I wonder whether that judge thinks it's ok for Voice of America to be sued in China or Iraq or wherever else the local laws don't approve of it, since people are listening to it there. The whole point of VOA is to get information to people that their governments don't want them to have. Well, Kazaa is now trying to get software to us that our government doesn't want us to have. It's ironic to see what happens when the shoe is on the other foot.
I haven't bought any Microsoft shrink-wrapped products but have bought several new computers with Windows preinstalled. I never tried returning the stuff, Windows Refund Day notwithstanding. Can I get some vouchers?
A trusted application, like Windows Media Player, after passing all other trust checks, even on Bochs, could then ask this motherboard chip to sign something. The public key would be known to everyone, so the signature could be verified that it came from this tamperproof chip. In fact, every chip could have a different private key, which itself is signed by a secret master key whose private part is NOT on the chip, but whose public part is well known. Now Bochs can't emulate that.
But what stops someone from modifying the code to bypass the signature check, just like just about every other copy protection scheme gets cracked and bypassed?
The 80GB drives mentioned are almost certainly 2.5" drives. In fact very little is said about 1.8" drives. The highest capacity 1.8" drives currently available are the 20GB Toshiba drives embedded in devices like the iPod. 80GB 2.5" drives are just beginning to appear now. 80GB drives in the 1.8" form factor are quite a ways off.
They're called PCMCIA drives and the older ones needed a type III slot. Toshiba makes a 5 GB one that fits in a type II slot now, and they make 1.8" embedded drives up to 20 GB that could fit in a type III slot except that their whole production is going to devices like iPod's. I hope they'll do a PCMCIA version soon.
This PCWorld thing is about a drive in some weird bigger enclosure which seems pointless. They should just make higher capacity PCMCIA drives.
I don't see how a system with such crappy security could have been in compliance with HIPAA. Anyone understand that stuff well enough to say? It sounds like that company may be facing some penalties.
Raëlians are followers of Raël, a French-born former race-car driver who has said he met a four-foot space alien atop a volcano in southern France in 1973 and went aboard his ship, where he was entertained by voluptuous female robots and learned that the first humans were created 25,000 years ago by space travelers called Elohim, who cloned themselves.
That's a lot more believable and less violent than the Xenu and the volcanoes story. There aren't even any body thetans stuck to us. So hey, where do we sign up?
They ran out of money like so many other dotcoms. There's some chance of a revival but I'm not holding my breath. I'll forward the url of this thread to Eric Blossom and maybe he'll post something. Meanwhile, here's a comparable product. And there's always Nautilus and
PGPfone (disclosure: I'm a co-author of Nautilus).
Re:Is a signal strength war already escalating?
on
802.11 RF Amp
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· Score: 2
There's another issue too, which is boosting your AP transmitter doesn't boost your laptop's transmitter. Just because you'll hear your AP better doesn't mean it will hear you.
You're getting worse performance with your Powerbook than most people I know: in a residential building (drywall, etc.) you should be able to use it everywhere in the unit. If you're using an 802.11 PC card (not built in wifi), an external antenna might help.
Is a signal strength war already escalating?
on
802.11 RF Amp
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A few people are always trying maximize the range of their WLAN's, reach through more walls, etc. But are there enough to support a "mass market" product like this? Or does it mean people are looking for more powerful AP transmitters because they're trying to overcome interference from other WLAN's in the same office building? And will those other WLAN users jack up their own transmitters in response? I wonder if we're seeing the beginning of an RF power output war, sort of like we already have between cell phone carriers with towers along highway 101 (in Calif.) and similar freeways. This is NOT good. We get cooked by enough microwave emissions in our offices already.
I'd be a lot happier if the FCC got rid of some of those UHF TV channel frequency monopolies and gave the spectrum back to the public that rightfully owns it, to try to lower contention over the narrow strip of bandwidth that 802.11 uses. There's also much more use of wireless these days by non-mobile devices than there really needs to be, when those devices could perfectly well use wired ethernet, or maybe a much lower-powered shorter-range wireless scheme (like a higher-bandwidth Bluetooth) to an access point that's nearby (i.e. in the same room or close to it, not far away in the building). However, that last part is harder. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
So what happened to plex86?
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Bochs 2.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
www.plex86.org sends a 404. And plex86's
Savannah project page doesn't show much sign of activity.
Is it moribund? Dead? How did it compare with vmware at its last sign of life?
You can create your own CA and generate your own certificates. You just have to configure your client software to recognize your CA. The only thing commercial certificates get you is that many programs (like browsers) are preconfigured to recognize commercial CA's. But for an internal network, making your own CA (or using a remotely administered private CA like Verisign OnSite) is precisely the right thing to do.
Though it probably predates stunnel. stunnel is an SSL port forwarding program that does all the stuff that you mention ssh can do.
SSH uses passwords to let the server know that the client is legit. It doesn't do much to let the client know that the server is legit. And it doesn't stop active (man-in-the-middle) attacks unless you actually check the md5 hashes, which nobody does. SSL is far better about all these things.
I've never understood that. Even if every one of those protocol bugs is fixed, it's still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks because who the heck bothers to look at those server md5 checksums when connecting a new client?
There was already a perfectly good socket encryption protocol before SSH came along, namely SSL, which has had a reasonably functional PKI (though not as great as the vendors pretend) for years, and it's perfectly reasonable to run telnet through it. SSL-secured telnet is called "telnets", similar to https, smtps, and so forth.
Https is built into just about every web browser these days. But almost nobody uses telnets.
SSH just seems to me like a case of the bad driving out the good. There was never any need for it. We should have just used telnets instead.
Lineo provide a valuable service to Sharp. Do you think sharp could have said "hey open-source community, I need a linux kernel and drivers for this new device I'm doing..., and have it ready in 6 months"?
Yes. There are plenty of Linux developers would jump at that job.
Would you drop everything you're doing and do it for them?
Yes. I'd probably charge them less than Lineo charged, too.
OpenZaurus is nice but unless sharp puts a decent development team to help make sure it sticks around, how are they going to guarantee that it will?
There's no guarantee that Lineo will stick around either, and in fact it looked likely for a while that it would go down the tubes. The Motorola acquisition makes it more likely that they'll stick around (though there's still no guarantee); but it certainly wasn't a sure thing, which is what made it news.
Commercial accountability, delivery guarantees are needed, and that's where companies like Lineo, RedHat, Suse, etc. come in.
Yes, and in fact Redhat has been very good about releasing everything they do as free software (I can't say as much for Suse). So I'm not impressed with Lineo's refusal to do the same.
Why is it a crime for company to try to make a buck with open-source software, even if they obey all license agreements?
I haven't claimed that Lineo committed crimes. However, just because something isn't actually criminal doesn't make it praiseworthy.
Also, as far as I know, Lineo has never "made a buck" (i.e. turned a profit), which is what put it in such danger. Red Hat, on the other hand is making a profit, while taking a much better attitude than Lineo about releasing free source code. So again, Lineo doesn't impress me.
The new Sony unit does both the +R/RW and -R/RW formats, but I've heard (source: it's one of those "I read it on the internet, so it must be true" things) that the -R discs it writes have more compatibility problems than -R discs written by -R-only drives. I'd just pick a format (- or +) and stick to it. Besides, Sony is an arm of the evil MPAA--who knows what DRM the next firmware upgrade will have?
Anyway, I currently don't see any significant advantage of +R/+RW over -R/-RW, given the people actually write these discs. So I think if I get a DVD burner any time soon, it will be a Pioneer DVR-105. This burns -R discs at 4x speed (maximum DVD+R speed of any current drive is 2.4x), though the 4x blanks are currently considerably more expensive than 1x and 2x blanks. I figure that won't last and DVD blanks will be like CD-R soon enough.
Why does anyone think these semi-proprietary embedded Linuxes are such a good thing? I have a Zaurus with Lineo on it and as far as I can tell, there's no useful source code available. One of the big attractions of Linux, the ability to modify your system without having to sign NDA's or buy licenses, has been lost. I don't claim they're violating the letter of the GPL, but they're holding back important stuff.
The alternative, OpenZaurus, is free but basically had to be done from scratch, from what I've heard, including some hardware reverse-engineering. I haven't gotten around to installing it on my Zaurus and I gather it still has some shortcomings. I hope Sharp will switch to OpenZaurus, release any new source code, and I don't care if Lineo goes down the tubes.
Proprietary Linuxes are just Windows with a penguin mascot. Let them rot.
Free wifi is going to interfere with military radar, but I bet when some big-money corporate interest group wants those same frequencies, they will get them with no radar objections being raised. We don't hear about UHF television interfering with radar either, or 1.8 ghz cell phones, etc. This is just another scam on the goverment's part to interfere with private communications.
I have PacBell DSL (now SBC) and though the stories of their ever-increasing suckage are all true, they have one redeeming feature. Although my service is supposedly 128kbps up/384 down, in fact I consistently get 1.5 mbps download speed at any time of the day or night, even for multi-gigabyte downloads. Speakeasy seems to charge quite a bit extra for > 384k download speed; if you only pay for 384, what do you usually actually get? I wouldn't mind if it's 384k some of the time and faster at night, but I really like that high speed for large transfers.
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I wonder whether that judge thinks it's ok for Voice of America to be sued in China or Iraq or wherever else the local laws don't approve of it, since people are listening to it there. The whole point of VOA is to get information to people that their governments don't want them to have. Well, Kazaa is now trying to get software to us that our government doesn't want us to have. It's ironic to see what happens when the shoe is on the other foot.
I haven't bought any Microsoft shrink-wrapped products but have bought several new computers with Windows preinstalled. I never tried returning the stuff, Windows Refund Day notwithstanding. Can I get some vouchers?
No. It just means the bios would have to be digitally signed by a trusted party.
I think you mean this.
I think for Tivo-like devices you'll always want as much capacity as you can get, which for now still means 3.5" drives.
The 80GB drives mentioned are almost certainly 2.5" drives. In fact very little is said about 1.8" drives. The highest capacity 1.8" drives currently available are the 20GB Toshiba drives embedded in devices like the iPod. 80GB 2.5" drives are just beginning to appear now. 80GB drives in the 1.8" form factor are quite a ways off.
This PCWorld thing is about a drive in some weird bigger enclosure which seems pointless. They should just make higher capacity PCMCIA drives.
I don't see how a system with such crappy security could have been in compliance with HIPAA. Anyone understand that stuff well enough to say? It sounds like that company may be facing some penalties.
They ran out of money like so many other dotcoms. There's some chance of a revival but I'm not holding my breath. I'll forward the url of this thread to Eric Blossom and maybe he'll post something. Meanwhile, here's a comparable product. And there's always Nautilus and PGPfone (disclosure: I'm a co-author of Nautilus).
You're getting worse performance with your Powerbook than most people I know: in a residential building (drywall, etc.) you should be able to use it everywhere in the unit. If you're using an 802.11 PC card (not built in wifi), an external antenna might help.
I'd be a lot happier if the FCC got rid of some of those UHF TV channel frequency monopolies and gave the spectrum back to the public that rightfully owns it, to try to lower contention over the narrow strip of bandwidth that 802.11 uses. There's also much more use of wireless these days by non-mobile devices than there really needs to be, when those devices could perfectly well use wired ethernet, or maybe a much lower-powered shorter-range wireless scheme (like a higher-bandwidth Bluetooth) to an access point that's nearby (i.e. in the same room or close to it, not far away in the building). However, that last part is harder. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
www.plex86.org sends a 404. And plex86's Savannah project page doesn't show much sign of activity. Is it moribund? Dead? How did it compare with vmware at its last sign of life?
You can create your own CA and generate your own certificates. You just have to configure your client software to recognize your CA. The only thing commercial certificates get you is that many programs (like browsers) are preconfigured to recognize commercial CA's. But for an internal network, making your own CA (or using a remotely administered private CA like Verisign OnSite) is precisely the right thing to do.
SSH uses passwords to let the server know that the client is legit. It doesn't do much to let the client know that the server is legit. And it doesn't stop active (man-in-the-middle) attacks unless you actually check the md5 hashes, which nobody does. SSL is far better about all these things.
Those things would be easy to do by tunneling rexec through SSL or whatever. I just don't see what SSH brings that's new.
I thought GNOME was part of the GNU project. So isn't there already an FSF to handle the donation collecting end of things?
There was already a perfectly good socket encryption protocol before SSH came along, namely SSL, which has had a reasonably functional PKI (though not as great as the vendors pretend) for years, and it's perfectly reasonable to run telnet through it. SSL-secured telnet is called "telnets", similar to https, smtps, and so forth. Https is built into just about every web browser these days. But almost nobody uses telnets.
SSH just seems to me like a case of the bad driving out the good. There was never any need for it. We should have just used telnets instead.
Anyway, I currently don't see any significant advantage of +R/+RW over -R/-RW, given the people actually write these discs. So I think if I get a DVD burner any time soon, it will be a Pioneer DVR-105. This burns -R discs at 4x speed (maximum DVD+R speed of any current drive is 2.4x), though the 4x blanks are currently considerably more expensive than 1x and 2x blanks. I figure that won't last and DVD blanks will be like CD-R soon enough.
but the perpetrator is the person who signed up for you, not the newsletter operator. Correct remedy is make the request forger liable.
The alternative, OpenZaurus, is free but basically had to be done from scratch, from what I've heard, including some hardware reverse-engineering. I haven't gotten around to installing it on my Zaurus and I gather it still has some shortcomings. I hope Sharp will switch to OpenZaurus, release any new source code, and I don't care if Lineo goes down the tubes.
Proprietary Linuxes are just Windows with a penguin mascot. Let them rot.
Free wifi is going to interfere with military radar, but I bet when some big-money corporate interest group wants those same frequencies, they will get them with no radar objections being raised. We don't hear about UHF television interfering with radar either, or 1.8 ghz cell phones, etc. This is just another scam on the goverment's part to interfere with private communications.
I have PacBell DSL (now SBC) and though the stories of their ever-increasing suckage are all true, they have one redeeming feature. Although my service is supposedly 128kbps up/384 down, in fact I consistently get 1.5 mbps download speed at any time of the day or night, even for multi-gigabyte downloads. Speakeasy seems to charge quite a bit extra for > 384k download speed; if you only pay for 384, what do you usually actually get? I wouldn't mind if it's 384k some of the time and faster at night, but I really like that high speed for large transfers.