Can't you use software encryption for (at least parts of) the drive using the proper kernel? And as you say, you can do pretty much with the forth of Open Firmware and clones.
I'm getting kinda tired of hearing "Pah! It wasn't a remote exploit, anyway..." followed by "Any machine you can get physical access to is insecure." as an excuse when there's a security hole. Sure, network exploits are worse but local exploits are still problems.
As for "Any machine you can get physical with..", how about a machine with good security measures before and during the boot loading (to avoid stuff like bios/OF-tricks or the classic "passing/bin/sh to lilo"-trick) as well as encrypted filesystems to prevent someone just taking your disks and mount them in another computer?
Or I dunno, maybe any machine you can get physical with is insecure. That won't make me take this bug any less seriously. The unfreeness of many prominent cocoa objects, including end-user-widget ones, does seem like quite a risk to me. Relying on a single source of fixes has never been a good idea.
I've been reading and enjoying the (often excellent) work of Scott McCloud for years, but what's this - flash?
That's really a shame, in my opinion - as far as I know (and please, do correct me), there's no flash player for Debian PPC that's up to snuff, free or non-free.
And the page has a lot of text-as-images boxes... last I checked, Scott was pretty good at accessibility and web standards.
I'm kinda bummed now - I've been looking forward to the new McCloud comic for a while but now I can't read it. Maybe I can coax my flatmate to install flash on her Debian x86 machine but (like me) she's usually pretty zealous about free vs non-free software.
I got my first SMS spam just yesterday, about "dates" and "chatting" etc. Not related to my phone provider.
The message implied that some unknown person who has a crush on me typed in my number, but they never said whom. The company seemed very untrustworthy so I didn't reply.
I was discussing The Republic with a friend two nights ago.
After reading your book, I started looking at the book again. (Project Gutenberg has it.)
From the glimpses I've seen consider Plato either A) not very bright, or B) a satirical comedian.
Either way, it's not something I find very worthwile to read, but maybe it would be interesting to read it alternating between those two lenses. The very ambiguity providing the spice necessary to keep my short attention span for a few chapters. (My reading style is severly disrupted - like a butterfly I flutter from book to book. I read like eight hours a day when I'm not acting or preparing a play but I only read a few pages per book before something else catches my fancy. Damned net with it's oh, so tempting links. The library has the same problem.)
What to do if I as a citizen don't agree with what the politicians, police and corporations decide? We'll see.
Please don't use military might to enforce an IP system internationally, in my worldview (not guaranteed to be unflawed) that's the worst kind of unethical plundering.
I had read parts of the (utterly boring) TRIPS agreement, wasn't aware of the details of the procedural safeguards but assumed there would be something of the sort.
But "trade sanctions" - that's my point exactly. Why should they want to trade with Europe if Europe has nothing physical of value to provide them? That's why I argue that Ms McCarthy should not use the "IP is our best export product" argument as I don't think will be suitable in a long run.
(Arguing that IP is good because it furthers innovation and invention is another matter, though, which would be valid arguments if it did.)
What can be owned and sold can be taxed. That means more feet on people's heads and hands, more power to the owners of the feet, and more credit to the owners as "great people" when something gets done.
Ah. I can understand it, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it.
If you doubt me, read "The Republic", see how it is held up as an example to be followed, and understand.
Are you talking about Plato's The Republic, or some other The Republic?
That's memetics for you. Every once in a while a word catches on, everyone wants to use it, and then "it's been there since the 18th century". Riiiight...
By the way, it's definition in early 20th century webster is not the same as it's being used today, so you're probably right, it was added retroactively. Just as when in the early 1980s they retroactively changed the way physics worked so you couldn't build perpetuum mobiles anymore. A few revisions later bumblebees could fly again, and always could.
She's calling a system with more opportunities for imposing patents more "liberal" and a less patent-drenched society more "restrictive".
That's pretty weird. If I were to choose such politically loaded words to describe patent systems, I'd have 'em switched the other way around, but I probably wouldn't use them at all.
She also writes: "With many of our traditional industries migrating to the Far East leaving behind job losses, we Europeans are having to rely on licensing out inventiveness to generate income and create jobs."
That's pretty silly and not likely to work in the long run. Imagine a future where non-european countries provide all goods and services needed - why should they want to trade with Europe? Because we have "inventions?" That's supposed to be Europes schtick, that Europeans are "smart"? Even if we'd have a fraction of the worlds inventiveness, what's to stop the aforementioned Asian countries from declaring our patent system null and void? (Along with some other IP practices like say, copyright.) Because "otherwise we won't trade with them?" That's just silly. If all we have to "offer" is slick ad campaigns and ruthless corporate practices along with a few good "ideas" - basically "ownership of ideas" - why should they want to trade? They could just copy it (assuming their own inventions weren't enough - there's plenty of good ideas coming out of Asia).
(And please don't talk of using military might to enforce an IP system internationally. My every fiber and cell tell's me that's not a just cause.)
Just saying that "we own this!" and pointing at words, ideas... you might argue some intellectual property practices are just but you can't expect everyone to agree (I certainly don't, and I even live in Europe), especially not when it could be a dumb move in international economics for a country to blindly abide by another's IP claims.
And if she's not talking about IP as an export product, then why bother? Selling each other "air" would jack up the GNP but it sure wouldn't raise living standards, it would only be a pointless excercise in number juggling. Same would apply to selling "ownership rights to ideas". Note that I'm not saying that the ideas themselves are without value - having someone on the payroll to sit and make up ideas might be worth it - but once the cat's out of the bag the ideas are easily copyable. Preventing that/bin/cp doesn't exist might be an appealing idea to some but it is just a game of pretends these days. Things can be copied. Deal with it.
Lastly, she's calling free software (she seems especially focused on copyleft software) "[A] form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users".
That's just not true.
Unlike patents, anyone's free to reimplement copylefted software any way they choose.
And unlike plain copyrighted proprietary software, anyone can use the copylefted software (both the program and source code) as long as they don't prevent others from doing the same.
Sure, the GPL has some practical problem (for example enforced warranty disclaimers, and problems with compability with other copylefted licenses) but it's definitely not a "monopoly". More like an "omnipoly" where every man, woman and child on the planet has the same right to the program.
Seriously, you probably were playing with 10.0 or 10.1, 10.2 is rock solid.
Well, yeah, this was 10.1.
The OS was as installed on the iBook. No peripherals whatsoever (using the modem though), no installed programs except the ones included. This was back when they sold it dual boot OS 9 and OS X 10.1.
The only programs I was using were terminal, finder, mail.app and Internet Explorer (never again).
I ran the OS for a few weeks, experiencing several slowdowns and lockups big and small, one of which garbled the screen and spouted out kernel panic. Doing nothing fishy with the machine, just browsing.
I installed Debian on it (was planning to anyway) and have been using the machine for 1.5 years now, it's this very one I'm typing on.
Perhaps the machine is flaky because it's pretty slow (haven't used any other iBook 500:s to compare with), but I haven't had any more stability problems.
It's possible that I had just freakishly bad luck, but I've had a pet peeve ever since seeing OS X being toted as "rock solid".
Yeah, I don't care that they don't have X as their main display (even though I personally love X, I respect that they went with Display PDF). I meant "below the hood", for example kernelwise.
I agree that the term should no longer be considered a trademark owned by the Open Group, since it's generic, but as long as we're talking about misleading consumers... Is the Darwin/XNU/BSD-setup that passes for a kernel in Mac OS X really Unix? It's strays pretty far from the original kt & dmr KISS philosophy.
Even GNU's got that N in the middle of it's acronym to keep it from being Unix. Sure, the Hurd of interfaces representing depth in GNU is even further from Unix-think than Mac OS X but that doesn't mean that Apple saying "Built on the industrial-strenth foundation of Unix" isn't misleading.
Darwin is interesting but it doesn't have the multiple decades of testing that Unix has, and unlike Linux (the kernel) I've gotten a kernel panic just using a web browser. (I've had Linux crash on me when I've been doing stupid things with hardware. Mac OS X a lot easier.)
(Again, I'm not dissing Darwin, I'm just asking "What is Unix?" especially in the light of how Apple is marketing it's OS to unixheads.)
I'm also primarily a typing person (a complete dvorak geek) so I've been wondering if there are some nice online exercises somewhere to learn a fast and beautiful script? I found no books on the topic at my local library.
What kind of dinky little car is that you're used to if someone writes "in traffic" and you assume she's driving? Ever hear of car pools, buses or trains?
I have no beef with the entry on GandhiCon, which I thought was witty and deserving of a place.
There are a few entries where the ESR-factor is bothering me, though, with the hacker politics page being the worst.
I love the line "Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day." which rings very true to my ears, and how the geeks (including myself) view politics. (I know people of both category a and b.)
However, that category "b" definitely includes socialistic (esp. anarchistic) views, especially (but not limited to) outside the US. I've met plenty of hackers who hate all lefties and I've met plenty who see themselves as socialist. The phrase "affected by the collapse of socialism" just sounds like what I read in plenty of rightwing-oriented literature (I like to read stuff from both sides of the camp), but it seems false. The latest years I've seen a great strengthening in various leftlibertarian/anarchist movements. The only thing that's crumbling with the Berlin wall is leninism (and part of marxism), not the socialistic ideals themselves.
Tonight, being in a good mood since it's a nice summer night here, I feel like suggesting that hackers should view each other with kindness regardness of immediate political view. Most hackers have a fondness for freedom, and even though some of us think that corporatism and capitalism are the greatest contemporary threat to that freedom while others think that capitalism is the best means to reach and uphold a state of freedom, the entry in the jargon file should reflect that hackerdom is not a homogenous political movement.
I've listened to a lot of recordings of RMS speeches (there are plenty on gnu.org) and he's bitter-sounding in some and great in some, depending on things like the mood or the audience or what have you.
He's no buddha, he's just a human, and he's done some great stuff. Sort of like ESR, who constantly manage to really make me angry with his political articles but who has interesting views on mysticism as well as working on fetchmail, a very useful program. They do good things and bad, just like you and me.
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CinePaint is a fork of Gimp that has up to 32 bits per channel (and can do 8 or 16 bits per channel if that's what you want).
(CinePaint doesn't seem to have path support, so there's still a reason to use Gimp if you're more into drawing and web work, like me.)
"Steal"? Scribus uses liblcms, no need to "steal" anything.
Gimp is great, but I'm kind of looking forward to something even better. Maybe that'll be GEGL, maybe something else.
Chandler (the program from OSA foundation) is named after Raymond Chandler.
Sure, or just encrypt any particularly sensitive files.
Can't you use software encryption for (at least parts of) the drive using the proper kernel?
And as you say, you can do pretty much with the forth of Open Firmware and clones.
I'm getting kinda tired of hearing "Pah! It wasn't a remote exploit, anyway..." followed by "Any machine you can get physical access to is insecure." as an excuse when there's a security hole. Sure, network exploits are worse but local exploits are still problems.
/bin/sh to lilo"-trick) as well as encrypted filesystems to prevent someone just taking your disks and mount them in another computer?
As for "Any machine you can get physical with..", how about a machine with good security measures before and during the boot loading (to avoid stuff like bios/OF-tricks or the classic "passing
Or I dunno, maybe any machine you can get physical with is insecure. That won't make me take this bug any less seriously. The unfreeness of many prominent cocoa objects, including end-user-widget ones, does seem like quite a risk to me. Relying on a single source of fixes has never been a good idea.
I've been reading and enjoying the (often excellent) work of Scott McCloud for years, but what's this - flash?
That's really a shame, in my opinion - as far as I know (and please, do correct me), there's no flash player for Debian PPC that's up to snuff, free or non-free.
And the page has a lot of text-as-images boxes... last I checked, Scott was pretty good at accessibility and web standards.
I'm kinda bummed now - I've been looking forward to the new McCloud comic for a while but now I can't read it. Maybe I can coax my flatmate to install flash on her Debian x86 machine but (like me) she's usually pretty zealous about free vs non-free software.
Just like this one... so what?
But (in a world with harsh copyright) there's no "other" Madonna or Radiohead.
I got my first SMS spam just yesterday, about "dates" and "chatting" etc. Not related to my phone provider.
The message implied that some unknown person who has a crush on me typed in my number, but they never said whom. The company seemed very untrustworthy so I didn't reply.
I was discussing The Republic with a friend two nights ago.
After reading your book, I started looking at the book again. (Project Gutenberg has it.)
From the glimpses I've seen consider Plato either A) not very bright, or B) a satirical comedian.
Either way, it's not something I find very worthwile to read, but maybe it would be interesting to read it alternating between those two lenses. The very ambiguity providing the spice necessary to keep my short attention span for a few chapters. (My reading style is severly disrupted - like a butterfly I flutter from book to book. I read like eight hours a day when I'm not acting or preparing a play but I only read a few pages per book before something else catches my fancy. Damned net with it's oh, so tempting links. The library has the same problem.)
What to do if I as a citizen don't agree with what the politicians, police and corporations decide? We'll see.
Please don't use military might to enforce an IP system internationally, in my worldview (not guaranteed to be unflawed) that's the worst kind of unethical plundering.
I had read parts of the (utterly boring) TRIPS agreement, wasn't aware of the details of the procedural safeguards but assumed there would be something of the sort.
But "trade sanctions" - that's my point exactly. Why should they want to trade with Europe if Europe has nothing physical of value to provide them? That's why I argue that Ms McCarthy should not use the "IP is our best export product" argument as I don't think will be suitable in a long run.
(Arguing that IP is good because it furthers innovation and invention is another matter, though, which would be valid arguments if it did.)
Ah. I can understand it, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it.
Are you talking about Plato's The Republic, or some other The Republic?
Right. Figured as much.
That's memetics for you. Every once in a while a word catches on, everyone wants to use it, and then "it's been there since the 18th century". Riiiight...
By the way, it's definition in early 20th century webster is not the same as it's being used today, so you're probably right, it was added retroactively. Just as when in the early 1980s they retroactively changed the way physics worked so you couldn't build perpetuum mobiles anymore. A few revisions later bumblebees could fly again, and always could.
I've been seeing it a lot lately, first (in recent times) in Penny Arcade but since then a gazillion places.
She's calling a system with more opportunities for imposing patents more "liberal" and a less patent-drenched society more "restrictive".
/bin/cp doesn't exist might be an appealing idea to some but it is just a game of pretends these days. Things can be copied. Deal with it.
That's pretty weird. If I were to choose such politically loaded words to describe patent systems, I'd have 'em switched the other way around, but I probably wouldn't use them at all.
She also writes: "With many of our traditional industries migrating to the Far East leaving behind job losses, we Europeans are having to rely on licensing out inventiveness to generate income and create jobs."
That's pretty silly and not likely to work in the long run. Imagine a future where non-european countries provide all goods and services needed - why should they want to trade with Europe? Because we have "inventions?" That's supposed to be Europes schtick, that Europeans are "smart"? Even if we'd have a fraction of the worlds inventiveness, what's to stop the aforementioned Asian countries from declaring our patent system null and void? (Along with some other IP practices like say, copyright.) Because "otherwise we won't trade with them?" That's just silly. If all we have to "offer" is slick ad campaigns and ruthless corporate practices along with a few good "ideas" - basically "ownership of ideas" - why should they want to trade? They could just copy it (assuming their own inventions weren't enough - there's plenty of good ideas coming out of Asia).
(And please don't talk of using military might to enforce an IP system internationally. My every fiber and cell tell's me that's not a just cause.)
Just saying that "we own this!" and pointing at words, ideas... you might argue some intellectual property practices are just but you can't expect everyone to agree (I certainly don't, and I even live in Europe), especially not when it could be a dumb move in international economics for a country to blindly abide by another's IP claims.
And if she's not talking about IP as an export product, then why bother? Selling each other "air" would jack up the GNP but it sure wouldn't raise living standards, it would only be a pointless excercise in number juggling. Same would apply to selling "ownership rights to ideas". Note that I'm not saying that the ideas themselves are without value - having someone on the payroll to sit and make up ideas might be worth it - but once the cat's out of the bag the ideas are easily copyable. Preventing that
Lastly, she's calling free software (she seems especially focused on copyleft software) "[A] form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users".
That's just not true.
Unlike patents, anyone's free to reimplement copylefted software any way they choose.
And unlike plain copyrighted proprietary software, anyone can use the copylefted software (both the program and source code) as long as they don't prevent others from doing the same.
Sure, the GPL has some practical problem (for example enforced warranty disclaimers, and problems with compability with other copylefted licenses) but it's definitely not a "monopoly". More like an "omnipoly" where every man, woman and child on the planet has the same right to the program.
Well, yeah, this was 10.1.
The OS was as installed on the iBook. No peripherals whatsoever (using the modem though), no installed programs except the ones included. This was back when they sold it dual boot OS 9 and OS X 10.1.
The only programs I was using were terminal, finder, mail.app and Internet Explorer (never again).
I ran the OS for a few weeks, experiencing several slowdowns and lockups big and small, one of which garbled the screen and spouted out kernel panic. Doing nothing fishy with the machine, just browsing.
I installed Debian on it (was planning to anyway) and have been using the machine for 1.5 years now, it's this very one I'm typing on.
Perhaps the machine is flaky because it's pretty slow (haven't used any other iBook 500:s to compare with), but I haven't had any more stability problems.
It's possible that I had just freakishly bad luck, but I've had a pet peeve ever since seeing OS X being toted as "rock solid".
Yeah, I don't care that they don't have X as their main display (even though I personally love X, I respect that they went with Display PDF). I meant "below the hood", for example kernelwise.
I agree that the term should no longer be considered a trademark owned by the Open Group, since it's generic, but as long as we're talking about misleading consumers... Is the Darwin/XNU/BSD-setup that passes for a kernel in Mac OS X really Unix? It's strays pretty far from the original kt & dmr KISS philosophy.
Even GNU's got that N in the middle of it's acronym to keep it from being Unix. Sure, the Hurd of interfaces representing depth in GNU is even further from Unix-think than Mac OS X but that doesn't mean that Apple saying "Built on the industrial-strenth foundation of Unix" isn't misleading.
Darwin is interesting but it doesn't have the multiple decades of testing that Unix has, and unlike Linux (the kernel) I've gotten a kernel panic just using a web browser. (I've had Linux crash on me when I've been doing stupid things with hardware. Mac OS X a lot easier.)
(Again, I'm not dissing Darwin, I'm just asking "What is Unix?" especially in the light of how Apple is marketing it's OS to unixheads.)
It's been done at least once. I'm looking forward to more hardware-based players since I don't like the battery-eating of software+ARM players.
I'm also primarily a typing person (a complete dvorak geek) so I've been wondering if there are some nice online exercises somewhere to learn a fast and beautiful script? I found no books on the topic at my local library.
What kind of dinky little car is that you're used to if someone writes "in traffic" and you assume she's driving? Ever hear of car pools, buses or trains?
I have no beef with the entry on GandhiCon, which I thought was witty and deserving of a place.
There are a few entries where the ESR-factor is bothering me, though, with the hacker politics page being the worst.
I love the line "Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day." which rings very true to my ears, and how the geeks (including myself) view politics. (I know people of both category a and b.)
However, that category "b" definitely includes socialistic (esp. anarchistic) views, especially (but not limited to) outside the US. I've met plenty of hackers who hate all lefties and I've met plenty who see themselves as socialist. The phrase "affected by the collapse of socialism" just sounds like what I read in plenty of rightwing-oriented literature (I like to read stuff from both sides of the camp), but it seems false. The latest years I've seen a great strengthening in various leftlibertarian/anarchist movements. The only thing that's crumbling with the Berlin wall is leninism (and part of marxism), not the socialistic ideals themselves.
Tonight, being in a good mood since it's a nice summer night here, I feel like suggesting that hackers should view each other with kindness regardness of immediate political view. Most hackers have a fondness for freedom, and even though some of us think that corporatism and capitalism are the greatest contemporary threat to that freedom while others think that capitalism is the best means to reach and uphold a state of freedom, the entry in the jargon file should reflect that hackerdom is not a homogenous political movement.
I've listened to a lot of recordings of RMS speeches (there are plenty on gnu.org) and he's bitter-sounding in some and great in some, depending on things like the mood or the audience or what have you.
He's no buddha, he's just a human, and he's done some great stuff. Sort of like ESR, who constantly manage to really make me angry with his political articles but who has interesting views on mysticism as well as working on fetchmail, a very useful program. They do good things and bad, just like you and me.
I use Emacs for mail, news, IM (via erc/bitlbee), as frontend to various websites and wikis, and as a planner/calendar.
I've been planning to switch my phonebook over to BBDB as well.