It's nice when governments put the interests of their citizens on top.
On a more economics note, efforts like these are generally doomed to failure, or to be very very expensive. If there is an economic inefficiency, there are ALWAYS financial incentives for some parties to remove or bypass the inefficiency. This is why monopolies eventually fall, smuggling of drugs is so costly to stop, and blocking a few UDP ports will be at best temporarily effective in blocking VOIP.
Could the "hard" Debian isnt (true or fabled) act as a filter, like a hard Operating Systems class is to cs majors? If a linux user is intimidated by the thought of a non-graphical, fairly technical debian install, they'll probably not be happy with the administrative tools debian has. The "hard" install may be saving them from horrible frustration further down the line. Just a thought:)
Redhat's administrative tools are graphical and there's really no good analogue in Debian.
I've run Mandrake, Debian, and Redhat. Currently I have Redhat 8.0 on my main box as it just makes everything fairly simple.
On my house mail server, that's a different story. I'm running Debian on an old P133. Debian made it really easy to install a totally stripped down system and exim configuration beats the *#@$* out of sendmail configuration as far as I'm concerned.
The debian install isn't bad at all if you're FAMILIAR with linux and know what you're doing. People complain it isn't as nice as Mandrake install. Guess what, Debian is put out by hobbyists and not by a commercial company. The focus is on functionality, NOT GUI interface design.
Debian isn't shooting for the average Joe Schmo linux desktop user. I think Debian is great for systems when you want TOTALLY cutting edge (unstable gets updated all the time and installing new packages over the net is a breeze), when you want just a few precisely chosen packages, or when running headless.
My largest complaint about Debian isn't about the installer per se, it's about X windows and fonts. Basically, I apt-get install gnome etc... and I have no idea what is up with the font situation. It use to be that you didn't even have truetype and had to fuck around for hours to get basic truetype working. I have no idea what the situation is with anti-aliasing and gnome 2.
But watch the criticism of Debian. Debian is a free product that is remarkably functional. It literally amazes me that anything in Debian works at all (and for the most part, everything does *with a lil tweakin*). Unless you start paying money for Debian GUI development, watch your tongue:P You're not ENTITLED to completely free operating system with a nice graphical installer!
Bugs in critical authetication and login systems, (eg. Kerberos, ssh, etc...) fall into a category critical enough to warrant a./ story.
If we're going to have articles on what dangerous server rooms look like, we can have an article on how if you don't patch that KDC server fast, tens of thousands of user accounts might be compromised. Kerberos is at the HEART of many large multi-user distributed systems. (Universities, hospitals...) A critical flaw possibly compromising hundreds of thousands of accounts worldwide is a big story.
Kerberos is the security core of some very large systems.... For example at the University I attend, logins on all accounts on the campus wide computing infastructure are done through kerberos. AFS file system tickets are done with kerberos. Authentication for logging into class registration is done through kerberos. And the list goes on. If someone managed to root one of the main kdc servers and compromise a bunch of accounts, the person could create mischeif on a rather large scale.
I wonder how much you could do before you got noticed, but even if you managed to copy over the encrypted password files, I'm sure you could find some that fell to cracking software.
The ramifications of a flaw in a kerberos implementation is a great deal more important than a flaw in outlook. (The importance of this though means this flaw is probably going to be patched faster than a speeding bullet!)
I feel his is similar to the US getting kicked of the UN human rights council while countries such as Libya and Sudan were voted on it.
It's not quite as bad as that, but I think there's probably a bit more of French anti-Americanism here than objectivity. Does anyone think the US is just a "satisfactory" place for journalists as opposed to a "good" place? That's what the report says!
That opinion piece left me hanging in terms of what the bill ACTUALLY does. I think this link here provides a bit more clarity and has links to other sites. The bill in the house was HR.5469
Just glancing at stuff, a very disturbing aspect of the bill is that for an individual webcaster, it defines as "gross revenues" to include any revenue from media, entertainment, Internet or wireless business where the individual owns more than %5. I don't really know, if this is how it works, but if Joe Blow owns a computer consulting company doing wireless installs, (or hell has 5% of it), and he streams mp3s somewhere, does he have to pay licensing and royalty fees on the revenues of his business?!?!?!?
Looks like Gephardt and some other Democrats opposed it.
I'm not a history major either;), though I think I'm still roughly correct (though I was a bit unclear in the point I was trying to make.)
Quaddafi is the leader of Libya, a nation state. Libyanese intelligence officers were implicated in a bombing of US service personel at a disco in Germany (this event led to Reagan bombing Libya). The US held Quadaffi, the individual, responsible for the event, but Qadaffi used the resources of a nation state in his terrorist activities.
Bin Laden does/did not take orders from any nation state and did not lead a country. He is not the leader of a nation, but a private individual, and his money is from private inheritted wealth.
Action against a foreign individual who is not the leader of a nation I guess isn't TOTALLY unprecedented. When Israel invaded Lebanon, one of the primary goals was the ejection of the PLO and Arafat from Beruit.
Wars against rebel organizations also isn't that uncommon, the FARC in Columbia etc.... the list goes on. Though not completely different, I still think Al Qaeda is a bit distinct though in two respects
a) Al Qaeda's ability to relocate across countries (at one point it was based in Sudan, and later moved to Afghanistan, now it's....) b)its lack of clear state funding.
Al Qaeda had a base in Afghanistan, but I don't think the Taliban provided much funding as much as allowed Al Qaeda's presence and provided it with land (though I could be wrong here). I think you can find in some organizations 'a' or 'b', but there is none (that I can think of) where you have both. For example, the PLO exhibitted 'a', but it was heavilly bankrolled by the Arab states. Though individuals in many nations are bankrolled Al Qaeda, I don't think any state knowingly gave Al Qaeda money as the result of a policy decision. You have a lot of rebel groups of type 'b' who aren't clearly sponsorred by a state (Hamas), but they operate on their own territory and not on a global scale.
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C'mon people. It's not that hard to use a stupid free registration. The Wall Street Journal has a subscription cost, the Economist has a subscription for some articles... NY Times doesn't HAVE to provide free media content, so don't blatantly disregard the law when it's so incredibly easy to follow.
I remember reading Bill Joy's warnings in wired and just laughing at myself that this guy had gone crazy. I have since somewhat changed my mind.
His general point (I believe it was his...), that the dissemination and democratization of knowledge and modern technology has made possible super powered individuals who are able to leverage the kind of power that was previously only available to nations, rings true. When Clinton fired cruise missiles at Bin Laden, it was the first time that the US had shot missiles and bombed not a country, but an individual. The anthrax attacks appear to a another example of the intersection of powerful knowledge and destructive intent creating significant dangers and disruption.
Back on the topic of science and this article, I'm not advocating a system that is both useless and obstructing (which the system mentioned in this article might be). But I think we must think about some of these concerns in a reasonable way and think about if there are things to do and not to do which limit dangers while not obstructing useful scientific progress.
It would only hypocrisy if he got where he is now because of drunk driving.
I disagree. Let's say he [Mr. Drunk Driver] made $1 million by driving drunk, could he still take a position against driving drunk today? Yes!
If binge drinking and driving drunk brought himself large degrees of pleasure and self satisfaction for years and years, could he still now take a position against drunk driving? I believe so.
What makes his position not hypocritical is that if he were to have his earlier, drunk driving years back, he would act differently. (A safe assumption given his AA attendance.) If the US were to go back to 1800s and our current leadership would have strong IP control, then the US leadership would also not be hypocritical.
jwinterboy writes " The New York Times has an article (free blah di blah) criticizing the intellectual property framework that the U.S. places on developing countries, given that it was a large pirate of intellectual property during it's own industrialization. "
The article is about a report which criticizes the intellectual property framework which the U.S. places on developing countries. The article itself is not criticizing the framework.
The NY Times can be a bit biased at times, but let's at least give them a little credit...
No INFORMATION was compromised in the example put forward by AnotherBlackHat.
If you were relying on receiving a decryptable ciphertext as evidence that nothing was tamperred with, then you have a problem.
I didn't quite understand BlackHat's example as he wrote it, so I'll just throw down my own (hoping I have the idea right!).
Let's say you know the victim's account number and that you know that the first 8 bits of the transaction are always the account number, and that you can monitor and change the communication line.
Bank ------ Eve (you) ---------- Alice
You know Alice's account number is 10001000 and if you get from Alice 11110111 you know her account number has been XORed with 01111111. If your account number is 00001111, you can send 01110000 and the bank will think that Alice is sending the money to you.
I'm not fully endorsing tanveer's claim that the ati review is just pure advertisement (though the review kinda reads that way...), but I would like to say that tech articles reading like product literature isn't exactly new or shocking, ESPECIALLY with cutting edge, new products.
I think there are a few reasons for this:
1) Probably not any Joe Blow reviewer can get their hands on a new piece of hardware (the manufacturer can choose who reviews...) so there is always the potential for selection bias.
2) There's a strong tendency (and indeed it's easier) to write an article detailing new features of the card than coming up with independent analysis. You can spit out an article based upon a spec sheet and a few qualatative tests in just a few hours. Running independent, objective tests and providing useful context (what does 'Double Precision Framebufferring Alpha Transition System Version Five!' actually mean...) is much more difficult.
3) With really new products, it isn't exactly clear what are valid benchmarks/comparisons. New products can often game old benchmarks. Also old benchmarks and tests may not reflect optimizations and features that CAN be used in FUTURE games, but aren't currently reflected in today's software.
On the whole, computer equipment reviews seem more rooted in the stockbroker tradition than the movie critic tradition. Just reading reviews for computer junk, you get a lot more 'buy' recommendations than 'don't buy.'
It's kinda interesting how some stories generate a lot of informative and thoughtful comments and others only generate big flaming piles of shit...
I think the robocontest story was interesting, but only about 10% of the posts attached to this story have content, and the other 90% are like "woooooooooo, wooooooooooo look at ME, FIRST POST!!! I'm a big fucking idiot! Yeeeeeeehhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaa."
Maybe I just have a weird sense of coding aesthetics, but I always feel dumb when trying to do AI stuff in Java (in the same way I feel dumb trying to do nice beautiful code in c).
No matter how good you try to code it in Java, a similar c++ version will run SO MUCH faster... And so when you're doing AI (which tends to test the border of what's computationally possible), I walk away with a dirty feeling if I try to do, let's say a SAT solver in Java.
With gnutella, QueryHit packets can make up as little as 1% of traffic (by numbers of packets, not size) while Ping and Pong packets can be well over 50% of packets. Check out this article to see more detail.
Gnutella is not one of the more advanced protocols, but most of it's problems are present at varying levels in other p2p systems. It's not really surprising that P2P software which spends so much time trying to connect to computers, connect to a computer to start a download etc... and search in a geometric spiderring fashion are quite inefficient.
In a statement, RIAA President Cary Sherman had accused Verizon of playing "a legal shell game" to save itself money.
"The only thing Verizon is protecting is Verizon's own business interests," Sherman said.
And what the hell is the RIAA trying to do?!?!??!?!
IBM built their PC using modular components and basically only had one bios chip that was prioritary, allowing Compaq to easilly 'tinker' and come out with their own PC.
This tinker obviously totally screwed IBM up the goat.ath.cx, but it also started openning up the PC industry. If IBM had realized that this 'tinker' was so achievable, would they have based their minicomputer so heavilly on off the shelf components?
It's really a complex equation of how best to encourage innovation. If tinkerring had too many protections and were too easy (and IBM were smarter...), we might not have had a PC based on non-proprietary components, and if tinkerring were downright illegal on all levels, we wouldn't have had compaq.
*hopes this application of theory to reality makes some sense*
Ten years, from now, I wonder if by openning up my power supply to lower the fan speed, I not only void my warranty, but also end up in prison for not agreeing to my power supply EULA...
It also almost seems like the Clockwork Orange might be coming to the computer... a world where not only is distributing mp3s illegal, but where it is indeed impossible.
These though are pretty hyperbolic, extreme scenarios (chuckle, not on slashdot!). Media companies and the like do have real piracy problems. CD sales have been flat for a while and recently I believe was one of the first years of noticeable decline (though linking this directly to mp3 piracy and not to rougher economic times isn't proven). A dynamic, productive capitalist society requires enforceable contracts, but also the absence of bizarre and overly onerous laws, rules and regulations.
Somewhere there's a balance between forced open sourced Windows with Napster for all on dedicated DS3 lines and an overly patented and EULAized world where you have to push an 'accept' button to get toast out of the toaster. I hope we can get there.
Altamont pass may be more of an exception than the rule, but a lot of birds HAVE been killed there. This San Jose Mercury News article states that more than 1000 birds were killed in the pass including 149 golden eagles (an endangerred species), and that a reintroduction of the condor was not to take place in the area partly because of dangers associated with turbines at the pass.
WIND POWER IS EXPENSIVE!!! It doesn't cost much to use, but it does cost a ton to build initially, check out this article
So why was my previous comment a troll? Is it a troll because I don't want to pay higher costs for power? Is it a troll because I'm not ranting and raving about wind power????
Last time I checked, you shouldn't moderate something as a troll just because you don't agree
Wind power generators have also been known to disrupt and kill birds. For example, in the early 1990s, a significant number of golden eagles were killed by turbines at California's Altamont pass.
Also, in line with Trepidity's comment, the main problem with wind power from what I've heard is that it just requires too many turbines to get the neccesary amount of power. You have to have truly giant wind farms to get a pitiful amount of power...
And who the hell wants to double their power bill anyway....? (see California for all the hell that breaks loose when power generation prices get real high.)
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On a more economics note, efforts like these are generally doomed to failure, or to be very very expensive. If there is an economic inefficiency, there are ALWAYS financial incentives for some parties to remove or bypass the inefficiency. This is why monopolies eventually fall, smuggling of drugs is so costly to stop, and blocking a few UDP ports will be at best temporarily effective in blocking VOIP.
For all practical purposes, aren't they integrated on the client side?
Redhat's administrative tools are graphical and there's really no good analogue in Debian.
On my house mail server, that's a different story. I'm running Debian on an old P133. Debian made it really easy to install a totally stripped down system and exim configuration beats the *#@$* out of sendmail configuration as far as I'm concerned.
The debian install isn't bad at all if you're FAMILIAR with linux and know what you're doing. People complain it isn't as nice as Mandrake install. Guess what, Debian is put out by hobbyists and not by a commercial company. The focus is on functionality, NOT GUI interface design.
Debian isn't shooting for the average Joe Schmo linux desktop user. I think Debian is great for systems when you want TOTALLY cutting edge (unstable gets updated all the time and installing new packages over the net is a breeze), when you want just a few precisely chosen packages, or when running headless.
My largest complaint about Debian isn't about the installer per se, it's about X windows and fonts. Basically, I apt-get install gnome etc... and I have no idea what is up with the font situation. It use to be that you didn't even have truetype and had to fuck around for hours to get basic truetype working. I have no idea what the situation is with anti-aliasing and gnome 2.
But watch the criticism of Debian. Debian is a free product that is remarkably functional. It literally amazes me that anything in Debian works at all (and for the most part, everything does *with a lil tweakin*). Unless you start paying money for Debian GUI development, watch your tongue :P You're not ENTITLED to completely free operating system with a nice graphical installer!
If we're going to have articles on what dangerous server rooms look like, we can have an article on how if you don't patch that KDC server fast, tens of thousands of user accounts might be compromised. Kerberos is at the HEART of many large multi-user distributed systems. (Universities, hospitals...) A critical flaw possibly compromising hundreds of thousands of accounts worldwide is a big story.
I wonder how much you could do before you got noticed, but even if you managed to copy over the encrypted password files, I'm sure you could find some that fell to cracking software.
The ramifications of a flaw in a kerberos implementation is a great deal more important than a flaw in outlook. (The importance of this though means this flaw is probably going to be patched faster than a speeding bullet!)
It's not quite as bad as that, but I think there's probably a bit more of French anti-Americanism here than objectivity. Does anyone think the US is just a "satisfactory" place for journalists as opposed to a "good" place? That's what the report says!
Just glancing at stuff, a very disturbing aspect of the bill is that for an individual webcaster, it defines as "gross revenues" to include any revenue from media, entertainment, Internet or wireless business where the individual owns more than %5. I don't really know, if this is how it works, but if Joe Blow owns a computer consulting company doing wireless installs, (or hell has 5% of it), and he streams mp3s somewhere, does he have to pay licensing and royalty fees on the revenues of his business?!?!?!?
Looks like Gephardt and some other Democrats opposed it.
Quaddafi is the leader of Libya, a nation state. Libyanese intelligence officers were implicated in a bombing of US service personel at a disco in Germany (this event led to Reagan bombing Libya). The US held Quadaffi, the individual, responsible for the event, but Qadaffi used the resources of a nation state in his terrorist activities.
Bin Laden does/did not take orders from any nation state and did not lead a country. He is not the leader of a nation, but a private individual, and his money is from private inheritted wealth.
Action against a foreign individual who is not the leader of a nation I guess isn't TOTALLY unprecedented. When Israel invaded Lebanon, one of the primary goals was the ejection of the PLO and Arafat from Beruit.
Wars against rebel organizations also isn't that uncommon, the FARC in Columbia etc.... the list goes on. Though not completely different, I still think Al Qaeda is a bit distinct though in two respects
a) Al Qaeda's ability to relocate across countries (at one point it was based in Sudan, and later moved to Afghanistan, now it's....)
b)its lack of clear state funding.
Al Qaeda had a base in Afghanistan, but I don't think the Taliban provided much funding as much as allowed Al Qaeda's presence and provided it with land (though I could be wrong here). I think you can find in some organizations 'a' or 'b', but there is none (that I can think of) where you have both. For example, the PLO exhibitted 'a', but it was heavilly bankrolled by the Arab states. Though individuals in many nations are bankrolled Al Qaeda, I don't think any state knowingly gave Al Qaeda money as the result of a policy decision. You have a lot of rebel groups of type 'b' who aren't clearly sponsorred by a state (Hamas), but they operate on their own territory and not on a global scale.
C'mon people. It's not that hard to use a stupid free registration. The Wall Street Journal has a subscription cost, the Economist has a subscription for some articles... NY Times doesn't HAVE to provide free media content, so don't blatantly disregard the law when it's so incredibly easy to follow.
His general point (I believe it was his...), that the dissemination and democratization of knowledge and modern technology has made possible super powered individuals who are able to leverage the kind of power that was previously only available to nations, rings true. When Clinton fired cruise missiles at Bin Laden, it was the first time that the US had shot missiles and bombed not a country, but an individual. The anthrax attacks appear to a another example of the intersection of powerful knowledge and destructive intent creating significant dangers and disruption.
Back on the topic of science and this article, I'm not advocating a system that is both useless and obstructing (which the system mentioned in this article might be). But I think we must think about some of these concerns in a reasonable way and think about if there are things to do and not to do which limit dangers while not obstructing useful scientific progress.
I disagree. Let's say he [Mr. Drunk Driver] made $1 million by driving drunk, could he still take a position against driving drunk today? Yes!
If binge drinking and driving drunk brought himself large degrees of pleasure and self satisfaction for years and years, could he still now take a position against drunk driving? I believe so.
What makes his position not hypocritical is that if he were to have his earlier, drunk driving years back, he would act differently. (A safe assumption given his AA attendance.) If the US were to go back to 1800s and our current leadership would have strong IP control, then the US leadership would also not be hypocritical.
The article is about a report which criticizes the intellectual property framework which the U.S. places on developing countries. The article itself is not criticizing the framework.
The NY Times can be a bit biased at times, but let's at least give them a little credit...
I didn't quite understand BlackHat's example as he wrote it, so I'll just throw down my own (hoping I have the idea right!).
Let's say you know the victim's account number and that you know that the first 8 bits of the transaction are always the account number, and that you can monitor and change the communication line.
Bank ------ Eve (you) ---------- Alice
You know Alice's account number is 10001000 and if you get from Alice 11110111 you know her account number has been XORed with 01111111. If your account number is 00001111, you can send 01110000 and the bank will think that Alice is sending the money to you.
I think there are a few reasons for this:
1) Probably not any Joe Blow reviewer can get their hands on a new piece of hardware (the manufacturer can choose who reviews...) so there is always the potential for selection bias.
2) There's a strong tendency (and indeed it's easier) to write an article detailing new features of the card than coming up with independent analysis. You can spit out an article based upon a spec sheet and a few qualatative tests in just a few hours. Running independent, objective tests and providing useful context (what does 'Double Precision Framebufferring Alpha Transition System Version Five!' actually mean...) is much more difficult.
3) With really new products, it isn't exactly clear what are valid benchmarks/comparisons. New products can often game old benchmarks. Also old benchmarks and tests may not reflect optimizations and features that CAN be used in FUTURE games, but aren't currently reflected in today's software.
On the whole, computer equipment reviews seem more rooted in the stockbroker tradition than the movie critic tradition. Just reading reviews for computer junk, you get a lot more 'buy' recommendations than 'don't buy.'
I think the robocontest story was interesting, but only about 10% of the posts attached to this story have content, and the other 90% are like "woooooooooo, wooooooooooo look at ME, FIRST POST!!! I'm a big fucking idiot! Yeeeeeeehhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaa."
No matter how good you try to code it in Java, a similar c++ version will run SO MUCH faster... And so when you're doing AI (which tends to test the border of what's computationally possible), I walk away with a dirty feeling if I try to do, let's say a SAT solver in Java.
Gnutella is not one of the more advanced protocols, but most of it's problems are present at varying levels in other p2p systems. It's not really surprising that P2P software which spends so much time trying to connect to computers, connect to a computer to start a download etc... and search in a geometric spiderring fashion are quite inefficient.
And what the hell is the RIAA trying to do?!?!??!?!
This tinker obviously totally screwed IBM up the goat.ath.cx, but it also started openning up the PC industry. If IBM had realized that this 'tinker' was so achievable, would they have based their minicomputer so heavilly on off the shelf components?
It's really a complex equation of how best to encourage innovation. If tinkerring had too many protections and were too easy (and IBM were smarter...), we might not have had a PC based on non-proprietary components, and if tinkerring were downright illegal on all levels, we wouldn't have had compaq.
*hopes this application of theory to reality makes some sense*
It also almost seems like the Clockwork Orange might be coming to the computer... a world where not only is distributing mp3s illegal, but where it is indeed impossible.
These though are pretty hyperbolic, extreme scenarios (chuckle, not on slashdot!). Media companies and the like do have real piracy problems. CD sales have been flat for a while and recently I believe was one of the first years of noticeable decline (though linking this directly to mp3 piracy and not to rougher economic times isn't proven). A dynamic, productive capitalist society requires enforceable contracts, but also the absence of bizarre and overly onerous laws, rules and regulations.
Somewhere there's a balance between forced open sourced Windows with Napster for all on dedicated DS3 lines and an overly patented and EULAized world where you have to push an 'accept' button to get toast out of the toaster. I hope we can get there.
WIND POWER IS EXPENSIVE!!! It doesn't cost much to use, but it does cost a ton to build initially, check out this article
So why was my previous comment a troll? Is it a troll because I don't want to pay higher costs for power? Is it a troll because I'm not ranting and raving about wind power????
Last time I checked, you shouldn't moderate something as a troll just because you don't agree
Also, in line with Trepidity's comment, the main problem with wind power from what I've heard is that it just requires too many turbines to get the neccesary amount of power. You have to have truly giant wind farms to get a pitiful amount of power...
And who the hell wants to double their power bill anyway....? (see California for all the hell that breaks loose when power generation prices get real high.)
And is it neccesary for the moderators to moderate down the criticism of the moderators?
If this is a valid slashdot story, then you guys should just post everything! :)