Microsoft has a long history, which continues to this day in the form of WGA, of writing software which sends undisclosed private information back to MS. That's what I meant by Spyware. When they're caught, they tend to lie about it, until they're caught again. They *may* be better about this than they used to be, but they've lied about this type of thing so many times that they can never, in my honest opinion, be trusted. Even the CEO lied in court, presenting falsified evidence.
And I didn't say that that getting better security and better visuals was bad. Just that it doesn't make them better than OS's which both have those already. SHILL.
The only thing that seemed useful in Longhorn was the database file system. BeOS gave us a preview of what that would could be like, and it was Good. But all they delivered was security closer to industry standards (well done), lots of consumer-hostile features like DRM/spyware, and, oh yeah, they're aping Mac-like eye candy. Thanks, got that on the mac, got that in Linux with Beryl. I guess you can't expect thousands of highly paid programmers to deliver a commercial product to compete with a few geeks who hack in their spare time because they love what they do.
I came up with a solution for them when Ballmer made his latest dismissive comment about Google, something along the lines of "They do search okay, and everything else they do is just kind of cute." It's true, Google is forever coming out with cute stuff, stuff that makes people say: "Oh shit, I'm gonna use that every day... thanks!" While MS comes out with stuff that makes people say "Oh thanks... I'm gonna use that every day? Shit!"
Seriously, when was the last time MS came out with something that really got you excited, something elegant and useful?
We're constantly learning that animals can accomplish feats we've been too arrogant to suspect them of: reasoning, memory, abstract concepts, tool use, eleven dimensional bee dances... and now, these dogs can determine, through scent alone, whether bits are pirated or legitimately owned.
I haven't gotten around to flashing my old Fon router with it yet, but a friend gave me a demo of his Linksys/Tomato setup... and it is very, very nice indeed. Almost any data you could think of wanting, any control you might want to exercise, presented in a clean, fast AJAX UI: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
Giving it away? You still owe daddy that money. I can't decide whether the adware/spyware user-hostile software is the crack or the clap in this equation, though. Regardless, it's better when it's consensual, safe, and free.
I have a friend doing Linux work at HP. They have a lot of Debian/Ubuntu people doing good work. They're profitable and the work they're doing fits with HP's pre-Carly reputation as an innovator. So you can see why Dell would be afraid of all that, but here's hoping HP as a whole can break out of the cycle into a healthier lifestyle.
Here are two suggestions for my local CompUSA. Make it easier for you customers to spend money with two innovations:
1) Organize software and DVDs in some fashion. I would suggest using a combination of genre and the alphabet (which is widely known outside of CompUSA), but really any system would be better than... none. For more information on the Alphabet, look under A in the... oh. Hmm. Well, ask around.
2) Some stores put price stickers on their wares. I find this to be quite helpful. You should look into it.
Maybe a single buggy application on their phones can take down their entire West Coast network, like the CEOs of Apple and Cingular claim of their combination. Hey, also, since Mr. Jobs claims that iPhone is OS X, and any third party applications will crash iPhone, is it true that any third party apps will crash OS X?
I mean, the only alternative is that they are lying, greedy scumbags, and I wouldn't want to think that about anybody.
I seem to have missed part of my geek education. Could somebody please explain to me why the whole shape-changing robot thing is useful? Like, in the middle of a battle the robot in question, what, ducks around a corner and folds into the shape of an eight ton cassette tape, and the bad guys come rushing around the corner and... what's this? He's gone! There's nothing here but this cassette tape the size of a semi truck! And it's snickering at us! Oh, well.
But I agree, we should definitely let our mighty, nigh-invulnerable robot slaves establish an unassailable beachhead on Mars. Also, we should give them human-like motivations, emotions, and needs, so that they may better serve us. And, some of them should look just like humans, so that they can use our equipment and so people will be more comfortable around them.
Actually I thought it was rather questionable, myself. But don't worry, almost all of the bidders were fronts for other companies. The foreign ownerships limits were largely ignored, as well. For example, NextWave was the top bidder in the "small business auction" at $4.5 billion. The FCC ended up waiving their foreign ownership requirements. Something about giving foreign companies ownership of our spectrum seems risky.
I was involved in handling the technical aspects of the bidding on the FCC PCS Wireless C Block Auction. This auction was supposed to enable a fourth cell phone carrier to buy spectrum across the US in every market. The auction was limited to small businesses, owned by a woman or minority. You know, fresh blood to compete with the huge incumbents to spur competition, lower prices, and encourage innovation. The I-Phone's random access voice mail? I put that in our business plan, in 1996. Anyway.
The second largest bidder in the C Block Auction was BDPCS. They bid $2.5 billion. They did their bidding from the offices of US West (now Qwest). They then immediately defaulted, because... they were not actually a real company. They'd never existed before the auction, had never sold a product or service.
They had bid on all the territories in which US West sold cell phone service.
The court cases in which they contested their default lasted for years. Years in which there was no fourth competitor in US West's markets.
The FCC was fine with this.
Oh, and the bidding process? For each round of bidding, you had to download the results via a proprietary Windows application, over modem, from a 900 number. The download speeds you would get from this number, no matter where you dialed from, amounted to approximately one tenth of the speed of the modem connection.
Yes, the FCC is a public government agency, the data belonged to the public, and the Internet did, in fact, exist back then. But I added it up, and whoever ran that deal must have made millions from that procedure. A cousin of an FCC commissioner, perchance?
What I'm getting at, is that if you expect the FCC to enable competition for Skype or anybody else, in the best interests of the public, well. The FCC now, ten years later, is *much* more corrupt than it was then. When Colin Powell's son Michael became head of the FCC and was instrumental in approving the AOL-Time Warner deal (Colin was on AOL's board of directors at the time; the deal made him about $4 million)... Powell was when it started to get really bad.
Now, the FCC operates purely in the interests of those who can afford their favor.
But wait a second... maybe they're right. If I'm paying the... *AA cartels whenever I buy media, then... fair enough. The just have to stop collecting money from sales of CDs and downloads. They can probably estimate how much to recompense the artists by tallying up data from torrents et al, right?
I'm going to take the rare step of admitting that I could be wrong on a lot of this. People who know more about these issues are invited to correct me.
This looks like a good thing, but I've noticed that there are several different similar efforts out there. There's Maemo for the Nokia tablets, OpenMoko for the Neo1973 (which is the closest I've seen to what I want in a phone), the Motorola Linux stuff, and this. I'm sure there will be some cross-pollination, but this seems like something that a consortium of phone makers or maybe Google could really push along quickly. How? Either by providing build servers which would build executables for the target environments, or providing emulators. Yeah, it's going to be hard to emulate the actual telecom functionality, but I think a majority of applications for these devices will not use those.
The reason I mentioned Google is that I believe they're doing something similar already, though a quick search didn't turn up what I remembered. IBM, Intel, or OSDN might be other good candidates.
Or are these different platforms using such different APIs for things like graphics toolkits that I'm smoking crack here?
SSH on 80 and 443 are handy for getting to your box from firewalled sites. Some governmentish sites actually allow telnet and ftp but not ssh. But nah, I was thinking of 19831. Nobody ever guesses that one. It's my little secret.
Absolutely, using ssh keys is a great option in many cases. But it carries its own risks, for example if steals your laptop or has root, or access to your account (don't forget to screenlock your machine whenever you step out of sight of it), on a machine which contains your keys.
Okay, let's look at just one service, SSH. Without security through obscurity, you can do things like keep OpenSSH patched, use very good passwords, disallow root logins, restrict logins to certain users (which is kinda security through obscurity, but...)
And on servers I run like that, I have yet to have a breakin, but I do get up to thousands of connection attempts from ssh worms, from the same servers, every day (well, they would if I stopped dropping them in iptables, but nevermind that). So it's possible that they could hit a user with a bad password, or one they got from another compromised machine.
On other boxes, like my home box, I put SSH on a high-numbered port. In a couple of years I've had zero attempts hit that port. It would be quite stupid to rely only on this trick, ignoring good discipline in other areas. But as a supplementary layer, it's quite useful. If nothing else, it saves bandwidth.
What the heck are you talking about? MSN was and is an ISP - an Internet Service Provider, not a separate network like Compuserve. Windows 95's codename was Chicago. Internet Explorer's codename? Ohare. Seems like someone must have believed in the concept.
Not sure wth code names have to do with anything, but IE, with ActiveX and its deliberate focus on incompatibility, is a great example of what I'm talking about.
As far as MSN being an ISP-- that's not how I remember it. Wikipedia's history matches my memory better: "MSN was originally conceived as an online service provider in the vein of America Online, supplying local and proprietary content through an interface that matched that of Windows 95's Windows Explorer. Following the rapid adaption of the Internet, partly fueled by the built-in IP protocol capabilities of Windows 95, the service was then rebranded in a new "MSN 2.0" incarnation, which combined access to the Internet with web delivered proprietary content."
I very distinctly remember Bill Gates saying that the Internet was a fad and that everybody should use MSN instead. I remember laughing at that. Sure, some people inside MS knew better. But just because Windows 95 had TCP/IP capabilities doesn't mean that they weren't trying to lock people into proprietary technologies.
Apple's no shining knight either. It's pretty clear that Jobs would be just as greedy/exclusive as Gates if he had the opportunity. But only the guy at the top can really get away with that, so for the time being I find the Apple products I use less intrusive than the MS products I've used. I'm just glad Linux/OSS is around to keep them both somewhat honest.
Given physical access, or even a logon, to a machine, it's pretty difficult to have reliable encryption. Let's take a simple case, the machine is off and somebody has yanked the hard drive. Okay, with something like TrueCrypt you can secure a partition fairly well. But you'd better be sure that all of your sensitive information is on those secure partitions. I think this is harder in Windows than anywhere else, but it's not trivial under *ix either. For example, under Linux, assuming no malicious programs were running when the OS was under your control, just things like, you're going to be worried about things in/tmp,/var,/home, etc, and your swap partition/file. So, really, the only sane thing to do is encrypt everything-- if you're that worried. But then you have a performance hit, it's less convenient, etc.
I think it makes more and more sense to use a VM, if you're concerned about security. You can restore it to a known safe initial state, and you can encrypt its entire world. It seems like a pretty big advantage... oh, and of course, you can move your secure environment to other host machines. Uh. Which may not be all that secure themselves, but hey. I told you this wasn't easy:)
Normally I'm all for bashing MS, but I have yet to see a great solution for this anywhere. So... if any of what I wrote above is new to you, I'd advise that you not trust your Doomsday Device plans (or, more likely, goat porn) to any OS's convenient built-in crypto.
Remember that for years Microsoft, AOL, Compuserve, and almost all the mainstream media fought the Internet in varying ways. MS, for example, said that it was a bad idea destined to fail and that everybody should use MSN. They tried not to support it, and tried instead to corrupt and kill it. In some ways they've never stopped, but losing that battle has been fantastic for their bottom line. The pundits at Time and in the PC magazines said the Internet couldn't possibly scale for more than another year or so.
They were wrong, and their parent publications were generally too stupid (or embarrassed) to archive their words on the Internet, so I don't have links for you...
And as for AOL/Compuserve... well, they hardly matter now.
My point is, the companies that try to exert greater control by giving their customers less control, the companies who spend as much effort making their products worse as making them better, do not always win. In fact, they quite often lose. It is largely up to us.
Now, cable companies and telcos tend to be an exception, because they basically have government-backed monopolies and there are so few that they can collude with each other. Even they are vulnerable in the long run, just not to market forces.
Slashdot Mirror
And I didn't say that that getting better security and better visuals was bad. Just that it doesn't make them better than OS's which both have those already. SHILL.
The only thing that seemed useful in Longhorn was the database file system. BeOS gave us a preview of what that would could be like, and it was Good. But all they delivered was security closer to industry standards (well done), lots of consumer-hostile features like DRM/spyware, and, oh yeah, they're aping Mac-like eye candy. Thanks, got that on the mac, got that in Linux with Beryl. I guess you can't expect thousands of highly paid programmers to deliver a commercial product to compete with a few geeks who hack in their spare time because they love what they do.
Seriously, when was the last time MS came out with something that really got you excited, something elegant and useful?
Incredible.
I haven't gotten around to flashing my old Fon router with it yet, but a friend gave me a demo of his Linksys/Tomato setup... and it is very, very nice indeed. Almost any data you could think of wanting, any control you might want to exercise, presented in a clean, fast AJAX UI: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
I have a friend doing Linux work at HP. They have a lot of Debian/Ubuntu people doing good work. They're profitable and the work they're doing fits with HP's pre-Carly reputation as an innovator. So you can see why Dell would be afraid of all that, but here's hoping HP as a whole can break out of the cycle into a healthier lifestyle.
1) Organize software and DVDs in some fashion. I would suggest using a combination of genre and the alphabet (which is widely known outside of CompUSA), but really any system would be better than... none. For more information on the Alphabet, look under A in the... oh. Hmm. Well, ask around.
2) Some stores put price stickers on their wares. I find this to be quite helpful. You should look into it.
I mean, the only alternative is that they are lying, greedy scumbags, and I wouldn't want to think that about anybody.
But I agree, we should definitely let our mighty, nigh-invulnerable robot slaves establish an unassailable beachhead on Mars. Also, we should give them human-like motivations, emotions, and needs, so that they may better serve us. And, some of them should look just like humans, so that they can use our equipment and so people will be more comfortable around them.
Actually I thought it was rather questionable, myself. But don't worry, almost all of the bidders were fronts for other companies. The foreign ownerships limits were largely ignored, as well. For example, NextWave was the top bidder in the "small business auction" at $4.5 billion. The FCC ended up waiving their foreign ownership requirements. Something about giving foreign companies ownership of our spectrum seems risky.
The second largest bidder in the C Block Auction was BDPCS. They bid $2.5 billion. They did their bidding from the offices of US West (now Qwest). They then immediately defaulted, because... they were not actually a real company. They'd never existed before the auction, had never sold a product or service.
They had bid on all the territories in which US West sold cell phone service.
The court cases in which they contested their default lasted for years. Years in which there was no fourth competitor in US West's markets.
The FCC was fine with this.
Oh, and the bidding process? For each round of bidding, you had to download the results via a proprietary Windows application, over modem, from a 900 number. The download speeds you would get from this number, no matter where you dialed from, amounted to approximately one tenth of the speed of the modem connection.
Yes, the FCC is a public government agency, the data belonged to the public, and the Internet did, in fact, exist back then. But I added it up, and whoever ran that deal must have made millions from that procedure. A cousin of an FCC commissioner, perchance?
What I'm getting at, is that if you expect the FCC to enable competition for Skype or anybody else, in the best interests of the public, well. The FCC now, ten years later, is *much* more corrupt than it was then. When Colin Powell's son Michael became head of the FCC and was instrumental in approving the AOL-Time Warner deal (Colin was on AOL's board of directors at the time; the deal made him about $4 million)... Powell was when it started to get really bad.
Now, the FCC operates purely in the interests of those who can afford their favor.
We were joking around, and I mentioned starting a Linux on Plumbing project. I should have known somebody at MIT would actually be working on it...
Man, I want a bender phone. One you can bend to any angle: 30 degrees, 32 degrees, you name it. 31...
But wait a second... maybe they're right. If I'm paying the... *AA cartels whenever I buy media, then... fair enough. The just have to stop collecting money from sales of CDs and downloads. They can probably estimate how much to recompense the artists by tallying up data from torrents et al, right?
Microsoft: We're the Douchiest!
This looks like a good thing, but I've noticed that there are several different similar efforts out there. There's Maemo for the Nokia tablets, OpenMoko for the Neo1973 (which is the closest I've seen to what I want in a phone), the Motorola Linux stuff, and this. I'm sure there will be some cross-pollination, but this seems like something that a consortium of phone makers or maybe Google could really push along quickly. How? Either by providing build servers which would build executables for the target environments, or providing emulators. Yeah, it's going to be hard to emulate the actual telecom functionality, but I think a majority of applications for these devices will not use those.
The reason I mentioned Google is that I believe they're doing something similar already, though a quick search didn't turn up what I remembered. IBM, Intel, or OSDN might be other good candidates.
Or are these different platforms using such different APIs for things like graphics toolkits that I'm smoking crack here?
I just don't like the sound of that... sounds kind of tentacly.
They're characters in Pratchett books. Okay, they claim that Ogg was from Netrek.
Security can really be a PITA sometimes.
And on servers I run like that, I have yet to have a breakin, but I do get up to thousands of connection attempts from ssh worms, from the same servers, every day (well, they would if I stopped dropping them in iptables, but nevermind that). So it's possible that they could hit a user with a bad password, or one they got from another compromised machine.
On other boxes, like my home box, I put SSH on a high-numbered port. In a couple of years I've had zero attempts hit that port. It would be quite stupid to rely only on this trick, ignoring good discipline in other areas. But as a supplementary layer, it's quite useful. If nothing else, it saves bandwidth.
It's not sufficient, but it's not inherently bad.
Not sure wth code names have to do with anything, but IE, with ActiveX and its deliberate focus on incompatibility, is a great example of what I'm talking about.
As far as MSN being an ISP-- that's not how I remember it. Wikipedia's history matches my memory better: "MSN was originally conceived as an online service provider in the vein of America Online, supplying local and proprietary content through an interface that matched that of Windows 95's Windows Explorer. Following the rapid adaption of the Internet, partly fueled by the built-in IP protocol capabilities of Windows 95, the service was then rebranded in a new "MSN 2.0" incarnation, which combined access to the Internet with web delivered proprietary content."
I very distinctly remember Bill Gates saying that the Internet was a fad and that everybody should use MSN instead. I remember laughing at that. Sure, some people inside MS knew better. But just because Windows 95 had TCP/IP capabilities doesn't mean that they weren't trying to lock people into proprietary technologies.
Apple's no shining knight either. It's pretty clear that Jobs would be just as greedy/exclusive as Gates if he had the opportunity. But only the guy at the top can really get away with that, so for the time being I find the Apple products I use less intrusive than the MS products I've used. I'm just glad Linux/OSS is around to keep them both somewhat honest.
I think it makes more and more sense to use a VM, if you're concerned about security. You can restore it to a known safe initial state, and you can encrypt its entire world. It seems like a pretty big advantage... oh, and of course, you can move your secure environment to other host machines. Uh. Which may not be all that secure themselves, but hey. I told you this wasn't easy :)
Normally I'm all for bashing MS, but I have yet to see a great solution for this anywhere. So... if any of what I wrote above is new to you, I'd advise that you not trust your Doomsday Device plans (or, more likely, goat porn) to any OS's convenient built-in crypto.
They were wrong, and their parent publications were generally too stupid (or embarrassed) to archive their words on the Internet, so I don't have links for you...
And as for AOL/Compuserve... well, they hardly matter now.
My point is, the companies that try to exert greater control by giving their customers less control, the companies who spend as much effort making their products worse as making them better, do not always win. In fact, they quite often lose. It is largely up to us.
Now, cable companies and telcos tend to be an exception, because they basically have government-backed monopolies and there are so few that they can collude with each other. Even they are vulnerable in the long run, just not to market forces.