Actually, public schools are generally local government institutions - and so should be completely unaffected by the constitutional ban on federal laws restricting the freedom of speach.
That is, right up until the moment they accept federal funding...
"Coding an exploit" is mentioned more than once in the article as an additional step that could be taken - i.e. a step that had not yet been taken. So it's more like seeing an open "employees only" door at the bank and pointing it out to the teller rather than poking your head in that door and telling the teller that the door to the vault is open.
In the real world I'd feel completely safe poking my head through an open door to see what's on the other side if the door was in a public area. There's nothing illegal about looking into an open bank vault and then pointing out to a teller that it's open.
In the article, it's talking about students noticing security issues in web applications that they are using. If you accept the physical property analogy at all, this is more "seeing that a door that should be secured was left open".
Why the hell would you do that? That's like writing the first draft of an essay on paper and correcting all the spelling mistakes before typing it ino a computer.
There are some things that computers are very good at, like identifying syntax errors. They also let you compile and test your code as many times as you want.
Now, it's important that students understand that programming has a design phase. It's also not always optimal to use the "debug an empty source file" programming technique, but there's also no reason to go back to the bad old days of batch systems and writing code away from the computer.
The problem can also be solved by users making that translation in their head, so those of us who would consider a CVS build if appropriate aren't screwed out of useful information.
There were reports that all the Wii demos at E3 were run on Game Cubes. This story clarifys that A.) People who thought they saw game cubes were right and B.) There's nothing sketchy going on with that.
In the post I responded to, you said the following:
Unless something crazy happens, I don't think that I'll need anything faster (ever).
Sure, right now your computer serves your needs. I'm not questioning that. People with reasonably recent computers today are doing fine for most light computer usage. That's actually been true for a while now.
That doesn't change the fact that a new computer costing $X will continue to be faster every year, and that application developers will continue to target the low end of what's available.
In five years (if you don't upgrade your 2100+ before then) your computer will be nearly 10 years old. It'll be slow for normal usage, simply because the applications will assume a 3 year old computer instead of a 10 year old computer.
As an extreme: In fifteen years, if you want to keep doing "normal" computing tasks, you'll need to upgrade that Athlon XP 2100+.
It's not that I don't believe that exported equipment has been used for international espionage in the past. That's obviously happened. In fact, most of the stuff you mention in your post is stuff I was aready aware of and consider to be pretty likely.
Given all that, I still don't think there's any reason to trust computers from Lenovo any less than computers from Dell. Simply put, after Lenovo acquired IBM's PC business they're too obvious a player. Getting them to put backdoors in their computers would be too blatant a play too soon. It'd be like if the United States had McDonalds put rat poision in their burgers at their China locations.
If they needed to hit every computer, then you'd be right.
They don't need to hit every computer, so they can attack much later in the production process. Anyone who has access to the motherboard after firmware is installed can update it with the "cracked" firmware. That includes anyone who has access to the assembled computers before they get packaged for shipping.
You're making the (insane) assumption that your current computer usage won't ever change.
Even if we assume that no radical new applications are developed, even simple things like watching videos on a computer will require more computing power. Your current computer couldn't play a 1920x1080@60 fps Mpeg-4 video smoothly. That may not matter in the next couple years, but it'll absolutely be the norm inside of 20 years.
The real issue though is that computer usage patterns change. 20 years ago, the concept of web pages with arbitrary 100dpi full color raster graphics on them would have seemed silly - but that didn't mean that "640k will be enough for anyone" or that "the world market can only support five or ten computers".
The whole (meaningful) point of this article is that that isn't true with this particular set of processors. Actually, the Pentium M has had better performance / clock for a while now.
There's one thing you did get right though: computer based espionage is pretty easy. Given how easy it is, there's no way to categorize computer makers as "trusted" or "untrusted" - because all the "enemy agent" needs to do is have 10 minutes alone with a computer to flash the BIOS. That could be a QA engineer at Dell. Hell, that could be the UPS guy.
Don't even need that, just need an email client that interfaces with an accessable file server (which can be the email server box) as its way of dealing with attachments.
That still doesn't help the virus problem, although it would let the existing SSL infastructure be used to (poorly) authenticate attachments.
Third parties are great, but they'll never get elected in the USA until the electoral system is fixed. This can actually be demonstrated mathematically with game theory.
Seriously, when was the last time a president was elected that wasn't a "Democrat" or a "Republican"?
Yup. And a steam-valve computer will have excellent EMP resistance, but that doesn't mean that "Electronic transistor-logic computers and steam-valve computers both have their places, neither is better than the other".
Perhaps some research OS / weird flavor of Linux needs a security model other than root right now, but OpenBSD doesn't. OpenBSD is a secure and stable BSD Unix in C, and it does that better than is reasonably possible. Totally altering the security model and basic archetecture completely misses the point, and would throw away both stability and security.
The cost of a camera or three isn't what's going to hold back any random film projects. Even if you go to best buy and pay $1500 each for HD camcorders.
Uhh, why would it be more expensive to provide HDTV content?
HD cameras cost the same now that decent SD cameras cost 10 years ago. Mostly it's just that we get free resolution for transitioning to digital data storage and letting moore's law run for 10 years.
HDTVs will get cheaper, as volume goes up and sunk manufacturing costs get recouped, but the price of game consoles isn't going anywhere. You can expect to pay $300+ for game consoles for quite a while yet.
The point is, sometimes things are similar. I'm not nessisarily saying that this is true for microkernels and monolithic kernels, but given any two things there's no rule that they both "have their place" - one might just be better.
A free press was designed into the american system of government. It's one of the checks and balances that is supposed to allow the USA to work, which is why it's in the first section of the bill of rights. "Classified information" is just a semantic game to get around that.
It's not about computers, it's about digital cameras or whatever. If you buy a digital camera and it doesn't work with your computer, returning it and getting a different brand is perfectly reasonable. In fact, it's what consumers normally do. I don't see the problem.
Additionally, at least with digital cameras, it's far more likely that it will work with Linux than with an old version of Windows that a similar user might be running.
Sure, as you approach five or six different types of device, you'll tend to hit something that won't work with Linux - but you'll also tend to simply run into a broken device that needs to be returned anyway. Most people don't get that many different devices in any case.
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World War II was a good deal science-wise. We got fission power, rockets (leading to space travel) and computers.
No later war was anywhere near as useful, especially not the current Iraq civil war.
That is, right up until the moment they accept federal funding...
In the real world I'd feel completely safe poking my head through an open door to see what's on the other side if the door was in a public area. There's nothing illegal about looking into an open bank vault and then pointing out to a teller that it's open.
In the article, it's talking about students noticing security issues in web applications that they are using. If you accept the physical property analogy at all, this is more "seeing that a door that should be secured was left open".
Why the hell would you do that? That's like writing the first draft of an essay on paper and correcting all the spelling mistakes before typing it ino a computer.
There are some things that computers are very good at, like identifying syntax errors. They also let you compile and test your code as many times as you want.
Now, it's important that students understand that programming has a design phase. It's also not always optimal to use the "debug an empty source file" programming technique, but there's also no reason to go back to the bad old days of batch systems and writing code away from the computer.
The problem can also be solved by users making that translation in their head, so those of us who would consider a CVS build if appropriate aren't screwed out of useful information.
There were reports that all the Wii demos at E3 were run on Game Cubes. This story clarifys that A.) People who thought they saw game cubes were right and B.) There's nothing sketchy going on with that.
Sure, right now your computer serves your needs. I'm not questioning that. People with reasonably recent computers today are doing fine for most light computer usage. That's actually been true for a while now.
That doesn't change the fact that a new computer costing $X will continue to be faster every year, and that application developers will continue to target the low end of what's available.
In five years (if you don't upgrade your 2100+ before then) your computer will be nearly 10 years old. It'll be slow for normal usage, simply because the applications will assume a 3 year old computer instead of a 10 year old computer.
As an extreme: In fifteen years, if you want to keep doing "normal" computing tasks, you'll need to upgrade that Athlon XP 2100+.
Given all that, I still don't think there's any reason to trust computers from Lenovo any less than computers from Dell. Simply put, after Lenovo acquired IBM's PC business they're too obvious a player. Getting them to put backdoors in their computers would be too blatant a play too soon. It'd be like if the United States had McDonalds put rat poision in their burgers at their China locations.
They don't need to hit every computer, so they can attack much later in the production process. Anyone who has access to the motherboard after firmware is installed can update it with the "cracked" firmware. That includes anyone who has access to the assembled computers before they get packaged for shipping.
You're making the (insane) assumption that your current computer usage won't ever change.
Even if we assume that no radical new applications are developed, even simple things like watching videos on a computer will require more computing power. Your current computer couldn't play a 1920x1080@60 fps Mpeg-4 video smoothly. That may not matter in the next couple years, but it'll absolutely be the norm inside of 20 years.
The real issue though is that computer usage patterns change. 20 years ago, the concept of web pages with arbitrary 100dpi full color raster graphics on them would have seemed silly - but that didn't mean that "640k will be enough for anyone" or that "the world market can only support five or ten computers".
The whole (meaningful) point of this article is that that isn't true with this particular set of processors. Actually, the Pentium M has had better performance / clock for a while now.
The hell? Your post, as a whole, makes no sense.
There's one thing you did get right though: computer based espionage is pretty easy. Given how easy it is, there's no way to categorize computer makers as "trusted" or "untrusted" - because all the "enemy agent" needs to do is have 10 minutes alone with a computer to flash the BIOS. That could be a QA engineer at Dell. Hell, that could be the UPS guy.
Why couldn't someone in a position to do that at say, Dell, be bribed?
That still doesn't help the virus problem, although it would let the existing SSL infastructure be used to (poorly) authenticate attachments.
Seriously, when was the last time a president was elected that wasn't a "Democrat" or a "Republican"?
The games are going to come on betamax tapes?
Yup. And a steam-valve computer will have excellent EMP resistance, but that doesn't mean that "Electronic transistor-logic computers and steam-valve computers both have their places, neither is better than the other".
Perhaps some research OS / weird flavor of Linux needs a security model other than root right now, but OpenBSD doesn't. OpenBSD is a secure and stable BSD Unix in C, and it does that better than is reasonably possible. Totally altering the security model and basic archetecture completely misses the point, and would throw away both stability and security.
The cost of a camera or three isn't what's going to hold back any random film projects. Even if you go to best buy and pay $1500 each for HD camcorders.
HD cameras cost the same now that decent SD cameras cost 10 years ago. Mostly it's just that we get free resolution for transitioning to digital data storage and letting moore's law run for 10 years.
HDTVs will get cheaper, as volume goes up and sunk manufacturing costs get recouped, but the price of game consoles isn't going anywhere. You can expect to pay $300+ for game consoles for quite a while yet.
The point is, sometimes things are similar. I'm not nessisarily saying that this is true for microkernels and monolithic kernels, but given any two things there's no rule that they both "have their place" - one might just be better.
A free press was designed into the american system of government. It's one of the checks and balances that is supposed to allow the USA to work, which is why it's in the first section of the bill of rights. "Classified information" is just a semantic game to get around that.
It's not about computers, it's about digital cameras or whatever. If you buy a digital camera and it doesn't work with your computer, returning it and getting a different brand is perfectly reasonable. In fact, it's what consumers normally do. I don't see the problem.
Additionally, at least with digital cameras, it's far more likely that it will work with Linux than with an old version of Windows that a similar user might be running.
Sure, as you approach five or six different types of device, you'll tend to hit something that won't work with Linux - but you'll also tend to simply run into a broken device that needs to be returned anyway. Most people don't get that many different devices in any case.