To quote literally from their family friendly policy page: family friendly policy page:
Probably, we will not have graphic depictions of the sex act or photographs of human sex organs [...] That seems like a rather tainted idea of "family friendly" to me. When child that becomes interested in sexual topics (and inevitably, they will), and decides to use an online encyclopedia to learn more about it, on Citizendium they will find that any images related to the subject have been purposefully kept off the site. The message is clear: sex is bad, why else would images of sexual organs be kept off a site meant to provide objective information? Personally, that's not the sort of message I would want to send to children at the age where they start discovering this side of themselves, especially not with the inherent insecurity about the subject they are likely to have.
On the other hand, for ultra-religious parents who do in fact want to teach their children that sex is a topic to be kept in obscurity as much as possible, Citizendium will be an excellent resource to point their children to.
Or, depending on your location, use one of these mirrors: http://uk.exampleURL.com/file.metalink http://nl.exampleURL.com/file.metalink http://de.exampleURL.com/file.metalink
Seriously though, I like the basic idea, but the system does add an extra point of failure.
I've tried jabber in the past, in fact I tried quite hard... but I ran into several little problems that annoyed me, one of the major ones being that when someone's connection to their jabber server times out I do not get notified of this, instead it appears as though the user is still online as normal.
Another problem I encountered is that when I set up my own server, it had trouble communicating with some of the main open jabber servers (jabber.com or jabber.org, I forgot which); with the problem appearing to be either simple unwillingness on the side of the remote server, or a slight difference in the implementation of the protocol.
I'm still willing to try again though... can anyone tell me whether the problems above are either resolved, or maybe a result of incompetence on my part? And also, can someone point me to a simple & solid opensource Jabber server that runs on Debian? I do definitely like the thought behind Jabber.
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- <reutty@bccls.org>
(reason: 501 unacceptable mail address)
----- Transcript of session follows -----... while talking to bergen2.bccls.org.: >>> MAIL From:<arjen@xyx.nl> <<< 501 unacceptable mail address 501 5.6.0 Data format error (501 unacceptable mail address)
And how would you compare them? You would have to either put the harddisk in a trusted system, or boot the system from a trusted medium, and then compare the data. Comparing them from inside the affected operating system is pointless since a rootkit/virus can mask any changes to files. In fact, you would need to check the harddisk at the raw data level, since something might be hidden beyond 'visible files'. And you can pretty much bet a raw copy of a drive partition will NOT be the same between backups, so extremely thorough checking will be required.
Taking all necessary measures to make sure you don't miss anything (which incidentally is something beyond the grasp of all but the most technically minded), it would be a process that would rival if not exceed a full wipe and reinstall in required time and effort.
I know quite a few non-tech people who are capable of fully reinstalling their windows systems. None of them can perform the comparison you describe in a way that would rule out something slipping through, even if they had backups.
True if you know the nature of the compromise to the last detail. But otherwise, "recovering" a compromised system is taking a chance, since you can't be 100% sure that no bad stuff remains sneaking around. The quality of the system should be measured by how (un)likely it is to be compromised to begin with, not by how well it can be recovered.
In fact should one of my Debian Stable systems ever get compromised, I probably wouldn't sleep soundly until I fully wiped & reinstalled it as well as any systems that might theoretically have been compromised through the one affected. What if someone planted an 'obvious' virus/rootkit/... as well as a small sneaky backdoor, with the former being placed mainly to distract from the latter?
You're right in pointing out the possibility of overloading the PSU with this setup, however I took this problem into account and chose an external PSU that can provide enough current to power the server as well as provide a charge current for the battery after it has been ran down by a long power outage. The battery itself is currently in a good state and in addition I test it regularly, so I don't foresee problems there.
Saying that, this UPS solution is currently more low-tech than what I'd want for the future. I'm planning to add some circuitry to improve handling of various problems, as well as to add other devices and/or batteries that share the same 12 V rail.
Hear hear! I'm currently using an EPIA TC10000 as main home server and am extremely happy with it (providing all the "usual" services). Onboard 12V DC-DC PSU means I can simply connect a car battery in parallel to have a UPS and avoid all the inefficiency that normally comes with a UPS (mains -> transformer -> inverter -> PSU -> mainboard). Power consumption is truly minimal and so are noise levels, and I can't say I've had any stability problems even at longer periods of high loads.
Slightly OT, but this thread seemed like a good place...
A question for anyone who feels that they have a decent idea of what's going on these days when it comes to network filesystems... what do you think is the best candidate for the network filesystem of the future, particularly from a UNIX point of view? NFSv4? Some AFS descendant? I watched Coda for a while during its active development but it seems to have grinded to a near-halt and has always seemed fragile.
Since you give the impression to know a bit about it, another question for you (or anyone who feels like they have an idea;-)): What factors/elements of the equation do you think are directly responsible for making it take so long to bring fusion power to the masses? To come up with clever solutions you mainly need clever people, not necessarily a lot of time.
I get a strong sense that of the required 40-50 years I usually read about, only a small fraction will be actually about people thinking up clever solutions to the problems you describe, and the rest will be spent on calculating the exact needed parameters, computer simulations, and implementing test setups such as ITER (and, I fear, also on politics & regulations).
Provided I'm at least partially right in that assessment, it would still seem that more money would enable a significant reduction in the time required to make fusion a usable energy source. Calculations & simulations could be done faster with more people & faster supercomputers and I assume that the time required to build a test setup would also depend strongly on the available means.
So in short, would you agree that a large increase in funding would lead to a significant reduction in the time required? Or is it not as "elastic" as I think?
Forgive me if I'm missing something completely obvious here, but why is progress in fusion research still progressing so slowly? Sources generally cite estimates in the 2050-2060 range for when we'll be actually using fusion power.
The actual research itself is relatively unpredictable, I understand that. But when I read that completion of the ITER (the way I see it a relatively straightforward job, I assume the blueprints are already completed) is still 10 years away, I wonder how much time could be shaved off that estimate, as well as the ~2050 estimate, if (a lot) more money were put into fusion research.
If nuclear fusion has the potential to provide a clean, efficient, lasting energy source, and thereby eventually solve the energy crises, it would seem to me that investing a far larger amount of money than is being put into it today would be a very good investment if that could mean nuclear fusion can be used a few years earlier. I think ITER's cost is estimated at about EUR 10 billion, which is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things (I think the world GDP is somewhere around 50 trillion) it's tiny. And seeing the large potential for creating armed conflict there is in energy shortages even these days, I'd say getting fusion sooner rather than later may very well be a real matter of life and death.
However, when I hear discussions on the energy crises, the efficiency of solar/wind/water power, whether more nuclear fission reactors should be built, fusion isn't even mentioned, let alone considered by politicians for larger investments. Is it simply because it's so far away, and that for the most of us, only our descendants would benefit from those investments?
Once again this is a serious question, I'm no expert in any of this so I honestly don't know.
Hear hear. I put my e-mail address unobfuscated on my website and other places, and while I *do* get quite a bit of spam, it's hardly a problem with sensible spam filtering. (which in my case is: rblsmtpd, spamassassin, dump all mail with a 20+ spamscore rightaway and put everything from 7 to 20 in a spambox that I check for false positives weekly. leaves only 1 or 2 out of the ~50 daily spam mails in my inbox, and only had a single false positive in nearly two years)
I refuse to intentionally make communication more complicated (obfuscating) just because some people might abuse it. Also, I think that the fact that I'm still managing quite well while being an easy spam target proves that fully open communication without real authentication *can* work.
I prefer Dirvish, and I highly recommend that people looking for a good harddisk-based backup system take a look at it. I've looked long and hard for a good backup system and this is the first that seems to fit the bill for me.
Ofcourse sufficiently advanced steganography (and encryption on top of that) used over a plaintext connection or a backdoored encrypted connection will still allow safe communication - there's *always* a way.
I have to admit to not being too familiar with how often this is the case for mainstream music - I'm mostly into metal and folk music myself. I'd estimate that in my CD collection (~250 CD's), easily 90% has full lyrics included, and especially in the case of metal albums the booklets often also feature nice graphical artwork. Probably not coincidentically, very few of these CD's were released by RIAA members.
Good point (also made by a sibling post), legal bought downloads are clearly missing something here compared to bought CD's. I was mostly responding to the sentence "This is part of a larger crackdown on websites distributing lyrics.", which in my opinion isn't relevant purely to legal downloads (even though TFA mostly deals with the app instead of the sites). The ability to download lyrics as well as songs does still reduce the difference between buying the CD and downloading illegally though - once again, I'm not defending the RIAA et al here but just reasoning from their viewpoint.
While I totally do not condone the activities of the RIAA and similar (to the contrary), you *can* usually read the lyrics when you actually buy the CD, since most of the time it has a lyrics booklet included. Since they want you to buy the CD and not download it, this *does* make sense from their perspective.
Since I don't want to be on the whole defensive of the RIAA, here's a link to the RIAA Radar to balance things - boycott the RIAA!
Death to the human race (except for me, of course) so that the world can be a natural place!!
VHEMT, The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, is a movement that, as the name mostly implies, encourages extinction of the human race by not reproducing further.
While personally I'm too fascinated by things like technological progress and human culture to support total extinction, I think a major reduction in world population in a non-violent way would be an extremely good thing.
do you think the next civil war will be a Cyberwar between the technological elite and the "dumb masses?" We all know what open source has done for software; what could open source do for next-gen weapons technology?
First of all, as much as I apparently seem intelligent enough, I think speculation is very difficult in this direction exactly because the "geek masses" are on average intelligent and as such unpredictable. But since it's an interesting topic, I'll give it a try;-)
Concerning "disenchanted enough [...] to take matters into their own hands": Yes, definitely, and I think this has already happened when it comes to the purely virtual domain. Slashdot readers generally seem to think that someone using bad, insecure software is at the very least partly to blame if something bad happens to his/her system as a result. I consider this "taking matters into own hands" as well since it's opposed to the general opinion that when some poor slob gets his unprotected windows system compromised it's only the bad evil hackers to blame. The fact that the legal system still considers itself to have the final say even here, doesn't change the techies' opinion on this.
As to "next civil war": I think physical violence is not something a supposedly intelligent group of the population is likely to resort to as long as there's any alternative at all. And I don't think this situation is likely to occur, which coincides nicely with the next thing you mention:
The useful "weapons" of the tech population are twofold, IMHO.
Firstly, the power to severely disrupt worldwide communication. I don't think they/we are likely to resort even to malicious attacks against important networks, but with the brains behind the internet removed, I don't think it would be long before the internet would degrade to a useless chaos (if you think the internet is sufficiently established for the suits & beancounters to be able to sustain it, consider, as a random example, what would happen if the Apache foundation decided to no longer fix any problems and/or make improvements to facilitate new technologies). While this does not directly stop rediculous lawsuits, I do think that situations where an example is being set will at some point trigger protests that will be heard by the general public and ultimately be acted upon by the not-so-technical, but sufficiently sensible part of the population.
Secondly, there is the ability of the tech people to take a significant part of their matters "underground". The idea of a "Darknet" has been mentioned in the media, combine this with using strong cryptography and even steganography and you're looking at a network that will be impossible to regulate and likely impossible to detect. It won't help situations like the one discussed in the article though, where the border between the virtual world and the physical world is concerned.
The current situation in most (all?) western countries is that the legal system is walking after the facts when it comes to matters relating to computers, networking, etc. . This makes the more technologically aware part of the population quickly lose all faith in their legal system.
It also makes the world a more dangerous place to live in as such technologies become a more important part of our society: police, courts and similar institutions seem to regard any sufficiently advanced technology as a magical, unpredictable black box, and as such make essentially random decisions on what they will do about it. Court cases are no longer centered around using facts to convince the jury of the truth, but around trying to create in the minds of those concerned an arbitrary but believable idea of what the technology does.
It shouldn't be too hard to imagine how big this problem can become in the long term.
And as for Dutch ISP's, XS4ALL is the ultimate geek ISP. Excellent services (bsd shell, static IP, *encourages* running servers, large experimental binary usenet server), very reliable. And they even sponsor Debian (*points at XS4ALL logo in lower left of Debian site*).
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, for ultra-religious parents who do in fact want to teach their children that sex is a topic to be kept in obscurity as much as possible, Citizendium will be an excellent resource to point their children to.
http://www.exampleURL.com/file.metalink
Or, depending on your location, use one of these mirrors:
http://uk.exampleURL.com/file.metalink
http://nl.exampleURL.com/file.metalink
http://de.exampleURL.com/file.metalink
Seriously though, I like the basic idea, but the system does add an extra point of failure.
I've tried jabber in the past, in fact I tried quite hard... but I ran into several little problems that annoyed me, one of the major ones being that when someone's connection to their jabber server times out I do not get notified of this, instead it appears as though the user is still online as normal.
Another problem I encountered is that when I set up my own server, it had trouble communicating with some of the main open jabber servers (jabber.com or jabber.org, I forgot which); with the problem appearing to be either simple unwillingness on the side of the remote server, or a slight difference in the implementation of the protocol.
I'm still willing to try again though... can anyone tell me whether the problems above are either resolved, or maybe a result of incompetence on my part? And also, can someone point me to a simple & solid opensource Jabber server that runs on Debian? I do definitely like the thought behind Jabber.
I tried, but...
... while talking to bergen2.bccls.org.:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<reutty@bccls.org>
(reason: 501 unacceptable mail address)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> MAIL From:<arjen@xyx.nl>
<<< 501 unacceptable mail address
501 5.6.0 Data format error (501 unacceptable mail address)
Wonder what's going on...
Larger and better readable version
Think I should sue? ;-)
Taking all necessary measures to make sure you don't miss anything (which incidentally is something beyond the grasp of all but the most technically minded), it would be a process that would rival if not exceed a full wipe and reinstall in required time and effort.
I know quite a few non-tech people who are capable of fully reinstalling their windows systems. None of them can perform the comparison you describe in a way that would rule out something slipping through, even if they had backups.
In fact should one of my Debian Stable systems ever get compromised, I probably wouldn't sleep soundly until I fully wiped & reinstalled it as well as any systems that might theoretically have been compromised through the one affected. What if someone planted an 'obvious' virus/rootkit/... as well as a small sneaky backdoor, with the former being placed mainly to distract from the latter?
Saying that, this UPS solution is currently more low-tech than what I'd want for the future. I'm planning to add some circuitry to improve handling of various problems, as well as to add other devices and/or batteries that share the same 12 V rail.
Hear hear! I'm currently using an EPIA TC10000 as main home server and am extremely happy with it (providing all the "usual" services). Onboard 12V DC-DC PSU means I can simply connect a car battery in parallel to have a UPS and avoid all the inefficiency that normally comes with a UPS (mains -> transformer -> inverter -> PSU -> mainboard). Power consumption is truly minimal and so are noise levels, and I can't say I've had any stability problems even at longer periods of high loads.
A question for anyone who feels that they have a decent idea of what's going on these days when it comes to network filesystems... what do you think is the best candidate for the network filesystem of the future, particularly from a UNIX point of view? NFSv4? Some AFS descendant? I watched Coda for a while during its active development but it seems to have grinded to a near-halt and has always seemed fragile.
I get a strong sense that of the required 40-50 years I usually read about, only a small fraction will be actually about people thinking up clever solutions to the problems you describe, and the rest will be spent on calculating the exact needed parameters, computer simulations, and implementing test setups such as ITER (and, I fear, also on politics & regulations).
Provided I'm at least partially right in that assessment, it would still seem that more money would enable a significant reduction in the time required to make fusion a usable energy source. Calculations & simulations could be done faster with more people & faster supercomputers and I assume that the time required to build a test setup would also depend strongly on the available means.
So in short, would you agree that a large increase in funding would lead to a significant reduction in the time required? Or is it not as "elastic" as I think?
The actual research itself is relatively unpredictable, I understand that. But when I read that completion of the ITER (the way I see it a relatively straightforward job, I assume the blueprints are already completed) is still 10 years away, I wonder how much time could be shaved off that estimate, as well as the ~2050 estimate, if (a lot) more money were put into fusion research.
If nuclear fusion has the potential to provide a clean, efficient, lasting energy source, and thereby eventually solve the energy crises, it would seem to me that investing a far larger amount of money than is being put into it today would be a very good investment if that could mean nuclear fusion can be used a few years earlier. I think ITER's cost is estimated at about EUR 10 billion, which is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things (I think the world GDP is somewhere around 50 trillion) it's tiny. And seeing the large potential for creating armed conflict there is in energy shortages even these days, I'd say getting fusion sooner rather than later may very well be a real matter of life and death.
However, when I hear discussions on the energy crises, the efficiency of solar/wind/water power, whether more nuclear fission reactors should be built, fusion isn't even mentioned, let alone considered by politicians for larger investments. Is it simply because it's so far away, and that for the most of us, only our descendants would benefit from those investments?
Once again this is a serious question, I'm no expert in any of this so I honestly don't know.
I refuse to intentionally make communication more complicated (obfuscating) just because some people might abuse it. Also, I think that the fact that I'm still managing quite well while being an easy spam target proves that fully open communication without real authentication *can* work.
I prefer Dirvish, and I highly recommend that people looking for a good harddisk-based backup system take a look at it. I've looked long and hard for a good backup system and this is the first that seems to fit the bill for me.
Ofcourse sufficiently advanced steganography (and encryption on top of that) used over a plaintext connection or a backdoored encrypted connection will still allow safe communication - there's *always* a way.
DarkLyrics.com is pretty excellent - light on ads and easy to navigate. Limited to metal lyrics though.
I have to admit to not being too familiar with how often this is the case for mainstream music - I'm mostly into metal and folk music myself. I'd estimate that in my CD collection (~250 CD's), easily 90% has full lyrics included, and especially in the case of metal albums the booklets often also feature nice graphical artwork. Probably not coincidentically, very few of these CD's were released by RIAA members.
Good point (also made by a sibling post), legal bought downloads are clearly missing something here compared to bought CD's. I was mostly responding to the sentence "This is part of a larger crackdown on websites distributing lyrics.", which in my opinion isn't relevant purely to legal downloads (even though TFA mostly deals with the app instead of the sites). The ability to download lyrics as well as songs does still reduce the difference between buying the CD and downloading illegally though - once again, I'm not defending the RIAA et al here but just reasoning from their viewpoint.
Since I don't want to be on the whole defensive of the RIAA, here's a link to the RIAA Radar to balance things - boycott the RIAA!
Let me complain for a minute and point out that it was the Reg, not "theodp" who wrote that blob of text, contrary to what the post suggests.
VHEMT, The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, is a movement that, as the name mostly implies, encourages extinction of the human race by not reproducing further.
While personally I'm too fascinated by things like technological progress and human culture to support total extinction, I think a major reduction in world population in a non-violent way would be an extremely good thing.
First of all, as much as I apparently seem intelligent enough, I think speculation is very difficult in this direction exactly because the "geek masses" are on average intelligent and as such unpredictable. But since it's an interesting topic, I'll give it a try ;-)
Concerning "disenchanted enough [...] to take matters into their own hands": Yes, definitely, and I think this has already happened when it comes to the purely virtual domain. Slashdot readers generally seem to think that someone using bad, insecure software is at the very least partly to blame if something bad happens to his/her system as a result. I consider this "taking matters into own hands" as well since it's opposed to the general opinion that when some poor slob gets his unprotected windows system compromised it's only the bad evil hackers to blame. The fact that the legal system still considers itself to have the final say even here, doesn't change the techies' opinion on this.
As to "next civil war": I think physical violence is not something a supposedly intelligent group of the population is likely to resort to as long as there's any alternative at all. And I don't think this situation is likely to occur, which coincides nicely with the next thing you mention:
The useful "weapons" of the tech population are twofold, IMHO.
Firstly, the power to severely disrupt worldwide communication. I don't think they/we are likely to resort even to malicious attacks against important networks, but with the brains behind the internet removed, I don't think it would be long before the internet would degrade to a useless chaos (if you think the internet is sufficiently established for the suits & beancounters to be able to sustain it, consider, as a random example, what would happen if the Apache foundation decided to no longer fix any problems and/or make improvements to facilitate new technologies). While this does not directly stop rediculous lawsuits, I do think that situations where an example is being set will at some point trigger protests that will be heard by the general public and ultimately be acted upon by the not-so-technical, but sufficiently sensible part of the population.
Secondly, there is the ability of the tech people to take a significant part of their matters "underground". The idea of a "Darknet" has been mentioned in the media, combine this with using strong cryptography and even steganography and you're looking at a network that will be impossible to regulate and likely impossible to detect. It won't help situations like the one discussed in the article though, where the border between the virtual world and the physical world is concerned.
Ofcourse ultimately, only time will tell.
The current situation in most (all?) western countries is that the legal system is walking after the facts when it comes to matters relating to computers, networking, etc. . This makes the more technologically aware part of the population quickly lose all faith in their legal system.
It also makes the world a more dangerous place to live in as such technologies become a more important part of our society: police, courts and similar institutions seem to regard any sufficiently advanced technology as a magical, unpredictable black box, and as such make essentially random decisions on what they will do about it. Court cases are no longer centered around using facts to convince the jury of the truth, but around trying to create in the minds of those concerned an arbitrary but believable idea of what the technology does.
It shouldn't be too hard to imagine how big this problem can become in the long term.
And as for Dutch ISP's, XS4ALL is the ultimate geek ISP. Excellent services (bsd shell, static IP, *encourages* running servers, large experimental binary usenet server), very reliable. And they even sponsor Debian (*points at XS4ALL logo in lower left of Debian site*).