Linux developers don't care, nor shoud they, about the decision of one company to play nice or not.
Linux kernel developers have been letting Nvidia get away with the whole "binary blob" thing for a long time. Nvidia has taken no real steps to come into conformance with the GPL requirements. They keep getting a pass for their bad citizenship.
Eventually bad actors (Nvidia) either have to shape up, or they need to ship out.
At the moment Nvidia is freeloading on the linux kernel. They are putting themselves in there for free. Now they are asking to break even more rules, or more accurately, to have the rules changed in the name of their personal interests. Nvidia has fouled their own bed, but now they are whining that they don't want to have to lie in the filth of their own making. They are a full grown company. They know what they _ought_ to be doing. They want a pass to have things their own way regardless.
Sometimes you have to tell a spoilt child that they don't get the lolly this time.
Linux developers are not trying to "force" anybody to do anything. Nvidia is trying to force the linux community to accept their unacceptable "super secret" blob into the kernel agains the linux community's development and participatation standards.
If I showed up on your doorstep and said "you have to let me use your bathroom and your kitchen, but I am not going to wash my hands or put on pants" you would not be "forcing" me to (anything) by saying that my intended pantless, unwashed use of your facilities was unacceptable.
The Linux community is telling nvidia "we use soap and pants here, if you won't do likewise, we don't feel like accomodating you."
Nvidia _knows_ they want in, otherwise they wouldent be trying to get in, Linux Don't Care if they come or not, but if they come they need pants...
Requiring someone to meet minimum standards for participation is not "forcing them" to do anything,
No pants, no access is not an unreasonable position.
See, thing is. Software was originally written by people who had to actually do things other than write software. It was all open soruce anyway. Not just Unix whith its original sharing stuff, but all the software that came before. In the seventies when IBM delivered you a copy of DOS and TSO and CICS for your big-iron mainframe it came on two sets of tapes. One was the ready to run binaries, and the other was the "you bet your ass you are going to find something you are going to need to tweak and recompile" sources.
Microsoft's bizzare model of selling software and keeping the source secret worked for lack of meaningful competition. The just imposed it onto the PC. And IBM, the company that put the whole bios source in the technical manual, didn't care because they just wanted to kill the Apple II and they then expected to dump the PC just like the other lugables they had put out to kill other small competitors.
The monkey got in the barrel when Business People took the "Personal Computer" and made it into a Business Computer surrogate.
That killed the multitude of brands in computing available and then left IBM supporting their business base with what was designed to be a throw-away. There's a reason that the AT used the stupidest mode of the interrupt controller and had to gang up on IRQ2 and bump its original occupant to IRQ9 and such. The chip they used had way better configurations but IBM had already glued their hourglass to their table on many technical shortcuts.
So flash forward. Microsoft never managed to escape software (windows and word) despite constantly trying to, because secrecy doesn't lead to good service or products. As larger more open systems in every other area of technology passed Microsoft by, lots of people wanted to be The Next Microsoft, but even Microsoft doesn't really want to be Microsoft. They just don't have any idea of how to be anything else. So they survive on a constant diet, cosisting of the flesh of their "preferred partners" and washed down by the secret bitter tears of the windows users who have learned to eat their gruel and like it mister.
But out here, we are back to people writing the software they need to use. After all, who better to know how it should work? And they do so knowing that the free-as-in-liberty materials they used to do so were _not_ free as in cash. Instead of paying Microsoft $10,000 for a development kit, and $2 per unit shipped, negoatiated up front to make a Windows CE monstrosity, they know they have to "pay" for their zero-cash initial outlay with 'here, have this URL full of code" for each unit sold.
Who cares? They are selling those units. Money is being made. People who want to sell you a phone have _no_ _interest_ in being in the "phone operating system development" business. So why would they care if you can replace the OS using the code they got for free and gave away for free? You bought the phone and good riddance till you decide you want the next one!
Same for military gear. Same for office suites. Same for business software. Same for scientific software.
People want to do business and science. Those few freaks like me in the mix who want to do software just find someone who wants to do that business or science and say "hey, buddy, I'll make that thing do what you want for a little green"...
What could be more natural.
The artificial scarcity attempt will fail, it will do horrific things to the U.S. economy as it fails, but the world will soldier on and in another 30 years the U.S. will come begging at the world technology table, with a black eye, and pretending to have no memory of chasing and seducing That Harlot DRM they went home with even when their friends tried to tell them they would regret it...
I get paid major bank to work on software for Linux. That some of it goes out to be free is no skin off my teeth.
See free software isn't "I'm gonna write some POS and hope someone buys it" development model. Those days are dead mostly anyway. Its "Some guy wants these features put on that 'free' bit because he actually has a use case, and he's gonna pay me to meet his needs then give it away so neither of us get stuck paying upkeep and he can have me do something newer and better".
Who want's to spend 40 years doing maintenance on a some accounting or word processing software anyway. There are people who are writing better gear because they need to process words and account for money. And since they really make their money counting money and processing words, giving the bycatch code out as the "whole cost" of getting the whole pre-mod app is a huge win.
It just won't lead to "another microsoft"
That closed source model was a fluke anyway, the preceding 40 years were open source. The next twenty five or so was a grand experiment that largely failed except for a few really unexpected cutthroat operators, and now its back to the more natural state of only paying for what you need.
In a current version of word I don't use 90% of it, and I'm a technical writer and novelist, but I paid for it all back when I was that foolish. Same can be said for any person or company that has ever bought that slag. So now there is this free stuff that was made by someone who actually needed it, so it's not so much slag, and given away to others who _might_ need it, and then gotten back greatly improved by the supporters and the adders on.
That's lots of money feeding lots of people, and nobody is wasting their time or money playing the "trade secret" and "big P.R." games.
Give yourself a remote account. Give grandma her own account that can only write in her own directory. Do remote maintenance at will. Back up her shit to something at your house because grandma is gonna break or lose that shit to her own activities someday. Do stealth maintenance.
In short, nuke that family shit from FOSS Orbit _before_ it can fester.
If only _someone_ would make a non-retarded LaTeX to HTML converter.
Even better, if someone else would make things like LyX really work with alternate document type macros, particularly SFFMS (which I used to write my novel because it will actually produce printed paper drafts in the absurd formats publishers want like double-underline for italics).
Currently I use Kile on KDE for editing my latex documents.
---
But _really_ *where* is the word processor that just saves its text in reasonable HTML. You know where paragraphs are in angle-p-angle "paragraph" tags?
Agressive use of POST instead of GET messages on all forms so that pin-trap requirements, if levied, would be largely moot. as in user XXXXXX did POST to "/" at this site on these dates and times. [POST data is not legal to collect in PIN traps in the USA as I understand the law.]
Services a site could sell? POST the URL you want as part of the encrypted blob you sen to this site, we will retrieve it, scrub it and send its content back to you encrypted to with your key.
Pay for encrypted, advertisement free page delivery with/without the unpaid peoples noise at your leasure. 8-)
Encrypted mail box where the records in the mailbox are encrypted to your public key the instant we get it if the "From" matches particular criteria you specify. (this burns time off your subscription key expiration date etc, so you might not want to encrypt "form *".
Note that this is not a bar to law enforcement if they show up with a court order to "tap" a particular key going forward. It is a barrier to having law enforcement fish into your past. I am not a lawyer so I don't know if this last bit is legal, it's just the noise floating in my head.
Of course such a site would have no way of knowing whether the "identity" information in the key, if any, was real so just as I could make a key that said I was both Mittens and B.H.O. today, anybody would be foolish to assume that an unsigned and unverrified key was anybody it clamed to represent.
In short the site design is not to confound the law, but to make the entire issue of identity "Somebody Else's Problem" since I want to be in the business of passing messages for fun and profit, not being the arbiter of who is whom.
(you should see my thoughts on replacing DNS... 8-)
Not for any longer than necessary. Likely I would make that opt-in.
I would have a payment history (bob paid x dollars for y time) as an atomic event. Bob could check a box to say "remember this for me", or not at the time of payment.
At the time of payment I would also send Bob a receipt. That recept would say "Bob paid for a service". The receipt would also contain a dot-splash (e.g. Qr Code a linear 2D barcode, depending on how much info space I turn out to need) that was the "proper join record for the database" (e.g. the key tuple that proved that payment X was for service Y on date Z). That tuple would be encrypted with _my_ secret key. Bob could use this receipt by sending it back to me, but I would only have that record until the payment cleared and was essentially irreversible, or when Bob sent it back via email or phone scan etc.
The actual membership information that Key X was paid-up-and-valid until Date Y would be a separate entry.
Think double entry accounting but where the account holder and not the institution had the journal that colated things.
With no start date, and if a person could buy any amount of time, which would be necessary because the key the customer made is only valid till it expires and that expiration date is chosen to the second by the key creator.
There is some ability to back-figure the expiration dates to the purchases and so the purchasers while both sets of data are present, so the user would have the option to "randomize the duration", e.g. for gambling a little of the funds paid they would gain or be shorted a random amount of time within a reasonable percentage of the purchase duration.
The idea is that, at every chance, you give the user the magic cookie, to join the information, but you keep the results. As long as the cookie is cryptographically secured it doesn't mater that they are holding it.
It wouldn't be that hard to figure out who and paid what when, when the user base is first started out, but as the base and transactions mounted the anonymity of payments would increase.
So imagine you want to buy a year, and your public key is good for at least a year, you could buy a year as one transaction, or cut it up into several transactions (like 2 and 3 and 7 months each) to get the year, or you could buy eleven months and bet a month hoping to go long not short. Without the record that you get into your exclusive custody, there is no good way to ask the site how 12 months ended up on that key from which purchaser.
If you invalidate your key, you get no money back. If you lose your receipt you have nobody to blame but yourself. That's the risk you take for your privacy. It's basically using an information system hole to make things same-as-cash.
I haven't figured out how to deal with credit card "charge-backs" or fraudulent disputes. I'd rather take the gift-card route for payment if it came to that kind of problem.
You could, I suppose, put people who paid via revocable means (like credit cards) in "risk pools" and if someone games, you penalize the pool but let people out of the pool using their receipts as proof that they are not the scammer. As each person used their receipts to change pools, the pool would get smaller but each member would lose more, until only the scammed account and people who didn't care or lost their receipt would lose anything.
The idea started out as more of a social media/blog/rant site idea more than a profit oriented thing, but I could make it work pretty easily, The "business rules" for an anonymized service seem totally workable, but the anonymous people would have to accept some of the risk for the privacy.
People who opt in to having _me_ keep the payment records are, of course, buying the surety of service for the loss of anonymity, at least in part.
And the un-paid people are much less work (e.g. none) to track.
And a spammer would lose all their content for spamming as the and all its content would be forefet for spamming as a single "hide/delete where" eqivelent action. So rather than make fake accounts on my system they would be "paying" CPU to make keys and encrypt and sign their transmissions to me. Not impossible to script but pretty hard to javascript.
Return email will be sent, if necessary, to whatever address(es) are registered in the public key database for that fingeprint, encrypted with that key.
Obviously I have no control over your passphrase and can do nothing to help you "recover your password" or whatever. Please see your GPG or PGP documentation for a better explanation.
Your account will not be "renewed" past the key expiration date.
I have been toying with a site idea. Your account name is your public key fingerprint. You public nicname is whatever you use in the message. Your login is validated because everything you send is signed wiht the key that matches the fingerprint (and encrypted with my public key for transmision). Input to user form is constrained and validated within those constraints (to prevent padding attacks).
I would then have a database "key x","paid through date y".
Sure, I couldn't sell any farmed data a-la facebook, but suppoena requests woudl be a breze... "here's your hex dump..."
Current precident in this U.S. of A. lets you "accidentally" loose your right to remain silent by, get this, "not talking". And you can "lose" your Fifth Ammendment Rights also by "answering _any_ question" (like "what is your name") in some contexts, such as being before a grand jury.
This isn't constitutional, but you will be held to it anyway.
The rule of law is bent to beyond breaking in many areas, including the right to remain silent and the right to free speech etc.
Don't depend on the law alone... only in immense piles of cold hard cash can you trust here under the law.
Theft or loss is more likely. In a proper police state, they already have you under surveillance so they already know your pass phrase.
First rule of paranoia, don't save what you don't want found.
Second rule of paranoia, why are _you_ asking _me_... what do you really want? I will not be deceived! I want to see the birth certificate of the guy who says the birt certificate is real! There never were any towers to start with, we can tell from the pictures of the so-called "moon landing" because the shadows on the newspaper don't match the shadows under his nose...!
Pulseaudo works perfectly for me on my boxes... I don't enable it in any of my applications... I don't compile it... and then all my problems go away.../doh...
(I use Gentoo, so it kindof makes most of this stuff moot as I get what I want and I don't get the other stuff.)
I have yet to have a GCC/C++ issue with version advancement that isn't solvable by using the appropriate version comparability flags. Sure, when I stumble upon something that I have to say "sure, use the depricated gcc-only feature instead of the new language standard, it can get tricky. But that's the cost of using "this tool only" features for ALL definitions of "this tool".
For instance, the gcc "typeof" was on the cutting block for many many revisions before it went away. It was never standard, and there is a new "language standard" feature of similar functionality. But it's poor practice to blame the compiler guys for implementing new standards and phasing out non-portable dross. Poorer still if you are the guy who was supposed to keep the code up to date but instead acts all surprised about something you had about ten years warning of. Or didn't you ever look?
I'd agree with parent, adding or changing some emphasis:
FOSS is generally written by people who want "usable" software in a field. Closed source software is usually written by people who want "salable" software in a field.
In example, most people working on FOSS office apps are doing so because they need a word processor (et. al.) that does things that the current version does not. Word for Windows was written by people who knew that their product had to sell itself in the first ten minutes. That means that the WfW (a.k.a. MSW) had to be wide, shallow and pretty in its shallowness. Star Office (now Open Office, or Libre Office etc) had to be good at processing words at depth but wasn't always pretty.
Now the problem here is that in virtually all cases the Shallow but Pretty commercial offering is plenty fine for the shallow users, and horrific for the deep users. Doubt me? Try putting two separate outlines in one Word document.
The second-part problem is that a lot of people come along and try to "pretty up" the FOSS by aping the closed source. Try putting two outlines into one LibreOffice document some time.
The bets options usually get lost on the cutting room floor. There is a reason that the entire legal field still uses WordPerfect. It's easy to have multiple outlines in one document there etc.
So virtually every open source project that attracts "enough people" begins to try to pretty itself up by aping the worst, prettiest bits of the currently popular shallow-ware market leader.
Linus has kept Linux from falling into that trap. It is still generally written by people who want and need a system kernel to work in depth. So to most of the GNU suites of software. Each designed to do one thing well. There is a reason that the GCC folks never tried to go all IDE on our collective asses, and that is the reason that it is _still_ the top of the line in portable compilers for the core languages (C/C++/Fortran/ADA) (and it's trying to get java in there too but getting too close to Sun/Oracle is not so smart).
So yes, when Linus said to the "let's be like Microsoft" guy, "eh, how a-bout 'no'" the smart money must applaud.
Part of the reason he changed sides is that after a large number of stunning victories and advances for the American side were shat upon by his superiors he realized that his superiors were likely to bone things up.
In short he was _driven_ to the other side and then demonized.
History is never as cut and dried as the books would lead you to believe on casual reading.
Your assertion that the poster was looking for a "better" solution (than VNC) is false, as he didn't say that.
You don't like VNC. I get that.
Doesn't make it a bad choice just because you don't like it.
Now leaving the VNC server running bare on the internet is bad, but that was handled elsewere by talking about reversing the link direction etc. That windows UAC is crap is sad, yes. But the fact that people need to turn to their family when their household appliances fail them (and Windows is a houshold appliance at this point) is sad as well.
Since your relative's most likely problem is "I can't get to my internets", any solution that involves them going to a web page or whatever is doomed to fail.
Your best bet is to get your friends and family to not think of you as tech support./doh... (really made my life easier 8-)
The reversed (server-calls-dispay) vnc thing works well enough.
Set up a VPN host at your place and VPN clients on their machines and then just "have that on"...
You could put Xen under windows and support Windows and Linux (no joy for OSX of course).
Firewall rules to filter out brute forcers on your host (but let you have up to 5 SSH sessions from each/any one host per hour): iptables --new-chain SSHTHROTTLE iptables --append SSHTHROTTLE --match recent --name bad_actors --update --jump DROP iptables --append SSHTHROTTLE --match hashlimit --hashlimit-name ssh_throttle --hashlimit-upto 5/hour --hashlimit-mode srcip --hashlimit-burst 2 --jump ACCEPT # or --jump RETURN if you have other rules to check on this link iptables --append SSHTHROTTLE --match recent --name bad_actors --set --jump DROP iptables --append INPUT --in-interface (external_interface) --proto tcp --match state --state NEW --dport 22 --syn --jump SSHTHROTTLE
I work with classified systems on aircraft. The linux distro stuff is usually compiled to exact machine specs. I do the same things on my home systems so that I can remain familiar with the procedures (and more importantly the pitfalls and compatibility/replacement issues) so that when the real work hits these sorts of snags I am already familiar with the symptoms and remediation steps likely necessary.
Note that the project isn't using Gentoo, but I am because it (over) simulates the kinds of things that the project -does- encounter. (plus I can bring in-and-out some of the things that some people suggest.)
Basically I do this because it keeps me fore-armed for what the actual work will run me smack into eventually. 8-)
Slashdot Mirror
Linux developers don't care, nor shoud they, about the decision of one company to play nice or not.
Linux kernel developers have been letting Nvidia get away with the whole "binary blob" thing for a long time. Nvidia has taken no real steps to come into conformance with the GPL requirements. They keep getting a pass for their bad citizenship.
Eventually bad actors (Nvidia) either have to shape up, or they need to ship out.
At the moment Nvidia is freeloading on the linux kernel. They are putting themselves in there for free. Now they are asking to break even more rules, or more accurately, to have the rules changed in the name of their personal interests. Nvidia has fouled their own bed, but now they are whining that they don't want to have to lie in the filth of their own making. They are a full grown company. They know what they _ought_ to be doing. They want a pass to have things their own way regardless.
Sometimes you have to tell a spoilt child that they don't get the lolly this time.
Linux developers are not trying to "force" anybody to do anything. Nvidia is trying to force the linux community to accept their unacceptable "super secret" blob into the kernel agains the linux community's development and participatation standards.
If I showed up on your doorstep and said "you have to let me use your bathroom and your kitchen, but I am not going to wash my hands or put on pants" you would not be "forcing" me to (anything) by saying that my intended pantless, unwashed use of your facilities was unacceptable.
The Linux community is telling nvidia "we use soap and pants here, if you won't do likewise, we don't feel like accomodating you."
Nvidia _knows_ they want in, otherwise they wouldent be trying to get in, Linux Don't Care if they come or not, but if they come they need pants...
Requiring someone to meet minimum standards for participation is not "forcing them" to do anything,
No pants, no access is not an unreasonable position.
DOS. TSO. CICS. == That's all IBM mainframe stuff from the sixties and seventies. Always came with source tapes.
Forth, the language, made by an astronomer, eventually extended into Postscript, e.g. that thing that runs all those printers.
All the platform-agnostic products like Open Office or the entirety of the platform agnostic elements of the GNU Suite.
Really, software used to be always be open sourced.
...orary software-for-money model.
See, thing is. Software was originally written by people who had to actually do things other than write software. It was all open soruce anyway. Not just Unix whith its original sharing stuff, but all the software that came before. In the seventies when IBM delivered you a copy of DOS and TSO and CICS for your big-iron mainframe it came on two sets of tapes. One was the ready to run binaries, and the other was the "you bet your ass you are going to find something you are going to need to tweak and recompile" sources.
Microsoft's bizzare model of selling software and keeping the source secret worked for lack of meaningful competition. The just imposed it onto the PC. And IBM, the company that put the whole bios source in the technical manual, didn't care because they just wanted to kill the Apple II and they then expected to dump the PC just like the other lugables they had put out to kill other small competitors.
The monkey got in the barrel when Business People took the "Personal Computer" and made it into a Business Computer surrogate.
That killed the multitude of brands in computing available and then left IBM supporting their business base with what was designed to be a throw-away. There's a reason that the AT used the stupidest mode of the interrupt controller and had to gang up on IRQ2 and bump its original occupant to IRQ9 and such. The chip they used had way better configurations but IBM had already glued their hourglass to their table on many technical shortcuts.
So flash forward. Microsoft never managed to escape software (windows and word) despite constantly trying to, because secrecy doesn't lead to good service or products. As larger more open systems in every other area of technology passed Microsoft by, lots of people wanted to be The Next Microsoft, but even Microsoft doesn't really want to be Microsoft. They just don't have any idea of how to be anything else. So they survive on a constant diet, cosisting of the flesh of their "preferred partners" and washed down by the secret bitter tears of the windows users who have learned to eat their gruel and like it mister.
But out here, we are back to people writing the software they need to use. After all, who better to know how it should work? And they do so knowing that the free-as-in-liberty materials they used to do so were _not_ free as in cash. Instead of paying Microsoft $10,000 for a development kit, and $2 per unit shipped, negoatiated up front to make a Windows CE monstrosity, they know they have to "pay" for their zero-cash initial outlay with 'here, have this URL full of code" for each unit sold.
Who cares? They are selling those units. Money is being made. People who want to sell you a phone have _no_ _interest_ in being in the "phone operating system development" business. So why would they care if you can replace the OS using the code they got for free and gave away for free? You bought the phone and good riddance till you decide you want the next one!
Same for military gear. Same for office suites. Same for business software. Same for scientific software.
People want to do business and science. Those few freaks like me in the mix who want to do software just find someone who wants to do that business or science and say "hey, buddy, I'll make that thing do what you want for a little green"...
What could be more natural.
The artificial scarcity attempt will fail, it will do horrific things to the U.S. economy as it fails, but the world will soldier on and in another 30 years the U.S. will come begging at the world technology table, with a black eye, and pretending to have no memory of chasing and seducing That Harlot DRM they went home with even when their friends tried to tell them they would regret it...
I get paid major bank to work on software for Linux. That some of it goes out to be free is no skin off my teeth.
See free software isn't "I'm gonna write some POS and hope someone buys it" development model. Those days are dead mostly anyway. Its "Some guy wants these features put on that 'free' bit because he actually has a use case, and he's gonna pay me to meet his needs then give it away so neither of us get stuck paying upkeep and he can have me do something newer and better".
Who want's to spend 40 years doing maintenance on a some accounting or word processing software anyway. There are people who are writing better gear because they need to process words and account for money. And since they really make their money counting money and processing words, giving the bycatch code out as the "whole cost" of getting the whole pre-mod app is a huge win.
It just won't lead to "another microsoft"
That closed source model was a fluke anyway, the preceding 40 years were open source. The next twenty five or so was a grand experiment that largely failed except for a few really unexpected cutthroat operators, and now its back to the more natural state of only paying for what you need.
In a current version of word I don't use 90% of it, and I'm a technical writer and novelist, but I paid for it all back when I was that foolish. Same can be said for any person or company that has ever bought that slag. So now there is this free stuff that was made by someone who actually needed it, so it's not so much slag, and given away to others who _might_ need it, and then gotten back greatly improved by the supporters and the adders on.
That's lots of money feeding lots of people, and nobody is wasting their time or money playing the "trade secret" and "big P.R." games.
What's not to love?
Give yourself a remote account. Give grandma her own account that can only write in her own directory. Do remote maintenance at will. Back up her shit to something at your house because grandma is gonna break or lose that shit to her own activities someday. Do stealth maintenance.
In short, nuke that family shit from FOSS Orbit _before_ it can fester.
If only _someone_ would make a non-retarded LaTeX to HTML converter.
Even better, if someone else would make things like LyX really work with alternate document type macros, particularly SFFMS (which I used to write my novel because it will actually produce printed paper drafts in the absurd formats publishers want like double-underline for italics).
Currently I use Kile on KDE for editing my latex documents.
---
But _really_ *where* is the word processor that just saves its text in reasonable HTML. You know where paragraphs are in angle-p-angle "paragraph" tags?
You can always just gmail it to yourself or the recipient unless you are completely internet dead.
And if you are completely internet dead, good old bluetooth can push objects around locally.
iClod is only going to let you move things to another iSue product.
There would be other little niceties.
Agressive use of POST instead of GET messages on all forms so that pin-trap requirements, if levied, would be largely moot. as in user XXXXXX did POST to "/" at this site on these dates and times. [POST data is not legal to collect in PIN traps in the USA as I understand the law.]
Services a site could sell? POST the URL you want as part of the encrypted blob you sen to this site, we will retrieve it, scrub it and send its content back to you encrypted to with your key.
Pay for encrypted, advertisement free page delivery with/without the unpaid peoples noise at your leasure. 8-)
Encrypted mail box where the records in the mailbox are encrypted to your public key the instant we get it if the "From" matches particular criteria you specify. (this burns time off your subscription key expiration date etc, so you might not want to encrypt "form *".
Note that this is not a bar to law enforcement if they show up with a court order to "tap" a particular key going forward. It is a barrier to having law enforcement fish into your past. I am not a lawyer so I don't know if this last bit is legal, it's just the noise floating in my head.
Of course such a site would have no way of knowing whether the "identity" information in the key, if any, was real so just as I could make a key that said I was both Mittens and B.H.O. today, anybody would be foolish to assume that an unsigned and unverrified key was anybody it clamed to represent.
In short the site design is not to confound the law, but to make the entire issue of identity "Somebody Else's Problem" since I want to be in the business of passing messages for fun and profit, not being the arbiter of who is whom.
(you should see my thoughts on replacing DNS... 8-)
Not for any longer than necessary. Likely I would make that opt-in.
I would have a payment history (bob paid x dollars for y time) as an atomic event. Bob could check a box to say "remember this for me", or not at the time of payment.
At the time of payment I would also send Bob a receipt. That recept would say "Bob paid for a service". The receipt would also contain a dot-splash (e.g. Qr Code a linear 2D barcode, depending on how much info space I turn out to need) that was the "proper join record for the database" (e.g. the key tuple that proved that payment X was for service Y on date Z). That tuple would be encrypted with _my_ secret key. Bob could use this receipt by sending it back to me, but I would only have that record until the payment cleared and was essentially irreversible, or when Bob sent it back via email or phone scan etc.
The actual membership information that Key X was paid-up-and-valid until Date Y would be a separate entry.
Think double entry accounting but where the account holder and not the institution had the journal that colated things.
With no start date, and if a person could buy any amount of time, which would be necessary because the key the customer made is only valid till it expires and that expiration date is chosen to the second by the key creator.
There is some ability to back-figure the expiration dates to the purchases and so the purchasers while both sets of data are present, so the user would have the option to "randomize the duration", e.g. for gambling a little of the funds paid they would gain or be shorted a random amount of time within a reasonable percentage of the purchase duration.
The idea is that, at every chance, you give the user the magic cookie, to join the information, but you keep the results. As long as the cookie is cryptographically secured it doesn't mater that they are holding it.
It wouldn't be that hard to figure out who and paid what when, when the user base is first started out, but as the base and transactions mounted the anonymity of payments would increase.
So imagine you want to buy a year, and your public key is good for at least a year, you could buy a year as one transaction, or cut it up into several transactions (like 2 and 3 and 7 months each) to get the year, or you could buy eleven months and bet a month hoping to go long not short. Without the record that you get into your exclusive custody, there is no good way to ask the site how 12 months ended up on that key from which purchaser.
If you invalidate your key, you get no money back. If you lose your receipt you have nobody to blame but yourself. That's the risk you take for your privacy. It's basically using an information system hole to make things same-as-cash.
I haven't figured out how to deal with credit card "charge-backs" or fraudulent disputes. I'd rather take the gift-card route for payment if it came to that kind of problem.
You could, I suppose, put people who paid via revocable means (like credit cards) in "risk pools" and if someone games, you penalize the pool but let people out of the pool using their receipts as proof that they are not the scammer. As each person used their receipts to change pools, the pool would get smaller but each member would lose more, until only the scammed account and people who didn't care or lost their receipt would lose anything.
The idea started out as more of a social media/blog/rant site idea more than a profit oriented thing, but I could make it work pretty easily, The "business rules" for an anonymized service seem totally workable, but the anonymous people would have to accept some of the risk for the privacy.
People who opt in to having _me_ keep the payment records are, of course, buying the surety of service for the loss of anonymity, at least in part.
And the un-paid people are much less work (e.g. none) to track.
And a spammer would lose all their content for spamming as the and all its content would be forefet for spamming as a single "hide/delete where" eqivelent action. So rather than make fake accounts on my system they would be "paying" CPU to make keys and encrypt and sign their transmissions to me. Not impossible to script but pretty hard to javascript.
Return email will be sent, if necessary, to whatever address(es) are registered in the public key database for that fingeprint, encrypted with that key.
Obviously I have no control over your passphrase and can do nothing to help you "recover your password" or whatever. Please see your GPG or PGP documentation for a better explanation.
Your account will not be "renewed" past the key expiration date.
I have been toying with a site idea. Your account name is your public key fingerprint. You public nicname is whatever you use in the message. Your login is validated because everything you send is signed wiht the key that matches the fingerprint (and encrypted with my public key for transmision). Input to user form is constrained and validated within those constraints (to prevent padding attacks).
I would then have a database "key x","paid through date y".
Sure, I couldn't sell any farmed data a-la facebook, but suppoena requests woudl be a breze... "here's your hex dump..."
Current precident in this U.S. of A. lets you "accidentally" loose your right to remain silent by, get this, "not talking". And you can "lose" your Fifth Ammendment Rights also by "answering _any_ question" (like "what is your name") in some contexts, such as being before a grand jury.
This isn't constitutional, but you will be held to it anyway.
The rule of law is bent to beyond breaking in many areas, including the right to remain silent and the right to free speech etc.
Don't depend on the law alone... only in immense piles of cold hard cash can you trust here under the law.
Theft or loss is more likely. In a proper police state, they already have you under surveillance so they already know your pass phrase.
First rule of paranoia, don't save what you don't want found.
Second rule of paranoia, why are _you_ asking _me_... what do you really want? I will not be deceived! I want to see the birth certificate of the guy who says the birt certificate is real! There never were any towers to start with, we can tell from the pictures of the so-called "moon landing" because the shadows on the newspaper don't match the shadows under his nose...!
8-)
Users are too stupid.
Actually, for large definitions of one place, like "on the hard drive" this is already done.
Therefore the disk should be encrypted.
I don't encrypt /boot for obvious reasons, those being that I like to boot my computer.
I have had zero problems.
I use LUKS and a decent pass phrase.
I reboot often enough that the chance of me forgetting my disk password is essentially zero.
And it was never necessary because we had "UNIX Domain Sockets" and the ability to parse...
Pulseaudo works perfectly for me on my boxes... /doh...
I don't enable it in any of my applications...
I don't compile it...
and then all my problems go away...
(I use Gentoo, so it kindof makes most of this stuff moot as I get what I want and I don't get the other stuff.)
I have yet to have a GCC/C++ issue with version advancement that isn't solvable by using the appropriate version comparability flags. Sure, when I stumble upon something that I have to say "sure, use the depricated gcc-only feature instead of the new language standard, it can get tricky. But that's the cost of using "this tool only" features for ALL definitions of "this tool".
For instance, the gcc "typeof" was on the cutting block for many many revisions before it went away. It was never standard, and there is a new "language standard" feature of similar functionality. But it's poor practice to blame the compiler guys for implementing new standards and phasing out non-portable dross. Poorer still if you are the guy who was supposed to keep the code up to date but instead acts all surprised about something you had about ten years warning of. Or didn't you ever look?
It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
I'd agree with parent, adding or changing some emphasis:
FOSS is generally written by people who want "usable" software in a field. Closed source software is usually written by people who want "salable" software in a field.
In example, most people working on FOSS office apps are doing so because they need a word processor (et. al.) that does things that the current version does not. Word for Windows was written by people who knew that their product had to sell itself in the first ten minutes. That means that the WfW (a.k.a. MSW) had to be wide, shallow and pretty in its shallowness. Star Office (now Open Office, or Libre Office etc) had to be good at processing words at depth but wasn't always pretty.
Now the problem here is that in virtually all cases the Shallow but Pretty commercial offering is plenty fine for the shallow users, and horrific for the deep users. Doubt me? Try putting two separate outlines in one Word document.
The second-part problem is that a lot of people come along and try to "pretty up" the FOSS by aping the closed source. Try putting two outlines into one LibreOffice document some time.
The bets options usually get lost on the cutting room floor. There is a reason that the entire legal field still uses WordPerfect. It's easy to have multiple outlines in one document there etc.
So virtually every open source project that attracts "enough people" begins to try to pretty itself up by aping the worst, prettiest bits of the currently popular shallow-ware market leader.
Linus has kept Linux from falling into that trap. It is still generally written by people who want and need a system kernel to work in depth. So to most of the GNU suites of software. Each designed to do one thing well. There is a reason that the GCC folks never tried to go all IDE on our collective asses, and that is the reason that it is _still_ the top of the line in portable compilers for the core languages (C/C++/Fortran/ADA) (and it's trying to get java in there too but getting too close to Sun/Oracle is not so smart).
So yes, when Linus said to the "let's be like Microsoft" guy, "eh, how a-bout 'no'" the smart money must applaud.
Part of the reason he changed sides is that after a large number of stunning victories and advances for the American side were shat upon by his superiors he realized that his superiors were likely to bone things up.
In short he was _driven_ to the other side and then demonized.
History is never as cut and dried as the books would lead you to believe on casual reading.
--signed, some american who knows history.
Your assertion that the poster was looking for a "better" solution (than VNC) is false, as he didn't say that.
You don't like VNC. I get that.
Doesn't make it a bad choice just because you don't like it.
Now leaving the VNC server running bare on the internet is bad, but that was handled elsewere by talking about reversing the link direction etc. That windows UAC is crap is sad, yes. But the fact that people need to turn to their family when their household appliances fail them (and Windows is a houshold appliance at this point) is sad as well.
Since your relative's most likely problem is "I can't get to my internets", any solution that involves them going to a web page or whatever is doomed to fail.
Your best bet is to get your friends and family to not think of you as tech support. /doh... (really made my life easier 8-)
The reversed (server-calls-dispay) vnc thing works well enough.
Set up a VPN host at your place and VPN clients on their machines and then just "have that on"...
You could put Xen under windows and support Windows and Linux (no joy for OSX of course).
Firewall rules to filter out brute forcers on your host (but let you have up to 5 SSH sessions from each/any one host per hour):
iptables --new-chain SSHTHROTTLE
iptables --append SSHTHROTTLE --match recent --name bad_actors --update --jump DROP
iptables --append SSHTHROTTLE --match hashlimit --hashlimit-name ssh_throttle --hashlimit-upto 5/hour --hashlimit-mode srcip --hashlimit-burst 2 --jump ACCEPT # or --jump RETURN if you have other rules to check on this link
iptables --append SSHTHROTTLE --match recent --name bad_actors --set --jump DROP
iptables --append INPUT --in-interface (external_interface) --proto tcp --match state --state NEW --dport 22 --syn --jump SSHTHROTTLE
I work with classified systems on aircraft. The linux distro stuff is usually compiled to exact machine specs. I do the same things on my home systems so that I can remain familiar with the procedures (and more importantly the pitfalls and compatibility/replacement issues) so that when the real work hits these sorts of snags I am already familiar with the symptoms and remediation steps likely necessary.
Note that the project isn't using Gentoo, but I am because it (over) simulates the kinds of things that the project -does- encounter. (plus I can bring in-and-out some of the things that some people suggest.)
Basically I do this because it keeps me fore-armed for what the actual work will run me smack into eventually. 8-)
Even God doesn't play Spore. God can not conceive of Sin and Spore was a hellscape of stupidity...