The BSD and MIT licenses offer true freedom. The GPL offers restriction and the elimination of freedom.
this is a very subtle and dangerous perspective that has one extremely large software project which has ended up in complete chaos, causing headaches for many people, including misunderstandings and ignorance by vendors who assume that because the majority of the software is BSD/MIT, the linux kernel's GPL license is somehow magically transmuted to a BSD/MIT license as well.
that software is android.
the only reason why we have things like cyanogen, thank god, is because there is one last bastion of fundamental GPL code left in android devices: u-boot and the linux kernel. without that, the smartphone industry would be viewed with extreme hostility. it's *already* bad enough in cases where companies such as Mediatek blatantly and continuously violate the GPL.
look at what happened with Fairphone, for example. great product, yes? envisioned as being sustainable, yes? and after 2 years, what happened? well, there turned out to be some security vulnerabilities in the version of android that was supplied (by Mediatek). it was *critical* that the users upgrade. but, because Fairphone had naively bought a binary-only GPL-violating OS from a 3rd party OEM company that *DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THE SOURCE CODE*, there was no way to provide updates of *ANY KIND*. the buyers therefore had to abandon their products for security reasons. bear in mind that this is supposed to be eco-conscious *sustainable* hardware that's supposed to be re-usable. it was extremely embarrassing for Fairphone, and a very hard lesson for them.
so that's even when there's a GPL kernel. imagine what it would be like - imagine the situation if the linux kernel *wasn't* GPL? you would end up with the exact same situation as with apple. apple _used_ to release the kernel source code (based on FreeBSD) back to the community... they stopped recently. the end result: people no longer actually own their own hardware.
the GPL is, at its heart, a recognition that collaboration is better than competition and secrecy. the BSD and MIT licenses were developed when everybody released source code *anyway*. the licenses were therefore more about fighting the liability that is inherent in releasing code as "Public Domain". everyone *trusted* that the code modifications would be released.... and then suddenly they weren't [did you even *know* for example that Windows 95's TCP/IP stack is actually BSD-licensed?]
google's insistence on using BSD licenses - to the point of re-implementing entire GPL-based pre-existing libraries - has resulted in untold very subtle harm to end-users and to software freedom in general - harm that is very difficult to quantify and explain because it's long-term, and the consequences are ongoing.
the one thing that really really stinks about what google did with android is summed up in this simple question: they replicated dozens of critical low-level libraries and applications that had perfectly-functional GPL versions that were proven and had stable communities based around them (that could really have done with the financial support of google).... so why did they not replicate the Linux Kernel as a BSD-based project as well? that hypocrisy - that they did not also re-create the Linux Kernel as a BSD/MIT project - tells you everything that you need to know.
The biggest barrier to true open hardware is the fact someone has to pay for a tangible good, and that tangible good - hardware - is designed for a specific purpose. The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon as you desire. The block is silicon that does what you want to do in the first place. And that carries with it costs beyond just software creation.
i'm designing Libre Hardware, right now. i've been on this task for the past five years, since the embarrassing time when i encouraged 20 software libre developers to join me in buying one of the very first ARM netbooks to come out (back in 2010) that turned out to be GPL-violating. i had to spend a frantic 3 weeks reverse-engineering the hardware in order to provide those people with a GPL-compliant linux kernel.
this example just on its own demonstrates that what you have said is simply untrue in a very profound and subtle way. you claim "The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon" - how can you load a kernel into memory using the BIOS's bootloader (if there is one) if you do not know how the BIOS *actually works*? how can you load a kernel into memory if you don't have the hardware's documentation? what if the proprietary bootloader (if there is one) has some sort of checksum or DRM where you are not provided the keys?
another example is the IBM / Lenovo laptops, where the BIOS had the PCIe device and MAC address of the WIFI adapter *burned into EEPROM*. quite literally the only way for people to replace the WIFI adapter was to *replace the entire BIOS*. that required a *massive* reverse-engineering effort and we now have coreboot support for many Lenovo laptops.
time and time again i have had to cut certain SoCs and ICs from the list of products because i cannot get the SDK, cannot get the Datasheet, cannot get *any* information about how the SoC or IC works.
so you claim "the block is silicon that does what you want to do" - it only does what you want to do via a hardware API which requires an extremely comprehensive bit-level and timing-critical software-driven understanding of that "block". without that, the hardware is LITERALLY useless. [remember NDISWRAPPER for WIFI cards?]
can you see, therefore, through these examples, that you've fundamentally misunderstood the complexity of the issue, and why there are such severe barriers to entry in the hardware arena?
i *do* understand this, so it's why i have been working for the past five years on creating Libre-compliant eco-conscious hardware, where the hardware - all of it - will be vetted for GPL-compliance before putting it into production. sounds mad? but it's the only way, i feel, that instead of waiting for someone else to tackle this, i'm *actively* taking responsibility for ensuring that there exists Libre-compliant Hardware.
... budget for lots of equipment including high end FPGAs to be located in a mine shaft. What shall we say we're doing with it?.
actually there's someone out there already working on a way to hack into their network so that they can run bitcoin mining on them. i bet however that they'll probably find that the scientists secretly installed bitcoin mining on them already... ostensibly to help justify the insane cost of the equipment. so now you know the _real_ reason why they haven't found any so-called dark matter....
The FSF needs a leader who is cool with you running open source apps on Macs and Windows PCs, and understands that it's the goal of free/open source code that matters, not how "pure" you are.
absolutely not. you fail to understand the critical, critical importance of leading by example. read this story, please: http://www.habitsforwellbeing....
imagine that the scenario you describe were to be the case. Dr Stallman (or his replacement) says, "Don't use proprietary software! It's Bad", and one person pipes up in the crowd, "But You Don't Believe That, You Use Proprietary Software And Proprietary Apps, So Why Should We Bother To Listen To You?".... and there's no answer, is there?
another example: a slave driver tells people "don't own slaves, it's inhumane!"
another example: a known corrupt judge passing sentence on people
another example: a paedophilic or gay priest advising people on marriage counselling...
another example: a bankrupt life-coach telling people how to make money...
by breaking and abandoning the very principles that you expect others to follow, your position is totally and utterly false.
yaaa, i'm not filling out the survey until i've seen the full source code and an MD5/SHA1 checksum that shows the source code is what's actually running on the server. i wouldn't want my data to be sold out by the FSF or intercepted by the NSA due to MD5 or SHA1 collisions ohshit...
i know they like to describe it as "response", but the "response" to terrorism is actually a "predictable reaction". these "predictable reactions" are what the psy-ops teams behind terrorist groups use to extend their reach well beyond what they would otherwise be able to achieve. kill a few people in a public place, get a MASSIVE reaction, governments predictably react in a 2-dimentsional zombie sleep-walking way, calling it a "response", and the damage is magnified and furthers the aims of the terrorists: to terrorise as many people as they can.
blunt and simple question. why are governments HELPING terrorists?
even this "news" report - where the U.S. govt is now holding talks with the companies that hold the most information about people in the history of humanity - far more than IBM could ever hold on punched-cards when it was commissioned by the Nazis to track the jewish population - is yet another example of the terrorists WINNING.
i didn't approve of it at the time, but there was significant censorship of the bombings that occurred in dublin in the 1980s. TWELVE bombs - set off in ONE DAY by the IRA - reached all of the Irish newspapers... but not a single word reached us in the UK or anywhere else. the only reason i got to hear about it at all was because we had some irish workers who would have newspapers specially shipped over.
this kind of "non-reaction" - non-reporting - i can see now is much more sensible than any kind of "reaction" dressed up with the words "response" or "proportionate response". it however takes extreme bravery to not react in the face of this kind of thing, and that, really, should be the role of governments: to say, "look: our current approach, to try to reassure you that we're 'taking care of this' for you by "reacting", isn't working. everything we try to do just makes things worse. instead, what we'd like you to consider doing is a VOLUNTARY censorship of terrorists. if you see something illegal on a social media site, report it. but DO NOT re-tweet it. do NOT send messages to your friends 'oh dear look at this, isn't it horrible'. take a deep breath, be compassionate, feel SORRY for these people that they're so deluded that they have to kill other human beings, but don't react in fear and loathing, because that's exactly what they want you to do".
sounds naive, maybe? but look, historically, at what's worked. the current "policies" aren't working, are they? so maybe it's time to try something different, yes? remember: definition of madness - to do the same thing over and over again, given the exact same conditions, expecting every single time a different outcome...
does anyone remember microsoft's ActiveDesktop, and why it failed? it failed because they took away all of the privilege separation that you get from having separate programs with permissions, and enabled and empowered a single process with carte blanche to access a vast array of resources... *and* failed to properly secure them. the mozilla foundation is now spending its sponsor's money on re-discovering why this is a non-starter, by permitting javascript direct access to hardware GPIO.
there is a better way - i have actually told the mozilla developers this but they are in some sort of hell-bound zombie sleep-walk mode - which is to go back to basics, remove *all* "special" APIs, then write JSON or other local services running on 127.0.0.1 loopback that carry out the "special" work that has absolutely nothing to do with GUI rendering.
this design strategy has the key advantage that high-priority code may be written in an *APPROPRIATE* programming language, but it does have the disadvantage that you can't really write eye-catching press releases....
i've said it once and i'll say it again: what the FUCK is wrong with people who think it's okay to put a country's critical infrastructure on the public internet AT ALL? there should be absolutely no way that power, water, gas, electricity or any kind of public utility should be even VAGUELY "internet connected". to anyone considering responding "but they might want to quotes manage quotes the infrastructure" then they should fucking well have a private closed-loop network or pay key emergency staff to live right next door to the infrastructure. there's a whole boat-load of long-range communications options that don't involve the public internet, which we *know* is wide-open to attack. any country that doesn't have laws in place which make it illegal for critical infrastructure to be on the public internet is quite literally asking for trouble. you don't leave the door to your house unlocked and then complain "but someone stole all my stuff!" - this is exactly the same thing.
hahaaaa! the only reason i would want washing machines to be WIFI-enabled would be to hack them in order to see this sort of thing happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - the only problem being of course that if [by-default] insecure IoT enabled washing machines really DID end up like this, it would be totally and utterly unsafe. kids or animals in the same room as tens of thousands of washing machines all spinning at 5,000 RPM under remote-DDOS-mass-hacked-computer-control... generally bad and unfavourable en-masse outcome. still, sadly, i can genuinely foresee something like this actually happening. with resultant lawsuits, company directors being imprisoned for mass-murder, and, finally, then and ONLY then would laws be put in place which make it a criminal offense to not properly secure IoT devices. the sad thing is that we as tech-savvy people damn well know RIGHT NOW that such laws are critical and necessary, but that law-makers are flat-out ignorant of the dangers.
in essence what you are suggesting is that the politicians cannot be trusted to make decisions on your behalf during their term of office. your "vote" is in effect a declaration of abdication of responsibility to their "better judgement" and "expertise". if, from your experience of how that's worked out, this sounds ridiculous or hollow to you, then you know, finally and at last, why democracy is one of the weakest forms of government.
as such, i think the idea of allowing continuous voting is both fascinating and marginally scary. we already have a situation where democracy brings us the politicians we *deserve* - they are a reflection of our "lowest common denominator" understanding of what is best for a country (or state). easily swayed and manipulated by deliberate media misunderstandings or by mass hysteria (instead of by corporate vested interests and/or corruption), i honestly cannot predict which would be worse.
my feeling is that the best form of government is one in which the head of state has absolutely no power whatsoever but to make "proclamations" - like a king / queen / diplomat. experts would come to them to give advice, and the head of state would "proclaim" their decision / advice - nothing more. mayors and so on i would suggest remain in place, because local people need local help, solutions and community self-support.
if this sounds strange, look historically at the damage and ineffectiveness of national government decisions in any western country you care to choose. power attracts strange people as well as corruption. best to remove the temptation, eh?
So install Mandarin Linux like redflag for these users? Hardware will still work. You don't expect your 2011 era Android 2.2 gingerbread or iPhone 3 to still run your latest apps do you?
precisely. so they must be discarded, despite being perfectly well functional for the task that their user *would* like to continue to use them for... if it wasn't for the fact that they're no longer secure. the modular approach - where the "main computer" can be upgraded - is an idea that solves this otherwise impossible situation whilst minimising electronic waste and allowing people to save money at the same time.
Since when has Slashdot become a Luddite websites for those that fear change?
XP is 15 years old! Things move on. We are tired of turning down 2008 era html 5 and leaving our phones with a better browser experience because of XP IE 6/8 compatibility from a different era. If the hardware is from 2008 or earlier you can install Linux for free?
Do you not change your oil and timing belts either
you're applying a first-world technically-literate engineering mind-set to a developing-world, mostly-technically-illiterate set of people [albeit desperate and highly creative as a result, it has to be said]. these are people that have been abandoned by profit-maximising corporations that prey and depend on you and people like you to feed the cycle of environmentally-irresponsible manufacturing.
there's not enough profit to justify selling product to them, so they're left with our discarded electronics, shipped in huge containers and either coaxed into life [or melted down in open-air no-safety acid baths].
you've also assumed that the older hardware - which is quite likely to have only 128mb or 256mb of RAM - is *capable* of running a modern version even of the GNU/Linux OS. did you check the resident-RAM and virtual memory of firefox recently? i just ran "top" right now, and firefox says it's consuming 2.4 GIGABYTES of resident memory and SIXTEEN gigabytes of virtual memory.
if you genuinely believe that a machine from 2008 is capable of reasonable resource consumption and reasonable response time running the latest version of firefox - even under a GNU/Linux OS - you are genuinely deluding yourself and are doing absolutely noone any favours.
please think a little bit outside of the box of your own environment, and act responsibly.
"Both companies have argued that there are millions of people in developing countries that still use browsers and operating systems that do not support SHA-2, the replacement function for SHA-1, and will therefore be cut off from encrypted websites that move to SHA-2 certificates."
that's ok - because they can just throw away perfectly good hardware because the software's out-of-date, discarding the older stuff in the hope that it doesn't end up in landfill but ends up in the developing world just like we do. wait... we're *already* talking about the developing world. so that means there's no fall-back - no incentive for the endless cycle of high-profit-with-bugs-and-security-vulnerabilities-so-you-buy-a-new-one, because there's not enough profit made from the sale of newer hardware in the developing market to justify pursuing it.
i _would_ recommend, at this point, that modular phones would be a good idea... except that if you now look at phonebloks you'll see that there's currently *six* separate and distinct, totally incompatible and entirely *not* open (i.e. not royalty-free, not patent-licensing-free etc.) hardware or open standard modular interoperable mobile phones.
plus, phones are not the only products that are insecure here: what about desktops, laptops and so on? it's not just the proprietary phones and proprietary tablets that will be *unable* to be upgraded because in order to effect an upgrade, it's likely that the entire OS will need to be replaced, it's *all* the computing devices that are hit by this problem.
as techies here on slashdot we understand that software keeps getting more and more complex, and that to recompile just one component (a security library) whilst keeping all the other, older components exactly the same is an extremely time-consuming software engineering task that NO PROPRIETARY HARDWARE VENDOR is going to commit to. in many cases they literally can't, especially the chinese OEMs, because the "O" for "originality" is a total sham in china: they receive binary-only (GPL-violating) distributions from an extremely secretive SoC manufacturer's close handful of partners, along with a Hardware Reference Design... and that's the end of the matter. they don't *HAVE* the source code. they *CAN'T* make the software upgrades even if they had customers willing to pay for the software engineers to do it.
so the only remaining choice, if the software cannot be upgraded, is to upgrade the hardware. and there literally isn't anyone except myself working on modular upgradeable computing appliances like laptops, desktops and so on. i've been looking for years, and i've even approached large companies: they've *actively* stated that they're not interested - the only reason i can think of is that they perceive there isn't enough guaranteed profit in modular computing because a competitor could come along and wipe them out with a faster or better compatible upgrade than they could produce in time. especially a chinese clone manufacturer.
so we're caught between a rock and a hard place, here. the current manufacturing-consumer cycle is highly-optimised for us in the 1st world, and we're effectively sleep-walking as to the consequences for ourselves and the rest of the world (which is just as the manufacturers want it) i outline this in more detail in a white paper i've written (below) - if in reading this you fully understand both the consequences and the nature of the problem and would like to do something about it, do contact me: i have some sponsors already and am open to more.
" BT data centres are also directly linked to NTAC for the supply of subscriber information, telephone call records, and domestic internet interception."
i wondered why BT's internet service slowed down massively during peak hours (especially when children got home from school). now we know why. the system which farmed off the monitoring so that we could be spied on wasn't fast enough. hey fuckers: if you're going to spy on us, do it in a way that doesn't affect the profitability of the companies you're shafting, ok? remember what's happening with cisco right now?
http://www.critters.org/turkey... - worth reading just for its hilarity (various versions abound, google the subject of this post) this is an invaluable read for any wannabe-writer not just in sci-fi, but the terms that are defined are a special warning-shot across the bows of anyone wishing to make the jump into the especially-discerning genre of science fiction.
many wanna-be science fiction writers forget that sci-fi readers are usually extremely well-read (i.e. extremely familiar with the genre), as well as being technically knowledgeable. they are thus extremely unlikely to be fooled by basic mistakes in the laws of physics without a thoroughly well-researched and well-explained plausible background and back-story.
peter f hamilton excels at this kind of job, but it's *literally* taken him 10 years to establish one of the story-lines which permitted him to do just that (the "Void" series). even there, limitations of human knowledge on "what is known and what is not" make an interesting (sometimes nail-biting) story.
iain banks likewise, with the "Culture" series, slowly developed plausibility for the use of "hyperspace", with several passages dedicated to explanations at appropriate times, interspersed throughout the series. the concept "Infinite Fun" was introduced in the book "Excession", having many pages dedicated to explaining that "Minds" - the machine consciousnesses that utilised hyperspace to store their consciousness - were so powerful and so fast that they could develop (and thus live within) entire virtual-reality worlds that were so compelling that they would *literally* lose themselves within them.
also in the same book, one of the "Minds" devotes 25 years to being a recluse, as an excuse to prepare itself for being able to convert its *entire* cargo hold [tens of kilometres long] into an emergency engine within days, *just* in case it was ever needed. turns out that such an excuse was in fact needed, and the story, spread out quietly over a few pages, of how that ship managed to break loose of its "minders" by accelerating to a sustained hyperspace speed over 235 times the speed of light [prior records being something like 20, resulting in severe engine degradation within a few hours], had me in absolute hysterics the first time i read it.
these kinds of renditions require skill, knowledge and dedication that very few authors in the non-sci-fi-world are prepared to develop. about the only exception i've encountered is a book by Tony Gonzalez, who wrote in the MMORG "Eve Online" world - a book called the "Empyrean Age". this book, thanks to the significant backdrop of information, allowed Tony to successfully "jump in" head-first as a totally unknown and entirely new author into the world of sci-fi writing. hilariously, he opens with "The White Room Syndrome" - literally! which was very funny for me as someone who has read over 800 sci-fi and fantasy books as well as the Turkey City Lexicon, reading the first few pages in the bookshop and going "OhNooooe, White Room Syndrome!!!" - luckily i skim-read a bit more and found the writing style compelling, and was glad that i bought the book, despite it being full of some soppy film-esque cliche "poignant scenes" at various points. overall, the book worked.
which reminds me, that it's worth mentioning that comics tend to make good films, because of the significant back-drop of technical knowledge and character development that the script-writers simply cannot ignore. both marvel comics films and the (darker) D.C. comics stories, when converted to films (or TV series) tend to be consistent and successful (DC comics less so than Marvel ones), as the script-writers and the directors have people (such as Stan Lee) whom they can call on to fill in any gaps and not end up with absolute howlers that jar the audience out of the story, in just the same way that Tony Gonzales (for the most part) managed to keep me enthralled in the story he told, thanks to it operati
i've mentioned this before, whenever the phrase "artificial" intelligence comes up. the problem is not with quotes AI quotes, it's with *us humans*. just look at the two words "artificial" combined with the word "intelligence". it is SHEER ARROGANCE on our part to declare that intelligence - such an amazing concept - can be *artificial*. as in "not really real". as in "beneath us". as in "objective and thus subject to our manipulation and enslavement". so until we - humans - stop thinking of intelligence as being "beneath us" and "not real", i don't really see how we can ever actually properly recreate it.
to make the point clearer: all these "tests", it doesn't really matter, because the people doing the assessment have a perspective that doesn't really respect intelligence... so how on earth can they judge that they've actually *detected* intelligence? like the "million monkeys typing shakespeare", the problem is that even if one of the monkeys did actually accidentally type up the complete works of shakespeare, unless there was someone there who was INTELLIGENT ENOUGH to recognise what had happened, the monkey that typed shakespeare's complete works is quite likely to go "oo oo aaah aah", rip up the pages, eat some of them and wipe its backside with the rest, destroying any chance of the successful outcome being *noticed*, even though it actually occurred.
i much prefer the term "machine consciousness". that's where things get properly interesting. the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is SELF-AWARENESS, and it's the key difference between what people are developing NOW and what we see in sci-fi books and films. programs being developed today are trying to simulate INTELLIGENCE. sci-fi books and films feature CONSCIOUS (self-aware) machines.
this lack of discernment in the [programming] scientific community between these two concepts, combined with the inherent arrogance implied by the word "Artificial" in the meme "AI" is why there is so little success in actually achieving any breakthroughs.
but it's actually a lot worse than that. let's say that the scientific community makes a cognitive breakthrough, and starts pursuing the goal of developing "machine consciousness". let's take the previous (million-monkeys) example and step that up, as illustrated with this question:
How can people who are not sufficiently self-aware - conscious of themselves - be expected to (a) DEFINE such that they can (b) RECOGNISE consciousness, such that (c) they can DEVELOP it in the first place?
let's take George Bush (junior) as an example. George Bush is known to have completely destroyed his mind with drink and drugs. he has an I.Q. of around 85 (unlike his father, who had an extra "1" in front of that number). yet he was voted into the world's most powerful office, as President of the United States. the concept of the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is explored in Charles Stross's book, "Singularity Sky". George Bush - despite being elected as President - would actually FAIL the consciousness test adopted by the alien race in "Singularity Sky"!
my point is, therefore, that until we start using the right terms, start developing some humility sufficient to recognise that we could create something GREATER than ourselves, start developing some laws *in advance* to protect machine conscious beings from being tortured, the human race stands very little chance of success in this field.
in short: we need to become conscious *ourselves* before we stand a chance of being able to move forward.
If the community get's behind systemd, it works and is/becomes usable and apps start relying on it being there - so what?
by taking over and forcing out all other options, it becomes a monoculture. and that, as we know from decades of experience where monoculture OSes have created cartels and monopolies, is incredibly dangerous.
i dedicated three years of my life - without proper financial recognition - to breaking the NT Domains monopoly, saving companies world-wide billions of dollars in the process. it is also not very well-known that i dedicated another year reverse-engineering the Exchange 5.5 protocol.
this dedication gave people a choice: they could choose to remain on monoculture monopolistic insecure proprietary and expensive per-seat-licensed servers, or they could choose to move over to software libre on any number of POSIX-compliant OSes including HPUX, AIX, Solaris, BSDs and GNU/Linux OSes - the *exact* opposite of a monopolistic monoculture. they could also choose to move to any number of proprietary solutions from companies such as Tarantella, Honeywell, Network Appliances and many more - all companies who got together because i pioneered the reverse-engineering (and wasn't murdered for doing so) which forced Microsoft to start doing proper documentation, and to sponsor CIFS conferences.
now i am witnessing a process by which everyone in the GNU/Linux community, by working in a totally dedicated way in "their corner" that has to be respected precisely *because* it is so dedicated, yet as a whole *all* of us have gone "hmmm, i'm working in my corner, the global problem isn't my problem: i'm making local decisions, here, which make my life easy and i'm doing what i think is best", totally forgetting that the overall consequences are like a shoal of fish: EVERYBODY has "flipped" - all at once - and the direction is a dangerous one that no one person has any responsibility or control over, because we are *not* a company, we do *not* have a "Board of Directors who can give us orders that we are required to follow or be fired", we are a bazaar - a self-organised group of self-organised individuals with independent free will and highly-focussed responsibilities.
the "flip" is to a dangerous monoculture position with, as we are now witnessing, absolutely zero choice (bad choices are no choice at all) - which i've warned about well over a year ago, and was told, basically, to "fuck off". well... now we begin to see the consequences.
i am running fvwm2 - i have been for 20 years - and i am using angband.pl's recompiled versions of critical dependencies (udevd and others) all of which have "--no-systemd" in the configure.ac files. so i will not be concerned about trojans that attack vulnerabilities in systemd, exploiting the new features such as allowing the firewall to be disabled and much, much more. but you - all you who trust the systemd authors and the desktop environments that now operate exclusively on systemd? you should be concerned.
... y'know... it has to be said, this is precisely why thinkpenguin (and other FSF-Endorsed hardware) do wipe-it-down-to-the-bedrock products, even to the extent of replacing the standard BIOS with coreboot, and why the purism librem laptop exists (and was successfully funded last year). but even there, the problem is that for the past 15 years all intel processors have to have an RSA-signed bootloader that goes into EEPROM on-board the processor, where there's absolutely no chance of obtaining the source code for that proprietary firmware blob. you have absolutely no idea what goes into that bootloader, but it's already been demonstrated that your laptop - and your desktop - can be woken up by external network signals - without your consent or knowledge - *even when you powered them down*.
the only possible solution here is... to not use intel (or AMD) processors. and that opens up a whole can of worms, which is why i've been sponsored to make an upgradeable laptop. if any one CPU is ever found to have problems, the whole CPU Card can be popped out and replaced... *without* having to throw away the entire laptop.
designing a laptop from the ground up so that its main CPU module can be replaced... only two years ago that could have been said to be "total paranoia". now we have the kinds of stunts being pulled by Dell, Lenovo and the NSA which were only previously believed to *potentially* be carried out...
wow, man. terrorists love the chaos and publicity that they receive. they love the reactions, the outrage, the responses that they get, because they don't need to do anything other than kill a few people, and the rest of the damage people - and governments - do *to themselves*. trying to "crack down" on anonymous payments all in the name of "terrorism"... it's amazing. i look forward to a time when people - and governments - understand that terrorising *ourselves* with the knee-jerk after-reactions often does far more lasting damage than the actual atrocities carried out by the killers.
man that is one F'ed up site that i can not get past the ADVERTISING 3 second countdown
that is royally F'ED UP
you get an advertising countdown? all i get is a redirect to a URL with the word "welcome"... that's then completely blank. this isn't the first time it's happened, either. y'know what? i'm going to resurrect a tag that i haven't seen used in a looong time - i'm going to mark this artlcle as "slashdotted". yes, in 2015, that's an indictment of a site as big as forbes. in 1997 it used to be fine (and funny) that the 15 minutes of fame from a slashdot focus would overwhelm a web site link.
yeah i got something similar, i researched the chipset a bit in advance, to see what frequencies it could do. i found one that could go from i think it was... like... 100 mhz through to almost 1900mhz, with a bandwidth of something like... 2.8m-samples/sec. it only had an 8-bit ADC resolution but that was ok. i then used it with some software i was working with, at the time (passive GSM scanning software), and actually managed to find a couple of frequencies, which was amazing.
going beyond that would have been tricky, because at the limit of 2.8 million samples per second of I and Q data @ 8 bit, it was pushing the limit of what the hardware could actually do: there were quite a few drop-outs. i'm sure the proprietary driver could handle that data rate, but the reverse-engineered gnu/linux one simply couldn't.
anyway yes absolutely! $12 plus shipping for something that will handle a huge range of frequencies, FM radio, TV frequencies, GPS satellites, GSM 850 and 900mhz, and even some of the higher-end GSM frequencies @ 1800mhz... maan, what more could you ask for?:)
Red herring. Efast didn't arrive to people's computers via official channels. Linux is just as vulnerable to malware when stuff is being installed via unofficial channels.
... which means that you didn't read the full contents of what i wrote before posting. in paragraph (5) i made this exact point. so you not only didn't read what i wrote, but you then detracted from the *actual* point being made, by criticising what was written without proper thought and consideration on your part.
you then go on to conclude that i must be on a "high horse", but at the point at which you clearly didn't read each and every paragraph, i lost interest in reading further because you clearly demonstrated that it was more important to you promote *yourself* (by way of denigrating others) than to actually provide a service to readers of the article.
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The BSD and MIT licenses offer true freedom. The GPL offers restriction and the elimination of freedom.
this is a very subtle and dangerous perspective that has one extremely large software project which has ended up in complete chaos, causing headaches for many people, including misunderstandings and ignorance by vendors who assume that because the majority of the software is BSD/MIT, the linux kernel's GPL license is somehow magically transmuted to a BSD/MIT license as well.
that software is android.
the only reason why we have things like cyanogen, thank god, is because there is one last bastion of fundamental GPL code left in android devices: u-boot and the linux kernel. without that, the smartphone industry would be viewed with extreme hostility. it's *already* bad enough in cases where companies such as Mediatek blatantly and continuously violate the GPL.
look at what happened with Fairphone, for example. great product, yes? envisioned as being sustainable, yes? and after 2 years, what happened? well, there turned out to be some security vulnerabilities in the version of android that was supplied (by Mediatek). it was *critical* that the users upgrade. but, because Fairphone had naively bought a binary-only GPL-violating OS from a 3rd party OEM company that *DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THE SOURCE CODE*, there was no way to provide updates of *ANY KIND*. the buyers therefore had to abandon their products for security reasons. bear in mind that this is supposed to be eco-conscious *sustainable* hardware that's supposed to be re-usable. it was extremely embarrassing for Fairphone, and a very hard lesson for them.
so that's even when there's a GPL kernel. imagine what it would be like - imagine the situation if the linux kernel *wasn't* GPL? you would end up with the exact same situation as with apple. apple _used_ to release the kernel source code (based on FreeBSD) back to the community... they stopped recently. the end result: people no longer actually own their own hardware.
the GPL is, at its heart, a recognition that collaboration is better than competition and secrecy. the BSD and MIT licenses were developed when everybody released source code *anyway*. the licenses were therefore more about fighting the liability that is inherent in releasing code as "Public Domain". everyone *trusted* that the code modifications would be released.... and then suddenly they weren't [did you even *know* for example that Windows 95's TCP/IP stack is actually BSD-licensed?]
google's insistence on using BSD licenses - to the point of re-implementing entire GPL-based pre-existing libraries - has resulted in untold very subtle harm to end-users and to software freedom in general - harm that is very difficult to quantify and explain because it's long-term, and the consequences are ongoing.
the one thing that really really stinks about what google did with android is summed up in this simple question: they replicated dozens of critical low-level libraries and applications that had perfectly-functional GPL versions that were proven and had stable communities based around them (that could really have done with the financial support of google).... so why did they not replicate the Linux Kernel as a BSD-based project as well? that hypocrisy - that they did not also re-create the Linux Kernel as a BSD/MIT project - tells you everything that you need to know.
The biggest barrier to true open hardware is the fact someone has to pay for a tangible good, and that tangible good - hardware - is designed for a specific purpose. The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon as you desire. The block is silicon that does what you want to do in the first place. And that carries with it costs beyond just software creation.
i'm designing Libre Hardware, right now. i've been on this task for the past five years, since the embarrassing time when i encouraged 20 software libre developers to join me in buying one of the very first ARM netbooks to come out (back in 2010) that turned out to be GPL-violating. i had to spend a frantic 3 weeks reverse-engineering the hardware in order to provide those people with a GPL-compliant linux kernel.
this example just on its own demonstrates that what you have said is simply untrue in a very profound and subtle way. you claim "The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon" - how can you load a kernel into memory using the BIOS's bootloader (if there is one) if you do not know how the BIOS *actually works*? how can you load a kernel into memory if you don't have the hardware's documentation? what if the proprietary bootloader (if there is one) has some sort of checksum or DRM where you are not provided the keys?
another example is the IBM / Lenovo laptops, where the BIOS had the PCIe device and MAC address of the WIFI adapter *burned into EEPROM*. quite literally the only way for people to replace the WIFI adapter was to *replace the entire BIOS*. that required a *massive* reverse-engineering effort and we now have coreboot support for many Lenovo laptops.
time and time again i have had to cut certain SoCs and ICs from the list of products because i cannot get the SDK, cannot get the Datasheet, cannot get *any* information about how the SoC or IC works.
so you claim "the block is silicon that does what you want to do" - it only does what you want to do via a hardware API which requires an extremely comprehensive bit-level and timing-critical software-driven understanding of that "block". without that, the hardware is LITERALLY useless. [remember NDISWRAPPER for WIFI cards?]
can you see, therefore, through these examples, that you've fundamentally misunderstood the complexity of the issue, and why there are such severe barriers to entry in the hardware arena?
i *do* understand this, so it's why i have been working for the past five years on creating Libre-compliant eco-conscious hardware, where the hardware - all of it - will be vetted for GPL-compliance before putting it into production. sounds mad? but it's the only way, i feel, that instead of waiting for someone else to tackle this, i'm *actively* taking responsibility for ensuring that there exists Libre-compliant Hardware.
actually there's someone out there already working on a way to hack into their network so that they can run bitcoin mining on them. i bet however that they'll probably find that the scientists secretly installed bitcoin mining on them already... ostensibly to help justify the insane cost of the equipment. so now you know the _real_ reason why they haven't found any so-called dark matter....
The FSF needs a leader who is cool with you running open source apps on Macs and Windows PCs, and understands that it's the goal of free/open source code that matters, not how "pure" you are.
absolutely not. you fail to understand the critical, critical importance of leading by example. read this story, please: http://www.habitsforwellbeing....
imagine that the scenario you describe were to be the case. Dr Stallman (or his replacement) says, "Don't use proprietary software! It's Bad", and one person pipes up in the crowd, "But You Don't Believe That, You Use Proprietary Software And Proprietary Apps, So Why Should We Bother To Listen To You?" .... and there's no answer, is there?
another example: a slave driver tells people "don't own slaves, it's inhumane!"
another example: a known corrupt judge passing sentence on people
another example: a paedophilic or gay priest advising people on marriage counselling...
another example: a bankrupt life-coach telling people how to make money...
by breaking and abandoning the very principles that you expect others to follow, your position is totally and utterly false.
yaaa, i'm not filling out the survey until i've seen the full source code and an MD5/SHA1 checksum that shows the source code is what's actually running on the server. i wouldn't want my data to be sold out by the FSF or intercepted by the NSA due to MD5 or SHA1 collisions ohshit...
i know they like to describe it as "response", but the "response" to terrorism is actually a "predictable reaction". these "predictable reactions" are what the psy-ops teams behind terrorist groups use to extend their reach well beyond what they would otherwise be able to achieve. kill a few people in a public place, get a MASSIVE reaction, governments predictably react in a 2-dimentsional zombie sleep-walking way, calling it a "response", and the damage is magnified and furthers the aims of the terrorists: to terrorise as many people as they can.
blunt and simple question. why are governments HELPING terrorists?
even this "news" report - where the U.S. govt is now holding talks with the companies that hold the most information about people in the history of humanity - far more than IBM could ever hold on punched-cards when it was commissioned by the Nazis to track the jewish population - is yet another example of the terrorists WINNING.
i didn't approve of it at the time, but there was significant censorship of the bombings that occurred in dublin in the 1980s. TWELVE bombs - set off in ONE DAY by the IRA - reached all of the Irish newspapers... but not a single word reached us in the UK or anywhere else. the only reason i got to hear about it at all was because we had some irish workers who would have newspapers specially shipped over.
this kind of "non-reaction" - non-reporting - i can see now is much more sensible than any kind of "reaction" dressed up with the words "response" or "proportionate response". it however takes extreme bravery to not react in the face of this kind of thing, and that, really, should be the role of governments: to say, "look: our current approach, to try to reassure you that we're 'taking care of this' for you by "reacting", isn't working. everything we try to do just makes things worse. instead, what we'd like you to consider doing is a VOLUNTARY censorship of terrorists. if you see something illegal on a social media site, report it. but DO NOT re-tweet it. do NOT send messages to your friends 'oh dear look at this, isn't it horrible'. take a deep breath, be compassionate, feel SORRY for these people that they're so deluded that they have to kill other human beings, but don't react in fear and loathing, because that's exactly what they want you to do".
sounds naive, maybe? but look, historically, at what's worked. the current "policies" aren't working, are they? so maybe it's time to try something different, yes? remember: definition of madness - to do the same thing over and over again, given the exact same conditions, expecting every single time a different outcome...
does anyone remember microsoft's ActiveDesktop, and why it failed? it failed because they took away all of the privilege separation that you get from having separate programs with permissions, and enabled and empowered a single process with carte blanche to access a vast array of resources... *and* failed to properly secure them. the mozilla foundation is now spending its sponsor's money on re-discovering why this is a non-starter, by permitting javascript direct access to hardware GPIO.
there is a better way - i have actually told the mozilla developers this but they are in some sort of hell-bound zombie sleep-walk mode - which is to go back to basics, remove *all* "special" APIs, then write JSON or other local services running on 127.0.0.1 loopback that carry out the "special" work that has absolutely nothing to do with GUI rendering.
this design strategy has the key advantage that high-priority code may be written in an *APPROPRIATE* programming language, but it does have the disadvantage that you can't really write eye-catching press releases....
i've said it once and i'll say it again: what the FUCK is wrong with people who think it's okay to put a country's critical infrastructure on the public internet AT ALL? there should be absolutely no way that power, water, gas, electricity or any kind of public utility should be even VAGUELY "internet connected". to anyone considering responding "but they might want to quotes manage quotes the infrastructure" then they should fucking well have a private closed-loop network or pay key emergency staff to live right next door to the infrastructure. there's a whole boat-load of long-range communications options that don't involve the public internet, which we *know* is wide-open to attack. any country that doesn't have laws in place which make it illegal for critical infrastructure to be on the public internet is quite literally asking for trouble. you don't leave the door to your house unlocked and then complain "but someone stole all my stuff!" - this is exactly the same thing.
how many "Mouse, Michael" entries are we going to see in the database, but more importantly, how many "Dave Gorman" [1] entries?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
hahaaaa! the only reason i would want washing machines to be WIFI-enabled would be to hack them in order to see this sort of thing happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - the only problem being of course that if [by-default] insecure IoT enabled washing machines really DID end up like this, it would be totally and utterly unsafe. kids or animals in the same room as tens of thousands of washing machines all spinning at 5,000 RPM under remote-DDOS-mass-hacked-computer-control... generally bad and unfavourable en-masse outcome. still, sadly, i can genuinely foresee something like this actually happening. with resultant lawsuits, company directors being imprisoned for mass-murder, and, finally, then and ONLY then would laws be put in place which make it a criminal offense to not properly secure IoT devices. the sad thing is that we as tech-savvy people damn well know RIGHT NOW that such laws are critical and necessary, but that law-makers are flat-out ignorant of the dangers.
in essence what you are suggesting is that the politicians cannot be trusted to make decisions on your behalf during their term of office. your "vote" is in effect a declaration of abdication of responsibility to their "better judgement" and "expertise". if, from your experience of how that's worked out, this sounds ridiculous or hollow to you, then you know, finally and at last, why democracy is one of the weakest forms of government.
as such, i think the idea of allowing continuous voting is both fascinating and marginally scary. we already have a situation where democracy brings us the politicians we *deserve* - they are a reflection of our "lowest common denominator" understanding of what is best for a country (or state). easily swayed and manipulated by deliberate media misunderstandings or by mass hysteria (instead of by corporate vested interests and/or corruption), i honestly cannot predict which would be worse.
my feeling is that the best form of government is one in which the head of state has absolutely no power whatsoever but to make "proclamations" - like a king / queen / diplomat. experts would come to them to give advice, and the head of state would "proclaim" their decision / advice - nothing more. mayors and so on i would suggest remain in place, because local people need local help, solutions and community self-support.
if this sounds strange, look historically at the damage and ineffectiveness of national government decisions in any western country you care to choose. power attracts strange people as well as corruption. best to remove the temptation, eh?
So install Mandarin Linux like redflag for these users? Hardware will still work. You don't expect your 2011 era Android 2.2 gingerbread or iPhone 3 to still run your latest apps do you?
precisely. so they must be discarded, despite being perfectly well functional for the task that their user *would* like to continue to use them for... if it wasn't for the fact that they're no longer secure. the modular approach - where the "main computer" can be upgraded - is an idea that solves this otherwise impossible situation whilst minimising electronic waste and allowing people to save money at the same time.
Since when has Slashdot become a Luddite websites for those that fear change?
XP is 15 years old! Things move on. We are tired of turning down 2008 era html 5 and leaving our phones with a better browser experience because of XP IE 6/8 compatibility from a different era. If the hardware is from 2008 or earlier you can install Linux for free?
Do you not change your oil and timing belts either
you're applying a first-world technically-literate engineering mind-set to a developing-world, mostly-technically-illiterate set of people [albeit desperate and highly creative as a result, it has to be said]. these are people that have been abandoned by profit-maximising corporations that prey and depend on you and people like you to feed the cycle of environmentally-irresponsible manufacturing.
there's not enough profit to justify selling product to them, so they're left with our discarded electronics, shipped in huge containers and either coaxed into life [or melted down in open-air no-safety acid baths].
you've also assumed that the older hardware - which is quite likely to have only 128mb or 256mb of RAM - is *capable* of running a modern version even of the GNU/Linux OS. did you check the resident-RAM and virtual memory of firefox recently? i just ran "top" right now, and firefox says it's consuming 2.4 GIGABYTES of resident memory and SIXTEEN gigabytes of virtual memory.
if you genuinely believe that a machine from 2008 is capable of reasonable resource consumption and reasonable response time running the latest version of firefox - even under a GNU/Linux OS - you are genuinely deluding yourself and are doing absolutely noone any favours.
please think a little bit outside of the box of your own environment, and act responsibly.
"Both companies have argued that there are millions of people in developing countries that still use browsers and operating systems that do not support SHA-2, the replacement function for SHA-1, and will therefore be cut off from encrypted websites that move to SHA-2 certificates."
that's ok - because they can just throw away perfectly good hardware because the software's out-of-date, discarding the older stuff in the hope that it doesn't end up in landfill but ends up in the developing world just like we do. wait... we're *already* talking about the developing world. so that means there's no fall-back - no incentive for the endless cycle of high-profit-with-bugs-and-security-vulnerabilities-so-you-buy-a-new-one, because there's not enough profit made from the sale of newer hardware in the developing market to justify pursuing it.
i _would_ recommend, at this point, that modular phones would be a good idea... except that if you now look at phonebloks you'll see that there's currently *six* separate and distinct, totally incompatible and entirely *not* open (i.e. not royalty-free, not patent-licensing-free etc.) hardware or open standard modular interoperable mobile phones.
plus, phones are not the only products that are insecure here: what about desktops, laptops and so on? it's not just the proprietary phones and proprietary tablets that will be *unable* to be upgraded because in order to effect an upgrade, it's likely that the entire OS will need to be replaced, it's *all* the computing devices that are hit by this problem.
as techies here on slashdot we understand that software keeps getting more and more complex, and that to recompile just one component (a security library) whilst keeping all the other, older components exactly the same is an extremely time-consuming software engineering task that NO PROPRIETARY HARDWARE VENDOR is going to commit to. in many cases they literally can't, especially the chinese OEMs, because the "O" for "originality" is a total sham in china: they receive binary-only (GPL-violating) distributions from an extremely secretive SoC manufacturer's close handful of partners, along with a Hardware Reference Design... and that's the end of the matter. they don't *HAVE* the source code. they *CAN'T* make the software upgrades even if they had customers willing to pay for the software engineers to do it.
so the only remaining choice, if the software cannot be upgraded, is to upgrade the hardware. and there literally isn't anyone except myself working on modular upgradeable computing appliances like laptops, desktops and so on. i've been looking for years, and i've even approached large companies: they've *actively* stated that they're not interested - the only reason i can think of is that they perceive there isn't enough guaranteed profit in modular computing because a competitor could come along and wipe them out with a faster or better compatible upgrade than they could produce in time. especially a chinese clone manufacturer.
so we're caught between a rock and a hard place, here. the current manufacturing-consumer cycle is highly-optimised for us in the 1st world, and we're effectively sleep-walking as to the consequences for ourselves and the rest of the world (which is just as the manufacturers want it) i outline this in more detail in a white paper i've written (below) - if in reading this you fully understand both the consequences and the nature of the problem and would like to do something about it, do contact me: i have some sponsors already and am open to more.
http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...
" BT data centres are also directly linked to NTAC for the supply of subscriber information, telephone call records, and domestic internet interception."
i wondered why BT's internet service slowed down massively during peak hours (especially when children got home from school). now we know why. the system which farmed off the monitoring so that we could be spied on wasn't fast enough. hey fuckers: if you're going to spy on us, do it in a way that doesn't affect the profitability of the companies you're shafting, ok? remember what's happening with cisco right now?
http://www.critters.org/turkey... - worth reading just for its hilarity (various versions abound, google the subject of this post) this is an invaluable read for any wannabe-writer not just in sci-fi, but the terms that are defined are a special warning-shot across the bows of anyone wishing to make the jump into the especially-discerning genre of science fiction.
many wanna-be science fiction writers forget that sci-fi readers are usually extremely well-read (i.e. extremely familiar with the genre), as well as being technically knowledgeable. they are thus extremely unlikely to be fooled by basic mistakes in the laws of physics without a thoroughly well-researched and well-explained plausible background and back-story.
peter f hamilton excels at this kind of job, but it's *literally* taken him 10 years to establish one of the story-lines which permitted him to do just that (the "Void" series). even there, limitations of human knowledge on "what is known and what is not" make an interesting (sometimes nail-biting) story.
iain banks likewise, with the "Culture" series, slowly developed plausibility for the use of "hyperspace", with several passages dedicated to explanations at appropriate times, interspersed throughout the series. the concept "Infinite Fun" was introduced in the book "Excession", having many pages dedicated to explaining that "Minds" - the machine consciousnesses that utilised hyperspace to store their consciousness - were so powerful and so fast that they could develop (and thus live within) entire virtual-reality worlds that were so compelling that they would *literally* lose themselves within them.
also in the same book, one of the "Minds" devotes 25 years to being a recluse, as an excuse to prepare itself for being able to convert its *entire* cargo hold [tens of kilometres long] into an emergency engine within days, *just* in case it was ever needed. turns out that such an excuse was in fact needed, and the story, spread out quietly over a few pages, of how that ship managed to break loose of its "minders" by accelerating to a sustained hyperspace speed over 235 times the speed of light [prior records being something like 20, resulting in severe engine degradation within a few hours], had me in absolute hysterics the first time i read it.
these kinds of renditions require skill, knowledge and dedication that very few authors in the non-sci-fi-world are prepared to develop. about the only exception i've encountered is a book by Tony Gonzalez, who wrote in the MMORG "Eve Online" world - a book called the "Empyrean Age". this book, thanks to the significant backdrop of information, allowed Tony to successfully "jump in" head-first as a totally unknown and entirely new author into the world of sci-fi writing. hilariously, he opens with "The White Room Syndrome" - literally! which was very funny for me as someone who has read over 800 sci-fi and fantasy books as well as the Turkey City Lexicon, reading the first few pages in the bookshop and going "OhNooooe, White Room Syndrome!!!" - luckily i skim-read a bit more and found the writing style compelling, and was glad that i bought the book, despite it being full of some soppy film-esque cliche "poignant scenes" at various points. overall, the book worked.
which reminds me, that it's worth mentioning that comics tend to make good films, because of the significant back-drop of technical knowledge and character development that the script-writers simply cannot ignore. both marvel comics films and the (darker) D.C. comics stories, when converted to films (or TV series) tend to be consistent and successful (DC comics less so than Marvel ones), as the script-writers and the directors have people (such as Stan Lee) whom they can call on to fill in any gaps and not end up with absolute howlers that jar the audience out of the story, in just the same way that Tony Gonzales (for the most part) managed to keep me enthralled in the story he told, thanks to it operati
i've mentioned this before, whenever the phrase "artificial" intelligence comes up. the problem is not with quotes AI quotes, it's with *us humans*. just look at the two words "artificial" combined with the word "intelligence". it is SHEER ARROGANCE on our part to declare that intelligence - such an amazing concept - can be *artificial*. as in "not really real". as in "beneath us". as in "objective and thus subject to our manipulation and enslavement". so until we - humans - stop thinking of intelligence as being "beneath us" and "not real", i don't really see how we can ever actually properly recreate it.
to make the point clearer: all these "tests", it doesn't really matter, because the people doing the assessment have a perspective that doesn't really respect intelligence... so how on earth can they judge that they've actually *detected* intelligence? like the "million monkeys typing shakespeare", the problem is that even if one of the monkeys did actually accidentally type up the complete works of shakespeare, unless there was someone there who was INTELLIGENT ENOUGH to recognise what had happened, the monkey that typed shakespeare's complete works is quite likely to go "oo oo aaah aah", rip up the pages, eat some of them and wipe its backside with the rest, destroying any chance of the successful outcome being *noticed*, even though it actually occurred.
i much prefer the term "machine consciousness". that's where things get properly interesting. the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is SELF-AWARENESS, and it's the key difference between what people are developing NOW and what we see in sci-fi books and films. programs being developed today are trying to simulate INTELLIGENCE. sci-fi books and films feature CONSCIOUS (self-aware) machines.
this lack of discernment in the [programming] scientific community between these two concepts, combined with the inherent arrogance implied by the word "Artificial" in the meme "AI" is why there is so little success in actually achieving any breakthroughs.
but it's actually a lot worse than that. let's say that the scientific community makes a cognitive breakthrough, and starts pursuing the goal of developing "machine consciousness". let's take the previous (million-monkeys) example and step that up, as illustrated with this question:
How can people who are not sufficiently self-aware - conscious of themselves - be expected to (a) DEFINE such that they can (b) RECOGNISE consciousness, such that (c) they can DEVELOP it in the first place?
let's take George Bush (junior) as an example. George Bush is known to have completely destroyed his mind with drink and drugs. he has an I.Q. of around 85 (unlike his father, who had an extra "1" in front of that number). yet he was voted into the world's most powerful office, as President of the United States. the concept of the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is explored in Charles Stross's book, "Singularity Sky". George Bush - despite being elected as President - would actually FAIL the consciousness test adopted by the alien race in "Singularity Sky"!
my point is, therefore, that until we start using the right terms, start developing some humility sufficient to recognise that we could create something GREATER than ourselves, start developing some laws *in advance* to protect machine conscious beings from being tortured, the human race stands very little chance of success in this field.
in short: we need to become conscious *ourselves* before we stand a chance of being able to move forward.
i have a nokia 3310, i don't mind what goes into unicode, because every SMS where people send me unicode smileys ends up as little rectangles.
i look forward to the next slashdot article, "newspaper involved in class-action lawsuit for harm done to reputations of thousands of forum users"...
If the community get's behind systemd, it works and is/becomes usable and apps start relying on it being there - so what?
by taking over and forcing out all other options, it becomes a monoculture. and that, as we know from decades of experience where monoculture OSes have created cartels and monopolies, is incredibly dangerous.
i dedicated three years of my life - without proper financial recognition - to breaking the NT Domains monopoly, saving companies world-wide billions of dollars in the process. it is also not very well-known that i dedicated another year reverse-engineering the Exchange 5.5 protocol.
this dedication gave people a choice: they could choose to remain on monoculture monopolistic insecure proprietary and expensive per-seat-licensed servers, or they could choose to move over to software libre on any number of POSIX-compliant OSes including HPUX, AIX, Solaris, BSDs and GNU/Linux OSes - the *exact* opposite of a monopolistic monoculture. they could also choose to move to any number of proprietary solutions from companies such as Tarantella, Honeywell, Network Appliances and many more - all companies who got together because i pioneered the reverse-engineering (and wasn't murdered for doing so) which forced Microsoft to start doing proper documentation, and to sponsor CIFS conferences.
now i am witnessing a process by which everyone in the GNU/Linux community, by working in a totally dedicated way in "their corner" that has to be respected precisely *because* it is so dedicated, yet as a whole *all* of us have gone "hmmm, i'm working in my corner, the global problem isn't my problem: i'm making local decisions, here, which make my life easy and i'm doing what i think is best", totally forgetting that the overall consequences are like a shoal of fish: EVERYBODY has "flipped" - all at once - and the direction is a dangerous one that no one person has any responsibility or control over, because we are *not* a company, we do *not* have a "Board of Directors who can give us orders that we are required to follow or be fired", we are a bazaar - a self-organised group of self-organised individuals with independent free will and highly-focussed responsibilities.
the "flip" is to a dangerous monoculture position with, as we are now witnessing, absolutely zero choice (bad choices are no choice at all) - which i've warned about well over a year ago, and was told, basically, to "fuck off". well... now we begin to see the consequences.
i am running fvwm2 - i have been for 20 years - and i am using angband.pl's recompiled versions of critical dependencies (udevd and others) all of which have "--no-systemd" in the configure.ac files. so i will not be concerned about trojans that attack vulnerabilities in systemd, exploiting the new features such as allowing the firewall to be disabled and much, much more. but you - all you who trust the systemd authors and the desktop environments that now operate exclusively on systemd? you should be concerned.
... y'know... it has to be said, this is precisely why thinkpenguin (and other FSF-Endorsed hardware) do wipe-it-down-to-the-bedrock products, even to the extent of replacing the standard BIOS with coreboot, and why the purism librem laptop exists (and was successfully funded last year). but even there, the problem is that for the past 15 years all intel processors have to have an RSA-signed bootloader that goes into EEPROM on-board the processor, where there's absolutely no chance of obtaining the source code for that proprietary firmware blob. you have absolutely no idea what goes into that bootloader, but it's already been demonstrated that your laptop - and your desktop - can be woken up by external network signals - without your consent or knowledge - *even when you powered them down*.
the only possible solution here is... to not use intel (or AMD) processors. and that opens up a whole can of worms, which is why i've been sponsored to make an upgradeable laptop. if any one CPU is ever found to have problems, the whole CPU Card can be popped out and replaced... *without* having to throw away the entire laptop.
designing a laptop from the ground up so that its main CPU module can be replaced... only two years ago that could have been said to be "total paranoia". now we have the kinds of stunts being pulled by Dell, Lenovo and the NSA which were only previously believed to *potentially* be carried out...
wow, man. terrorists love the chaos and publicity that they receive. they love the reactions, the outrage, the responses that they get, because they don't need to do anything other than kill a few people, and the rest of the damage people - and governments - do *to themselves*. trying to "crack down" on anonymous payments all in the name of "terrorism"... it's amazing. i look forward to a time when people - and governments - understand that terrorising *ourselves* with the knee-jerk after-reactions often does far more lasting damage than the actual atrocities carried out by the killers.
man that is one F'ed up site that i can not get past the ADVERTISING 3 second countdown
that is royally F'ED UP
you get an advertising countdown? all i get is a redirect to a URL with the word "welcome"... that's then completely blank. this isn't the first time it's happened, either. y'know what? i'm going to resurrect a tag that i haven't seen used in a looong time - i'm going to mark this artlcle as "slashdotted". yes, in 2015, that's an indictment of a site as big as forbes. in 1997 it used to be fine (and funny) that the 15 minutes of fame from a slashdot focus would overwhelm a web site link.
yeah i got something similar, i researched the chipset a bit in advance, to see what frequencies it could do. i found one that could go from i think it was... like... 100 mhz through to almost 1900mhz, with a bandwidth of something like... 2.8m-samples/sec. it only had an 8-bit ADC resolution but that was ok. i then used it with some software i was working with, at the time (passive GSM scanning software), and actually managed to find a couple of frequencies, which was amazing.
going beyond that would have been tricky, because at the limit of 2.8 million samples per second of I and Q data @ 8 bit, it was pushing the limit of what the hardware could actually do: there were quite a few drop-outs. i'm sure the proprietary driver could handle that data rate, but the reverse-engineered gnu/linux one simply couldn't.
anyway yes absolutely! $12 plus shipping for something that will handle a huge range of frequencies, FM radio, TV frequencies, GPS satellites, GSM 850 and 900mhz, and even some of the higher-end GSM frequencies @ 1800mhz... maan, what more could you ask for? :)
Red herring. Efast didn't arrive to people's computers via official channels. Linux is just as vulnerable to malware when stuff is being installed via unofficial channels.
... which means that you didn't read the full contents of what i wrote before posting. in paragraph (5) i made this exact point. so you not only didn't read what i wrote, but you then detracted from the *actual* point being made, by criticising what was written without proper thought and consideration on your part.
you then go on to conclude that i must be on a "high horse", but at the point at which you clearly didn't read each and every paragraph, i lost interest in reading further because you clearly demonstrated that it was more important to you promote *yourself* (by way of denigrating others) than to actually provide a service to readers of the article.
please be more careful next time, eh?