. not tied to a particular provider) version of the Treo 600 is GBP525 ($966 at today's exchange rate) from PalmOne UK, while it's $349 from PalmOne US. This whole state of affairs leads me to believe that PalmOne just doesn't get it when it comes to Europe and the attractiveness of something like the Treo. Give it to us now!
What you're paying for in the $97k base configuration is the chassis with a few disks. That chassis may seem expensive, but considering the kind of redundancy built in (dunno if $97k is the fully redundant system with dual caches, dual FC switches, dual PowerPC processors, dual power supplies, you get the picture), it's a pretty low price.
Remember, when looking at stuff like this, you're really looking at the price of the chassis as the base of a much larger system, not a "I need half a terabyte, what should I use?" If you just needed half a terabyte in total you almost certainly wouldn't be using one of these.
Really? It seems like an ideal way to pose in a "safe" chat room. You just borrow/steal/abscond-with/buy the token from someone who matches the profile that you want to emulate (i.e. you steal it from your 6 year old neice, or just take it when she's not looking and replace it before she can misplace it).
If we've learned nothing else from social attacks, it's that a misplaced sense of security can actually be worse than a lack of security at all. If you think that authentication is working, you're less on your guard (and more trusting) that you would be if you thought that it definitely wasn't working. If the system is that easy to foul up, it's thus worse than no authentication at all.
Now if it was 2 or 3 factor authentication (i.e. in order for the token to work you have to do a fingerprint and PIN check) then it's a different story. If it's just a dongle, it's pretty worthless.
I used to agree with this, except that there are three big issues with it given the current infrastructure:
You have to trust that the certificate providers that you're going to "trust" are properly dealing with spamming customers. Because otherwise, it would be relatively easy to send spam, it's just that you guarantee that you can know the email address of the person who's spamming you. Or, rather, you can guarantee that the email address which was on the outbound message matches the one that the provider issued. This means that you can still get spam, it's just that you know an email address was successfully provided at oen point for that spam.
What about phishing scams where they take your password? You think they won't find a way to get the private key for your certificate store, and then use your certificate to run joe jobs against you? Think again. As long as you have clueless users out on the internet, they'll be able to do crappy things with anything which relies on user-level security.
What do you do with webmail systems? There's no way outside of something like ActiveX for me to client-side sign my outbound email, and even if there was, there wouldn't be a way to deal with the whole kiosk problem (I want to walk up to an internet browser and be able to check my email). I could offload the signing onto the webmail system, but then that's not terribly secure, because the people I send email to can't necessarily trust that it was me (and not Yahoo Mail) who actually drafted the email. Also, if I have a simple password, again, that could be cracked, and anybody could send email as me.
While this one might seem a unique problem with things like Hotmail and the like (which you might not want to allow mail from anyway), think of the number of corporate users who rely on things like Outlook Web Access (which will soon support client-side signing, but only if you're running MSIE on Windows and are at a machine where you can control the hardware to get your private key pair installed correctly).
So while S/MIME and equivalent systems are useful in the fight against spam, they aren't panaceas because the rest of the infrastructure (particularly webmail systems) can't deal with them.
If the controller goes really wonky and starts writing bad data to the drives, then it doesn't matter if the drives are in good shape or not, if the data on them is wrong.
For example, if you send a block of 00000 to your RAID array, and the controller barfs and actually tells the drives to write 00100, then it doesn't matter if all your drives are okay, the data on them is actually wrong, meaning that your controller corrupted your data.
I think that the key thing that he's trying to say is that media, while being an example of a mature industry, is a different industry than something like automobile production. In essence, democracy depends on having a flourishing, vibrant media. Without it, democracy itself has major problems because the public is only exposed to a few viewpoints.
Imagine that you're in Soviet Russia (where media controls you). You have three networks, but all three of them air the same stories, and are blatantly politically biased towards the government. How are you going to get alternative news? How are you going to have sufficient information to act as a proper democracy? Russia happens to be a good example today, because while it's nominally become a democracy, its media is once again as subserviant to the ruling structures that its democracy is suffering. If you're in Moscow and you want to hear news which is critical of Putin or supportive of anyone else, you're going to have a hard time trying to find media which will air those views.
For those who say that competition between the oligarchs of media will prevent that, look again at Russia. What happens if the government "rewards" those who look favorably on its policies and "punishes" those who don't? Well, if there are 100 sources of news, then it doesn't matter, because they're not going to control all of them. But if there are only 3 or 4? How difficult would it be to "convince" all 3 or 4 major news sources that they should report a particular way on a story?
And diversity of smallish news outlets doesn't help either. If you say "oh, well, we've got these hundred small internet sites and newspapers," the problem is that their credibility is in doubt with most people, because they take information on who to believe is credible from the major sources. So if you say to someone you get your news from NBC, and someone else says that they get their news from FooBar.com, if you're a normal person you're going to think they're a crackpot or incorrectly informed, because it lacks credibility.
So imagine a situation where all major, credible news organizations are controlled by 3 people. Imagine how that would impact democracy. Now tell me that media is just another mature industry.
Well, definitely not every country, since although being a US citizen I reside in the United Kingdom, and there's no national ID card there. Big Brother Blunkett wants to introduce one, but it's not gone far yet.
And to be honest, I almost wish they would. There's nothing except a driver's license (which not nearly as many people have as in America) and a passport (which more people have than in America, but are still not widespread) which has any type of biometric information and is state issued, and as a result proving my identity is a total PITA all over the place. Usually I have to show my passport, show some documentation proving that I live at my address (like utility statements), and answer some security questions just to prove my identity. What a pain!
But I just wanted to point out that your gross exaggeration is a case of hyperbole. And it's wrong.
And in order to work with anyone, you always sign over the rights for them to aggregate it in this way anyway. So in theory you own your data, in order to do anything at all in society you have to relinquish your rights to the data which you own.
Well, not in the usual sense of a national ID card.
First, my driver's license is issued by a state (in my case California). And I don't actually have to have one, because I might not be licensed to drive.
Second, even in cases where I need identification, my identification card is issued by a state as well (also California).
Also, the major differences between those two things and what most people think of as a "national ID card" is that I actually am never required to present them to government officials when going about my day-to-day business. I use my driver's license to prove my identity to private (and public, truth be told) entities, but those entities only use the information as a biometric check: am I who I say I am? They don't connect information to me based on my driver's license number, only use it as a biometric holder. My passport is only used when I travel.
If you lived somewhere that actually does have a national ID card (like Spain IIRC) you'd find that you effectively need that card for everything. It's a combination ID card, social security card, passport (when travelling w/i the EU in Spain you don't need a passport, just your ID card), health insurance card, etc.
Wouldn't necessarily kill router sales
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IPv6 is Here
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· Score: 1
You're assuming that the devices that LinkSys, et. al., are primarily seen as "routers" over the longer term. Even today, that isn't strictly true for a lot of them: they include printer servers, firewalls, wireless gateways, etc. I think you're going to start to see a much more generous definition of what those things are.
Linksys is already on this to some extent, since they (and NetGear and others) also sell other, similar products, which do things like add network storage to the home network (in the form of a hard drive with a really simple embedded file server), and stand-alone print servers. What you're probably looking at is a situation where Linksys isn't in the business of selling "routers" per se, but where they're in the business of selling "consumer networking appliances," where those do other things than just a simple NAT router.
For example, to expand on your idea, imagine an appliance (which would look suspiciously like what you're suggesting Linksys do) which would allow users to connect to their home machines, no matter where they are in the world, and would block other people. A lot of people would be seriously interested in that, and it's not a very far stretch from what you're suggesting; just an IPv6 connection for the home machines and a firewall with some form of authentication, with something like DynDNS to do the IPv6 lookup.
Then start thinking of things that you can do with a world-wide lookupable machine (the extension of the previous idea). Why not allow your DVR access from the rest of the world? Why not sell a box which will just stream TV so that you can watch whatever's on at home? What about nanny-cams? Once you sell people on the concept that you can safely have something on your home network accessible from the rest of the world, Joe Consumer will start to buy a lot more of those things, many of which are made by the same people whose router sales would be limited.
I agree with you that clamshells are really convenient (I've owned 3 different Samsung US models), but not every non-clamshell has those problems.
For example, I have two different Sony Ericsson phones (the T3something and the T610, one for Europe and one for the USA), and if a call is coming through, then the keypad unlocks enough for me to say "yes, I want to take the call." Then when the call is going on, the keypad is fully unlocked, and then right when the call ends, it goes back to being locked.
So you don't have to have those problems with unlocking the phone all the time to take the call, but I do have to admit that it's easier to just open and close it. If only teh european flip phones weren't getting so damn huge! (I remember when flip phones rocked because on the whole they were much smaller than the candy-bar phones they replaced; now in the UK market at least, most of the current clamshell phones are actually bigger than my Ericsson, and it's not a flip phone!).
The article does mention that you're able to set up to 40 bookmarks on a particular book (allowing you to jump to predefined locations in the book pretty easily) as well as being able to make annotations and the like for the book, which would probably make things much more easily accessed. For example, when I do the same things, it's usually to go to the same few places over and over to have some reference on the few pages that tend to get overly complex. With this, I could just set a bookmark rather than having to dogear the page or what have you.
If you read the article, you'll see that they've been working with e-ink to bring this to market, the same people who have been the most vocal about working with the e-paper format. So I'm assuming that if there's an IP conflict between e-ink and any other e-paper companies, then e-ink has probably dealt with it.
In addition, they are thinking that they'll have flexible (i.e. paper-like) e-ink displays in these things in a few years, but that they're not really ready for prime time yet in the format they wanted with the resolution/contrast that they wanted.
In short, read the Guardian article. It covers who they've been working with to develop the technology.
I was pulled over for speeding once in California and had forgotten my ID. In my citation was an entry for speeding and an entry for not carrying my Drivers License with me while driving. I didn't look up the specific statute (though it was enumerated in the citation), but that seems to imply that in California they can cite you for not having your drivers license with you.
My mom got this email this morning which purported to be from someone at Microsoft referring to this exact patch as something she could download. The only problem (aside from the fact that even my mom wouldn't have been dumb enough to type sensitive information into a form like that, AND she uses Mozilla anyway) is that the link in the email USED the flaw that it was telling her to fix.
In other words, some email/CC#/whatever harvester decided to pull a funny and use the correction for this flaw as a way to exploit the flaw. Now that I see that the described patch is legitimate, I'm actually laughing internally at the delicious irony.
By the time my mom got the email, the target web site had already been taken down by the sysadmin of the host.
None of this is to condone the action of the scum who blasted the email, but come on, that took some balls.
Slashdot Mirror
You should also try Oracle's SQL Developer, which has MySQL support and does all the stuff you want. I haven't tried it against MySQL, but others say that it's pretty good. It's Free As In Beer and does a pretty good job on Oracle if you just want a query analyzer and live worksheet and stuff like that. Pure Java so you're at the mercy of the MySQL JDBC team to make the driver better, but you should take a look.
There are several behaviors in MySQL that are quite key to the core of the system, and which are still not being revisited. For example:
These affect performance of almost any large system. However, even with the new storage back-end, some of these fundamental "characteristics" aren't being revisited, in particular the universally derided failure to support foreign key constraint checking.
Why is MySQL so fundamentally incapable of revisiting decisions that have proven to be incorrect over time? I mean, Monty may have had reasons for making his database incapable of supporting key relational database constructs. But why are you incapable of accepting that for MySQL to have much wider scale adoption you have to remove the Monty Personality Constructs from the core limitations of the system?
For those of you who are interested, the key part here is that systems like InnoDB (which are able to process FK constraints internally) aren't able to do so efficiently, because the core locks them into row-at-a-time constraint processing, meaning that large inserts into fact tables with small dimension tables are painfully slow if you don't turn of FK constraint checking)
But the more interesting thing is honestly that OSS people essentially want everybody to be in the position of:
- Seeing Random Software CD for sale.
- Knowing whether the software is under copyright or not.
- Knowing whether the license allows the Random Seller to sell that CD
before entering into a transaction. Yeah, for common stuff ("Linux") you might have some idea, but what if it's "Flibberty Gibbit v.1.2.1"? What's that? Can you safely buy it? What about "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"? It's got "Linux" in the name, but you can't actually grab the CDs unless you build them yourself (yada yada yada), which means that even "Linux" isn't always safe.For everybody who reads Slashdot, that should be pretty self-explainatory: you know that it's open source, so it's okay (and you're probably not in the habit of buying software out of the back of a car). But think of someone's mother (probably not your own). Mine knows about OSS software because I used to work for an OSS software company and have her machine fully tricked out with Mozilla stuff, but her friends? They don't have a farking clue. They just know that they've had it drilled into their heads that software costs money, comes with your computer, and if someone's trying to sell you a CD with some software for a price that seems too low, it's probably pirated.
What this essentially indicates to me is that there's a whole separate marketing effort that needs to go on to make sure that society as a whole knows that there is such a thing as OSS software and some people will gladly give you some software, and some won't.
Oh, yeah, and the trading standards people are d00bs for not actually doing a google search on WTF OSS software is before contacting them. Foolios.
- A reasonable (1GB+) amount of disk space.
- IMAP and webmail access.
I've seen various combinations (particularly a large amount of disk space with POP), but never a really good IMAP service. If someone knows of one please let me know!- It wasn't George Washington.
- The quotation is incorrect.
- It's basically come up every time the patriot act has.
The actual quotation is: The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.I can only imagine that this is the case, since TFA states that M68k binaries will run unchanged, but Cobalt apps will require a minor recompile to run. In other words, as someone who's read TFA, I can only surmise that they're going to port/recompile their M68k emulator themselves and other stuff will require a recompile.
So now you're in the clear as long as you don't make an implicit act of citizenship. My attorney in the US (I'm a US citizen living in London and plan on getting citizenship here eventually) as well as that of my boyfriend (who's dual US-UK national) says that as long as you pay your US income taxes (or file the "I don't owe you anything" form every year), and always enter the US using a US passport (they're really strict on that, it's hit my boyfriend before) you're in the clear, but it can be tricky there.
Well, if it's a "Bash on the silly thoughts of the MySQL developers" thread, allow me to join in!
Does MySQL still silently ignore DDL constructs that it doesn't handle (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY)?
Does MySQL still refuse to allow the drivers to return metadata about foreign keys which are maintained by an underlying storage engine (n.b. FOREIGN KEY in InnoDB: the storage system knows about them, but the JDBC driver can't return metadata about them)? (Of course it does! After all, you don't want to use foreign keys anyway, you moron!)
Does MySQL still silently ignore it when you create a table on a storage engine which does support foreign keys (i.e. InnoDB) but haven't created the right indexes to support it?
It was was of the first to get the 600. However, that was still IIRC substantially after the first two carriers in the US (one CDMA, Sprint, the other one of the GSM providers) had theirs. Given the fact that even today you can basically only get the Treo 600 through Orange anyway, I would expect that you'd be able to get it through orange pretty quickly, but I still expect a couple of month lag between first customer ship in the US and first customer ship in the UK. Even today, it doesn't show up on the Orange web site (again, much like it doesn't show up on the PalmOne web site for the UK either).
My point is that the phone is basically almost ready, but given how much stuff happens over the next couple of months here, we'll get the phone so late as to miss the entire holiday season, which matters quite a bit. In other words, I have no doubt that we'll get it pretty early, but even a couple of month delay basically shows where the priorities lie.
Besides, Orange blows. I actually specifically moved away from them when I made my recent purchase and really don't want to go back to them.
I used to live in the US, and got very used to my Palms (I've been using them for years, starting with a Handspring Visor through a Sony Clie), and I was just looking to upgrade my phone, and I ended up getting something that Wasn't The Treo. Why? Because even though I waited until the "official" announcement, and thus knew everything about it, I still don't have any idea when it'll be available here in the UK.
This is pretty lame. Here in Europe (at least in the UK) Palm Pilots and other PDAs don't have nearly as high penetration as in the US, because everybody's got their mobile with them at all times and doesn't want to carry around two devices. However, given past performance, the GSM Treo (which is a worldphone, so you can just buy it in the US and bring it on a plane here and it'll work perfectly with your local coverage) won't be available for several months at best, unlike in the US. Even now, although the Treo 650 is all over the US PalmOne site, it's nowhere to be found on the UK site.
This makes very little sense, given that the biggest competition for the Treo (namely the blackberry and the Sony Ericsson P910i) are available here as soon as the US, if not sooner. Moreover, the SIM-free (i.e. not tied to a particular provider) version of the Treo 600 is GBP525 ($966 at today's exchange rate) from PalmOne UK, while it's $349 from PalmOne US. This whole state of affairs leads me to believe that PalmOne just doesn't get it when it comes to Europe and the attractiveness of something like the Treo. Give it to us now!
What you're paying for in the $97k base configuration is the chassis with a few disks. That chassis may seem expensive, but considering the kind of redundancy built in (dunno if $97k is the fully redundant system with dual caches, dual FC switches, dual PowerPC processors, dual power supplies, you get the picture), it's a pretty low price.
Remember, when looking at stuff like this, you're really looking at the price of the chassis as the base of a much larger system, not a "I need half a terabyte, what should I use?" If you just needed half a terabyte in total you almost certainly wouldn't be using one of these.
If we've learned nothing else from social attacks, it's that a misplaced sense of security can actually be worse than a lack of security at all. If you think that authentication is working, you're less on your guard (and more trusting) that you would be if you thought that it definitely wasn't working. If the system is that easy to foul up, it's thus worse than no authentication at all.
Now if it was 2 or 3 factor authentication (i.e. in order for the token to work you have to do a fingerprint and PIN check) then it's a different story. If it's just a dongle, it's pretty worthless.
I know, because my domestic partner works for them.
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You have to trust that the certificate providers that you're going to "trust" are properly dealing with spamming customers. Because otherwise, it would be relatively easy to send spam, it's just that you guarantee that you can know the email address of the person who's spamming you. Or, rather, you can guarantee that the email address which was on the outbound message matches the one that the provider issued. This means that you can still get spam, it's just that you know an email address was successfully provided at oen point for that spam.
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What about phishing scams where they take your password? You think they won't find a way to get the private key for your certificate store, and then use your certificate to run joe jobs against you? Think again. As long as you have clueless users out on the internet, they'll be able to do crappy things with anything which relies on user-level security.
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What do you do with webmail systems? There's no way outside of something like ActiveX for me to client-side sign my outbound email, and even if there was, there wouldn't be a way to deal with the whole kiosk problem (I want to walk up to an internet browser and be able to check my email). I could offload the signing onto the webmail system, but then that's not terribly secure, because the people I send email to can't necessarily trust that it was me (and not Yahoo Mail) who actually drafted the email. Also, if I have a simple password, again, that could be cracked, and anybody could send email as me.
While this one might seem a unique problem with things like Hotmail and the like (which you might not want to allow mail from anyway), think of the number of corporate users who rely on things like Outlook Web Access (which will soon support client-side signing, but only if you're running MSIE on Windows and are at a machine where you can control the hardware to get your private key pair installed correctly).
So while S/MIME and equivalent systems are useful in the fight against spam, they aren't panaceas because the rest of the infrastructure (particularly webmail systems) can't deal with them.For example, if you send a block of 00000 to your RAID array, and the controller barfs and actually tells the drives to write 00100, then it doesn't matter if all your drives are okay, the data on them is actually wrong, meaning that your controller corrupted your data.
Imagine that you're in Soviet Russia (where media controls you). You have three networks, but all three of them air the same stories, and are blatantly politically biased towards the government. How are you going to get alternative news? How are you going to have sufficient information to act as a proper democracy? Russia happens to be a good example today, because while it's nominally become a democracy, its media is once again as subserviant to the ruling structures that its democracy is suffering. If you're in Moscow and you want to hear news which is critical of Putin or supportive of anyone else, you're going to have a hard time trying to find media which will air those views.
For those who say that competition between the oligarchs of media will prevent that, look again at Russia. What happens if the government "rewards" those who look favorably on its policies and "punishes" those who don't? Well, if there are 100 sources of news, then it doesn't matter, because they're not going to control all of them. But if there are only 3 or 4? How difficult would it be to "convince" all 3 or 4 major news sources that they should report a particular way on a story?
And diversity of smallish news outlets doesn't help either. If you say "oh, well, we've got these hundred small internet sites and newspapers," the problem is that their credibility is in doubt with most people, because they take information on who to believe is credible from the major sources. So if you say to someone you get your news from NBC, and someone else says that they get their news from FooBar.com, if you're a normal person you're going to think they're a crackpot or incorrectly informed, because it lacks credibility.
So imagine a situation where all major, credible news organizations are controlled by 3 people. Imagine how that would impact democracy. Now tell me that media is just another mature industry.
And to be honest, I almost wish they would. There's nothing except a driver's license (which not nearly as many people have as in America) and a passport (which more people have than in America, but are still not widespread) which has any type of biometric information and is state issued, and as a result proving my identity is a total PITA all over the place. Usually I have to show my passport, show some documentation proving that I live at my address (like utility statements), and answer some security questions just to prove my identity. What a pain!
But I just wanted to point out that your gross exaggeration is a case of hyperbole. And it's wrong.
And in order to work with anyone, you always sign over the rights for them to aggregate it in this way anyway. So in theory you own your data, in order to do anything at all in society you have to relinquish your rights to the data which you own.
First, my driver's license is issued by a state (in my case California). And I don't actually have to have one, because I might not be licensed to drive.
Second, even in cases where I need identification, my identification card is issued by a state as well (also California).
Also, the major differences between those two things and what most people think of as a "national ID card" is that I actually am never required to present them to government officials when going about my day-to-day business. I use my driver's license to prove my identity to private (and public, truth be told) entities, but those entities only use the information as a biometric check: am I who I say I am? They don't connect information to me based on my driver's license number, only use it as a biometric holder. My passport is only used when I travel.
If you lived somewhere that actually does have a national ID card (like Spain IIRC) you'd find that you effectively need that card for everything. It's a combination ID card, social security card, passport (when travelling w/i the EU in Spain you don't need a passport, just your ID card), health insurance card, etc.
Linksys is already on this to some extent, since they (and NetGear and others) also sell other, similar products, which do things like add network storage to the home network (in the form of a hard drive with a really simple embedded file server), and stand-alone print servers. What you're probably looking at is a situation where Linksys isn't in the business of selling "routers" per se, but where they're in the business of selling "consumer networking appliances," where those do other things than just a simple NAT router.
For example, to expand on your idea, imagine an appliance (which would look suspiciously like what you're suggesting Linksys do) which would allow users to connect to their home machines, no matter where they are in the world, and would block other people. A lot of people would be seriously interested in that, and it's not a very far stretch from what you're suggesting; just an IPv6 connection for the home machines and a firewall with some form of authentication, with something like DynDNS to do the IPv6 lookup.
Then start thinking of things that you can do with a world-wide lookupable machine (the extension of the previous idea). Why not allow your DVR access from the rest of the world? Why not sell a box which will just stream TV so that you can watch whatever's on at home? What about nanny-cams? Once you sell people on the concept that you can safely have something on your home network accessible from the rest of the world, Joe Consumer will start to buy a lot more of those things, many of which are made by the same people whose router sales would be limited.
For example, I have two different Sony Ericsson phones (the T3something and the T610, one for Europe and one for the USA), and if a call is coming through, then the keypad unlocks enough for me to say "yes, I want to take the call." Then when the call is going on, the keypad is fully unlocked, and then right when the call ends, it goes back to being locked.
So you don't have to have those problems with unlocking the phone all the time to take the call, but I do have to admit that it's easier to just open and close it. If only teh european flip phones weren't getting so damn huge! (I remember when flip phones rocked because on the whole they were much smaller than the candy-bar phones they replaced; now in the UK market at least, most of the current clamshell phones are actually bigger than my Ericsson, and it's not a flip phone!).
The article does mention that you're able to set up to 40 bookmarks on a particular book (allowing you to jump to predefined locations in the book pretty easily) as well as being able to make annotations and the like for the book, which would probably make things much more easily accessed. For example, when I do the same things, it's usually to go to the same few places over and over to have some reference on the few pages that tend to get overly complex. With this, I could just set a bookmark rather than having to dogear the page or what have you.
In addition, they are thinking that they'll have flexible (i.e. paper-like) e-ink displays in these things in a few years, but that they're not really ready for prime time yet in the format they wanted with the resolution/contrast that they wanted.
In short, read the Guardian article. It covers who they've been working with to develop the technology.
I was pulled over for speeding once in California and had forgotten my ID. In my citation was an entry for speeding and an entry for not carrying my Drivers License with me while driving. I didn't look up the specific statute (though it was enumerated in the citation), but that seems to imply that in California they can cite you for not having your drivers license with you.
In other words, some email/CC#/whatever harvester decided to pull a funny and use the correction for this flaw as a way to exploit the flaw. Now that I see that the described patch is legitimate, I'm actually laughing internally at the delicious irony.
By the time my mom got the email, the target web site had already been taken down by the sysadmin of the host.
None of this is to condone the action of the scum who blasted the email, but come on, that took some balls.