"The trouble is that the US government's various agencies are very good at obtaining evidence before it is digitized and made available on the internet."
I disagree - do you remember all the kerfuffle about four years ago, over Los Alamos Nat'l Labs, and a missing hard drive. The US gov't has a damned hard time keeping nuclear secrets from disappearing from its custody, let alone something that could embarrass an elected official.
As for the Pentagon conspiracy thingy, how does one know that the gov't 'got 'em all', so to speak? (BTW, the NTSB would prolly get first dibs on such things anyway for engineering forensics reasons.)
"f you put cameras on everyone, we will be forced to look at ourselves. It won't just be the faceless government watching us, it will be our friends, our enemies, and thousands of random strangers. Some people will riot in the streets, some will be happier, and some will recede from sight. Some will be angry and call such an intrusion into our lives wrong. Those are the responses every time we have been forced to look at ourselves. Be clear, this will be as straining an event as any we have ever endured. With the focus literally on us, our culture will change in order to survive."
Here, I agree. Although, there is already a somewhat relative parallel now: Britain. The British government has cameras on nearly every street corner, and nothing in outdoors London goes unseen or un-taped.
At least the Peeping Toms of the world will get a kick out of it:)
Conspiratorial overtones aside... I mean, really, I gotta see this mythical Ashcroft League of Priapatetic Darkness (or whatever it may be called by the moveon.org crowd these days) bust into a server room in West Armpit, China and run off with the results of some guy's DV recordings before the public sees it...
Hint: It is literally impossible to stop information once it gets online and out to the public proper.
The German government tried the censorship route in 1996 over a shitty little online rag called Radikal, and they couldn't stop Germans from seeing it (or even slow 'em down by much), even back when the 'net was damned tiny compared to what it is today.
The Chinese, which do have a totalitarian government right now, can't even stop their own population from proxying and satelliting their way out beyond official governmental firewalls and seeing whatever they want. This is in spite of a government which does have (and exercises on an alarming basis) the power of life or death, freedom or imprisonment, over their citizenry.
Hell, there's a damned hard fight in keeping the frickin' child porners to a minimum, and there's no nation on Earth that endorses that stuff. What makes you think that the US gov't is any more efficient in stopping information that half the planet's leadership couldn't give a dried dog's turd about.
The PATRIOT Act is limited to US territory and any foreign country which agrees by treaty to help enforce it. The list of signatory nations ain't all that damned long.
I sincerely doubt that it would be harder for the public to have access to evidentiary information if that info is privately gathered and spread across the Internet, no?
Also, last I checked the PATRIOT act is fairly limited in the other two regards you mentioned, especially for information stored or disseminated outside of US territorial borders.
"So instead of spending money on a program with a proven track record of advancing practical science, we should spend it on something with dubious odds of succeeding at its primary mission (which is itself of dubious strategic value) and little potential for useful spin-off technology."
Huh? I wouldn't look at it as a case of black vs. white here - programs like SDI and the early ICBM projects fed a lot of technology to the world at large, as peaceful space technology fed to the military.
BTW, a nitpick - I doubt that "preventing nukes from wiping out every major city in my country" would be considered a "dubious" strategic value;)
"I think that the cases here are for people sharing music, not the ones downloading, that is relatively easier to find than people downloading."
Just one prblem - while you download a song, you are also sharing it.Even if you download it and immediately remove it from your shared folder/directory, you're still sharng the thing while downloading, even if only from the temp directory where the file is being stored for assembly.
Some P2P systems, such as BitTorrent, in fact rely on this very thing to exist at all.
...it may be easier to cripple a proggy on Windows than on Linux, where someone could write a simple "plugin" to remove the watermarking from the renders, for instance... after all, in *ix, everything is a file.
In Windows, is would be much easier to bury things in the registry and in general make it tougher for the statistically less-adept user to unlock.
As a parallel example, how easy would it be to re-create the C-DILLA auth crap (and actually make it stick) for 3DS Max, on a Linux box?
Yep, they're zero-day exploits, but I was thinking of folks who, instead of holding it in their back pocket, offer the use of that vulnerability for sale... and for a lot more cash than the MSRP of a new video card.
In Mozilla's case, it would be possible to track an exploit and write your own patch, thanks to F/OSS.
Open source brings up another point - how can an agency prepare for an attack, even knowing how they'll get attacked, if the OS/proggie vendor hasn't a patch out for it yet...
I take my missus with me to Networld, and she has zero problems with hitting the casinos while I fart around in the convention halls.
Just one thing that very few learn...
on
Blackhat/Defcon Report
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...it's easier to know how to break into a system/box/whatever, than it is to learn exactly what happened and take measures to prevent it.
Sure, some items are fairly obvious, but I'm willing to wager that there are a lot of exploits that even dedicated security officials aren't aware of, simply because the exploit was found and put to use, but never reported.
As it applies to 9/11, I'm fairly certain that OBL and his boys are more willing to shell out the cash for the folks who can find undiscovered vulns than for scripters who get their rocks off by passing around " 'sploits".
Given this, I doubt there is too awful much one can learn about securing the network completely against future attacks.
OTOH, he did leave out a lot of (very) long-term reasons, most of which have a whole lot to do with humanity surviving beyond whatever Fate has laid out for the planet we're grubbing around on now...
LOL! I didn't mean for it to be taken as literal transition, nor will Microsoft's fall/replacement be one...
It will be almost guaranteed to be haphazard, unplanned, and otherwise unpredictable as to who or what body of authority will eventually own the corpse's intellectual property, or rather, make a majority marketshare from it.:)
They may well fall more like the Romans than the Nazis - by transmorgrifying into another powerful entity that dominates the whole of what it surveys, such as the way the Roman Imperium became the Roman Papacy that held sway over all of Medieval Europe.
My biggest reason for saying this involves the fact that Microsoft is also too large to just topple outright, and there is too much of the industry tied up in Windows technology for it to just suddenly become irrelevant, not to mention all the legacy apps and documents that'll require continued support no matter what OS or technology eventually rises to new dominance (.doc, ferinstance.)
I guess that, even as an admitted Linux/Mac partisan, Microsoft isn't just going to die in some Nazi-ish 'Gates-eating-a-bullet-in-a-Redmond-bunker' gotterdammerung, as much as it will just become something else, and still hold sway to some extent after it does.
So yeah - out of the two examples you picked, I'd pick the Roman one as being the one most likely to come true.
Actually, I hadn't mentioned "lesbians" specifically, nor had the child poster. Where did you get that from? And where on earth were the handicapped specifically mocked? I'm rather curious now...
As a bonus, no one will want to swipe your Gameboy and play it, either!
Nothing but bonuses all around on this one.../P
Re:Start by banning plastics for consumables
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Plastics are recyclable. Also, plastics don't really take away from the fuel supply anyway - like other petrochemicals such as asphalt, they can't be turned into gasoline without some serious re-jiggering of its internal chemical structure.
Besides, given the stability of plastics, you can mine landfills for it if you need the stuff badly enough.
Bah! It appears to be just another relative trying to cash in on someone else's work, like the decendants of the guy who copyrighted the "happy birthday" song awhile back.
Besides, no one has seen fit to defend the implied trademark (though registered? I'm thinking "not), so I doubt that the lawsuit gets anywhere... I suspect a couple of relatives saw Google's IPO numbers and decided to try at cashing in.
There are too many potential liabilities that can come up further downstream from non-GPL code pretending to be GPL. While it would be easy enough for a home-geek or a guy who downloads and inventories all his own stuff to know that a given item is no big deal license-wise, developers wanting a clean box to work from may decide to go grabbing bits and parts that may not be OSS, and they (like any human being) may have forgotten (or if they grabbed the libs from a local network server, not even know) that it wasn't.
As for your assertion, drivers can be non-OSS and still work perfectly, and OEM's aren't forced to make their stuff OSS - just ask NVIDIA if you don't believe me. Therefore, you're posting a strawman there...
The linuxant cheat isn't a problem because of the source code being closed, it is a problem because it pretends to be open-source when it is not, failing to warn whoever installs it.
...big time. MSFT and their campaign against the GPL as "viral", perhaps? prolly not in whole. OTOH, it would certainly put the bite into SCO after IBM gets done with 'em, and Linux vendors everywhere begin attacking 'em for distributing GPL'd stuff contra to the license.
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Message-ID:
Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree - do you remember all the kerfuffle about four years ago, over Los Alamos Nat'l Labs, and a missing hard drive. The US gov't has a damned hard time keeping nuclear secrets from disappearing from its custody, let alone something that could embarrass an elected official.
As for the Pentagon conspiracy thingy, how does one know that the gov't 'got 'em all', so to speak? (BTW, the NTSB would prolly get first dibs on such things anyway for engineering forensics reasons.)
"f you put cameras on everyone, we will be forced to look at ourselves. It won't just be the faceless government watching us, it will be our friends, our enemies, and thousands of random strangers. Some people will riot in the streets, some will be happier, and some will recede from sight. Some will be angry and call such an intrusion into our lives wrong. Those are the responses every time we have been forced to look at ourselves. Be clear, this will be as straining an event as any we have ever endured. With the focus literally on us, our culture will change in order to survive."
Here, I agree. Although, there is already a somewhat relative parallel now: Britain. The British government has cameras on nearly every street corner, and nothing in outdoors London goes unseen or un-taped.
At least the Peeping Toms of the world will get a kick out of it :)
Conspiratorial overtones aside... I mean, really, I gotta see this mythical Ashcroft League of Priapatetic Darkness (or whatever it may be called by the moveon.org crowd these days) bust into a server room in West Armpit, China and run off with the results of some guy's DV recordings before the public sees it...
Hint: It is literally impossible to stop information once it gets online and out to the public proper.
The German government tried the censorship route in 1996 over a shitty little online rag called Radikal, and they couldn't stop Germans from seeing it (or even slow 'em down by much), even back when the 'net was damned tiny compared to what it is today.
The Chinese, which do have a totalitarian government right now, can't even stop their own population from proxying and satelliting their way out beyond official governmental firewalls and seeing whatever they want. This is in spite of a government which does have (and exercises on an alarming basis) the power of life or death, freedom or imprisonment, over their citizenry.
Hell, there's a damned hard fight in keeping the frickin' child porners to a minimum, and there's no nation on Earth that endorses that stuff. What makes you think that the US gov't is any more efficient in stopping information that half the planet's leadership couldn't give a dried dog's turd about.
The PATRIOT Act is limited to US territory and any foreign country which agrees by treaty to help enforce it. The list of signatory nations ain't all that damned long.
So, please, lay off the wolf-crying. Gad.
Also, last I checked the PATRIOT act is fairly limited in the other two regards you mentioned, especially for information stored or disseminated outside of US territorial borders.
Huh? I wouldn't look at it as a case of black vs. white here - programs like SDI and the early ICBM projects fed a lot of technology to the world at large, as peaceful space technology fed to the military.
BTW, a nitpick - I doubt that "preventing nukes from wiping out every major city in my country" would be considered a "dubious" strategic value ;)
Just one prblem - while you download a song, you are also sharing it.Even if you download it and immediately remove it from your shared folder/directory, you're still sharng the thing while downloading, even if only from the temp directory where the file is being stored for assembly.
Some P2P systems, such as BitTorrent, in fact rely on this very thing to exist at all.
In Windows, is would be much easier to bury things in the registry and in general make it tougher for the statistically less-adept user to unlock.
As a parallel example, how easy would it be to re-create the C-DILLA auth crap (and actually make it stick) for 3DS Max, on a Linux box?
In Mozilla's case, it would be possible to track an exploit and write your own patch, thanks to F/OSS.
Open source brings up another point - how can an agency prepare for an attack, even knowing how they'll get attacked, if the OS/proggie vendor hasn't a patch out for it yet...
Sure, some items are fairly obvious, but I'm willing to wager that there are a lot of exploits that even dedicated security officials aren't aware of, simply because the exploit was found and put to use, but never reported.
As it applies to 9/11, I'm fairly certain that OBL and his boys are more willing to shell out the cash for the folks who can find undiscovered vulns than for scripters who get their rocks off by passing around " 'sploits".
Given this, I doubt there is too awful much one can learn about securing the network completely against future attacks.
OTOH, he did leave out a lot of (very) long-term reasons, most of which have a whole lot to do with humanity surviving beyond whatever Fate has laid out for the planet we're grubbing around on now...
Oh, wait...
It will be almost guaranteed to be haphazard, unplanned, and otherwise unpredictable as to who or what body of authority will eventually own the corpse's intellectual property, or rather, make a majority marketshare from it. :)
My biggest reason for saying this involves the fact that Microsoft is also too large to just topple outright, and there is too much of the industry tied up in Windows technology for it to just suddenly become irrelevant, not to mention all the legacy apps and documents that'll require continued support no matter what OS or technology eventually rises to new dominance (.doc, ferinstance.)
I guess that, even as an admitted Linux/Mac partisan, Microsoft isn't just going to die in some Nazi-ish 'Gates-eating-a-bullet-in-a-Redmond-bunker' gotterdammerung, as much as it will just become something else, and still hold sway to some extent after it does.
So yeah - out of the two examples you picked, I'd pick the Roman one as being the one most likely to come true.
Nothing but bonuses all around on this one... /P
Besides, given the stability of plastics, you can mine landfills for it if you need the stuff badly enough.
Besides, no one has seen fit to defend the implied trademark (though registered? I'm thinking "not), so I doubt that the lawsuit gets anywhere... I suspect a couple of relatives saw Google's IPO numbers and decided to try at cashing in.
Friggin' corporate pirates should be MADE to pay their proper dues!
As for your assertion, drivers can be non-OSS and still work perfectly, and OEM's aren't forced to make their stuff OSS - just ask NVIDIA if you don't believe me. Therefore, you're posting a strawman there...
The linuxant cheat isn't a problem because of the source code being closed, it is a problem because it pretends to be open-source when it is not, failing to warn whoever installs it.
###
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) :-)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Message-ID:
Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all- nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you
###