They're spending a lot of money implementing a new technology to accomplish something that old technology would have done cheaper and better, and they're enforcing uptake of the new, inferior technology by legislative means, at the same time obstructing the uptake of the better alternatives.
No. But in pretty much any decently engineered crypto setup, if you can do signing you can also do (end-to-end) encryption. Which is why they didn't create a decently engineered crypto setup.
Really? Here in Germany they're not always accepted on the other end. This would allow people to verify that the signed document actually came from the person who supposedly sent it...
I didn't say that anybody accepts (or sends out) signed emails. I said it's already possible to sign emails, so there's no reason to come up with an alternate infrastructure. Instead of spending X to get government services and a few companies to use de-mail, they could have spent Y << X to get government services and a few companies to install GPG. Of course that'd result in widely deployed public cryptography -- including strong end-to-end encryption -- something that must not be.
They're arguing that minimizing is an uncommon thing to do and also one that doesn't work well within the general interface ideas behind Gnome Shell. So minimizing is, basically, deprecated. OTOH, they're not at all saying that maximizing is infrequent. What they are saying is that you should maximize in other ways: primarily by dragging the window to the top edge (that'd be the same as in Win7; the mouse gesture might be different, I haven't really tried Gnome 3); double clicking the title bar will also still work, I assume. Mouse gestures are supposedly more "gratifying" or some similar thing that will undoubtedly get a lot of hate on Slashdot.
FWIW, it's true that I only really use the close button on the title bar. I rarely minimize windows, and I invariably maximize by double clicking the title bar.
Cryptographically signing emails has been possible for decades. The government could have lead by example by simply doing that on a wide scale, encouraging businesses to do the same. For instance, after buying stuff online, you unfailingly get an invoice per mail, something I think businesses are pretty much required to do (if they don't snailmail it, of course); why not just require them to sign it for it to be a valid invoice. Of course, signing and encrypting go hand in hand, and LEO and the interior intelligence service are scared out of their wits of public key crypto gaining wide usage. Hence this train wreck.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (x) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Yup. Sounds like a bad joke right? A new messaging standard, incompatible with everything else, that doesn't even do end-to-end encryption! It's pathetic. It purports to solve problems that are already pretty much solved -- spam, reliable delivery -- while not solving all the difficult ones and introducing new dangers for the customers, like missing a "registered email". Oh, and you'll be charged per mail! The worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
Who does that, though? I've been aware of that feature at least since XP, but it would be distinctly weird to me to mount another partition in a sub-path of C:\. And yes, if there was a "true" root directory, that might be different. But on a desktop machine, the drive-letters carry a very strong association of representing one physical partition. Mounting a network directory as a drive-letter always felt odd to me, too.
It used to be relevant to me since occasionally I'd have to navigate to my profile directory (e.g. for games that store data in there). Typing in %USERPROFILE%, percentage signs and all, isn't very convenient either. I agree that it's important for non-interactive uses, though.
Re: the user directory path. I agree that it took far too long to settle on a simple path. That said, I think the location of that directory is actually fairly irrelevant for the day-to-day activities of most Windows users. Certainly was for me, when I still used it. My relatives put their stuff on the desktop and in Documents without giving a damn where those locations "really" were in the filesystem. And I used to put stuff -- apps and data -- wherever the hell I wanted, mostly on different single-purpose HDDs or partitions; basically everywhere EXCEPT the user folder wherever it was. I know it took me a while to reorient myself to basically consider ~ as the root directory for my day-to-day activities. Of course, that was when running as a non-privileged user in Windows was basically crazy talk.
Re: scripting. How many ways of "fucking around" with batch/scripting are there in *NIX? Various shells with incompatible syntax, perl, python, tcl are all widely used; the list goes on and that's a good thing. Hell, even the popular editors (though not so much the standard editor) are basically their own programming environments. Compared to all of this, Windows is basically static.
Cool, thanks, I had never heard of that distinction. The five terms (fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, generic) make a lot of sense. I agree that suggestive would fit Windows, though I'm not so sure whether App Store can be considered descriptive (as opposed to generic); and even if so, if it's acquired secondary meaning. App Store (as used by Apple) only refers to a single instance of a store selling software, but by a similar argument I could trademark Website to refer to a single instance of a site on the web (namely, my own). In that way, App Store seems almost prototypically generic, like cornflakes or cola or something like that. But maybe I'm missing something regarding the distinction between descriptive and generic.
I had half a post about metonymy written up before I noticed I put an extra "is" in there. I guess that's is what you're referring to, not the metonymy thing.
Why would I be carrying a Guy Fawkes mask? I assume it's is an Anonymous reference, but what have they got to do with anything? Are superfluous "is" or excessive italics prevalent in their posts, too?
That's stupid. "Windows" may well be generic, but it's a very different situation from "App Store". What does the App Store do? It sells licenses to executables (and implements an infrastructure to that end). Those executables can be referred to by a very small set of words: application, program; others are overly specific (tool, utility, game) or overly technical (executable, binary). The place where one sells things can also be referred to by only a few words: market, store, shop (and those names for physical places are routinely metaphorically extended to refer to virtual places).
What I'm saying is that the name "App Store" is a fairly accurate description of what the App Store is. It's a natural name for it in the same manner that Red Truck is a natural name for certain kinds of large red vehicles. What's more, it's one of a fairly small set of accurate short names for such things.
So what about "Windows"? Certainly, the graphical user interface objects you often deal with are also windows. But what does Windows do? Well, it's an operating system, etc. etc. It does not do windows, though, neither is it a window or windows. Maybe it's a windows operating system, a compound noun similar to app store? I guess that'd be a fairly daft (or, possibly, creative) way of referring to an operating system that contains a GUI: in which case it'd be acceptable to refer to OS X as a windows operating system. Doesn't work very well.
So maybe the Windows trademark is generic since it's derived from a prominent/visible constituent object. But unlike app store, the trademarked name doesn't describe the whole thing. Instead it's is a case of metonomy, arguably a more creative process than compounding two very salient concepts.
Why yes, I am a linguist. Which I guess makes me quite unqualified to participate in a legal discussion. But sometimes it's fun to talk about these things as if they were bound to reason.
You, individually, can't easily escape those raised prices. But clearly, if enough people decided NOT to use credit cards, the market power of the CC companies would be reduced, with all kinds of consequences. Even if you never pay them a dime (beyond the transaction fee), you're extremely valuable to them just as "another satisfied customer".
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that there really is a 'hidden space' that's only visible to the controller itself (sadly, there is nothing magic about it). The new 25nm OCZ "120 GB" drive actually contains 128 GB worth of flash memory and stores only 118 GB. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Over-provisioning. You'd need to talk to the controller to wipe those areas, writing to the "raw" block device won't do anything.
Depends on what kind of a secure delete you're referring to. Simply overwriting a file -- ie. the way to securely delete it on a normal hard disk -- won't accomplish much: the meaningless data that's meant to overwrite will end up somewhere else, since there is no easy way to tell the controller where to actually put stuff. So, yeah 90% might be left.
However, if you securely wipe an entire drive, by writing $capacity bytes to it, nearly everything on the drive will be irrevocably gone. I say nearly because all SSDs use overprovisioning to a certain degree: there is more physical flash memory available than the capacity reported by the controller. The excess space is used to increase performance and reliability. It's conceivable that a file gets written to a block that's never again written to because it's permanently replaced by a block in the overprovisioned area. AFAIK, regular HDDs also have a little bit of extra capacity to improve reliability, but it's nowhere near as much: the new 25nm OCZ drives has 128 GB "raw" capacity of which only 118 GB can be used. (Slightly more, 120 GB, can be used in the older 34nm version. Source: StorageReview.)
Of course, none of this takes into account what I assume TFA is talking about: that the controllers on SSDs will often permanently wipe blocks without the user going to any great lengths (beyond, you know, unlinking the file), in the normal course of operations that are, in fact, required for the enduring performance of the SSD.
It's nice of you to give them the benefit of the doubt despite the fact that the Firewire DMA exploits work fine in OS X. At least up to (including) 10.5, maybe they fixed it in 10.6 or 10.7.
I quickly adjusted to it being up there, but it did always have the problem of obscuring the current url as well as shortening the link url. The reduced contrast also makes it harder to read.
Slashdot Mirror
They're spending a lot of money implementing a new technology to accomplish something that old technology would have done cheaper and better, and they're enforcing uptake of the new, inferior technology by legislative means, at the same time obstructing the uptake of the better alternatives.
No. But in pretty much any decently engineered crypto setup, if you can do signing you can also do (end-to-end) encryption. Which is why they didn't create a decently engineered crypto setup.
Really? Here in Germany they're not always accepted on the other end. This would allow people to verify that the signed document actually came from the person who supposedly sent it...
I didn't say that anybody accepts (or sends out) signed emails. I said it's already possible to sign emails, so there's no reason to come up with an alternate infrastructure. Instead of spending X to get government services and a few companies to use de-mail, they could have spent Y << X to get government services and a few companies to install GPG. Of course that'd result in widely deployed public cryptography -- including strong end-to-end encryption -- something that must not be.
They're arguing that minimizing is an uncommon thing to do and also one that doesn't work well within the general interface ideas behind Gnome Shell. So minimizing is, basically, deprecated. OTOH, they're not at all saying that maximizing is infrequent. What they are saying is that you should maximize in other ways: primarily by dragging the window to the top edge (that'd be the same as in Win7; the mouse gesture might be different, I haven't really tried Gnome 3); double clicking the title bar will also still work, I assume. Mouse gestures are supposedly more "gratifying" or some similar thing that will undoubtedly get a lot of hate on Slashdot.
FWIW, it's true that I only really use the close button on the title bar. I rarely minimize windows, and I invariably maximize by double clicking the title bar.
Documents with signatures can already be sent as e-mail!
Cryptographically signing emails has been possible for decades. The government could have lead by example by simply doing that on a wide scale, encouraging businesses to do the same. For instance, after buying stuff online, you unfailingly get an invoice per mail, something I think businesses are pretty much required to do (if they don't snailmail it, of course); why not just require them to sign it for it to be a valid invoice. Of course, signing and encrypting go hand in hand, and LEO and the interior intelligence service are scared out of their wits of public key crypto gaining wide usage. Hence this train wreck.
Your post^Whuge government engineering proposal advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Yup. Sounds like a bad joke right? A new messaging standard, incompatible with everything else, that doesn't even do end-to-end encryption! It's pathetic. It purports to solve problems that are already pretty much solved -- spam, reliable delivery -- while not solving all the difficult ones and introducing new dangers for the customers, like missing a "registered email". Oh, and you'll be charged per mail! The worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
For 2 years, rather than 5. Do the maths.
Okay.
Apparently, 5 years is 3 years more than 2 years.
Who does that, though? I've been aware of that feature at least since XP, but it would be distinctly weird to me to mount another partition in a sub-path of C:\. And yes, if there was a "true" root directory, that might be different. But on a desktop machine, the drive-letters carry a very strong association of representing one physical partition. Mounting a network directory as a drive-letter always felt odd to me, too.
A screenshot tool is an "awesome feature of Windows 7"? Aero Snap is nice, though.
It used to be relevant to me since occasionally I'd have to navigate to my profile directory (e.g. for games that store data in there). Typing in %USERPROFILE%, percentage signs and all, isn't very convenient either. I agree that it's important for non-interactive uses, though.
Re: the user directory path. I agree that it took far too long to settle on a simple path. That said, I think the location of that directory is actually fairly irrelevant for the day-to-day activities of most Windows users. Certainly was for me, when I still used it. My relatives put their stuff on the desktop and in Documents without giving a damn where those locations "really" were in the filesystem. And I used to put stuff -- apps and data -- wherever the hell I wanted, mostly on different single-purpose HDDs or partitions; basically everywhere EXCEPT the user folder wherever it was. I know it took me a while to reorient myself to basically consider ~ as the root directory for my day-to-day activities. Of course, that was when running as a non-privileged user in Windows was basically crazy talk.
Re: scripting. How many ways of "fucking around" with batch/scripting are there in *NIX? Various shells with incompatible syntax, perl, python, tcl are all widely used; the list goes on and that's a good thing. Hell, even the popular editors (though not so much the standard editor) are basically their own programming environments. Compared to all of this, Windows is basically static.
That has got to be one of the strangest ways of making a recursive definition that I have seen so far. And you're not even kidding!
Deleted in December 2008
Cool, thanks, I had never heard of that distinction. The five terms (fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, generic) make a lot of sense. I agree that suggestive would fit Windows, though I'm not so sure whether App Store can be considered descriptive (as opposed to generic); and even if so, if it's acquired secondary meaning. App Store (as used by Apple) only refers to a single instance of a store selling software, but by a similar argument I could trademark Website to refer to a single instance of a site on the web (namely, my own). In that way, App Store seems almost prototypically generic, like cornflakes or cola or something like that. But maybe I'm missing something regarding the distinction between descriptive and generic.
I had half a post about metonymy written up before I noticed I put an extra "is" in there. I guess that's is what you're referring to, not the metonymy thing.
Why would I be carrying a Guy Fawkes mask? I assume it's is an Anonymous reference, but what have they got to do with anything? Are superfluous "is" or excessive italics prevalent in their posts, too?
You mean like Office Open XML aka ISO/IEC 29500? ;)
That's stupid. "Windows" may well be generic, but it's a very different situation from "App Store". What does the App Store do? It sells licenses to executables (and implements an infrastructure to that end). Those executables can be referred to by a very small set of words: application, program; others are overly specific (tool, utility, game) or overly technical (executable, binary). The place where one sells things can also be referred to by only a few words: market, store, shop (and those names for physical places are routinely metaphorically extended to refer to virtual places).
What I'm saying is that the name "App Store" is a fairly accurate description of what the App Store is. It's a natural name for it in the same manner that Red Truck is a natural name for certain kinds of large red vehicles. What's more, it's one of a fairly small set of accurate short names for such things.
So what about "Windows"? Certainly, the graphical user interface objects you often deal with are also windows. But what does Windows do? Well, it's an operating system, etc. etc. It does not do windows, though, neither is it a window or windows. Maybe it's a windows operating system, a compound noun similar to app store? I guess that'd be a fairly daft (or, possibly, creative) way of referring to an operating system that contains a GUI: in which case it'd be acceptable to refer to OS X as a windows operating system. Doesn't work very well.
So maybe the Windows trademark is generic since it's derived from a prominent/visible constituent object. But unlike app store, the trademarked name doesn't describe the whole thing. Instead it's is a case of metonomy, arguably a more creative process than compounding two very salient concepts.
Why yes, I am a linguist. Which I guess makes me quite unqualified to participate in a legal discussion. But sometimes it's fun to talk about these things as if they were bound to reason.
You, individually, can't easily escape those raised prices. But clearly, if enough people decided NOT to use credit cards, the market power of the CC companies would be reduced, with all kinds of consequences. Even if you never pay them a dime (beyond the transaction fee), you're extremely valuable to them just as "another satisfied customer".
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that there really is a 'hidden space' that's only visible to the controller itself (sadly, there is nothing magic about it). The new 25nm OCZ "120 GB" drive actually contains 128 GB worth of flash memory and stores only 118 GB. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Over-provisioning. You'd need to talk to the controller to wipe those areas, writing to the "raw" block device won't do anything.
Depends on what kind of a secure delete you're referring to. Simply overwriting a file -- ie. the way to securely delete it on a normal hard disk -- won't accomplish much: the meaningless data that's meant to overwrite will end up somewhere else, since there is no easy way to tell the controller where to actually put stuff. So, yeah 90% might be left.
However, if you securely wipe an entire drive, by writing $capacity bytes to it, nearly everything on the drive will be irrevocably gone. I say nearly because all SSDs use overprovisioning to a certain degree: there is more physical flash memory available than the capacity reported by the controller. The excess space is used to increase performance and reliability. It's conceivable that a file gets written to a block that's never again written to because it's permanently replaced by a block in the overprovisioned area. AFAIK, regular HDDs also have a little bit of extra capacity to improve reliability, but it's nowhere near as much: the new 25nm OCZ drives has 128 GB "raw" capacity of which only 118 GB can be used. (Slightly more, 120 GB, can be used in the older 34nm version. Source: StorageReview.)
Of course, none of this takes into account what I assume TFA is talking about: that the controllers on SSDs will often permanently wipe blocks without the user going to any great lengths (beyond, you know, unlinking the file), in the normal course of operations that are, in fact, required for the enduring performance of the SSD.
In Cuba/China/Venezuala, I'd assume. They're not doing any hydraulic fracturing, though, as far as I know.
It's nice of you to give them the benefit of the doubt despite the fact that the Firewire DMA exploits work fine in OS X. At least up to (including) 10.5, maybe they fixed it in 10.6 or 10.7.
See http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-firewire-dma-part-1-overview-and-mitigation
I quickly adjusted to it being up there, but it did always have the problem of obscuring the current url as well as shortening the link url. The reduced contrast also makes it harder to read.