What a great idea. It's a pity though that businesses will never use it because of its name. Can you imagine "monkeysphere compliant" on a product website? There you go.
A great example on how to have great stupid names: "Bacula" is a pretty clever stupid name that businesses never ever will understand. It's the plural of baculum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum). Always makes me grin when I see it in a corporate environment.
What's keeping us from creating something like this, and what would seperate it from other approaches such as darknet et al.? I'm sure there are several infrastructures like that as we speak, we just don't know about them. (Hint: There must be something hidden in all that spam.)
Could you elaborate on the problems with FogBugz (or "the FuckBox" as my new coworkers call it)? My new employer has a FogBugz installation that is half-assedly used for product development, but we want to manage support via FB too (using the mail feature) and merge in existing tickets from our Bugzilla (which doesn't handle "standard" tickets at all) so that we end up using FugBogz only for everything. We're only 30 people living off a specialized software, so load won't be an issue. I'm intrigued by the time tracking features and the resulting projected release schedules, but I'm still testing stuff out and would like to know the pitfalls to see whether we can/want to accomodate them.
Actually "hacktivist" is a pretty old phrase - I remember reading about "hacktivism" on the cDc homepage at least ten years ago. At that time it was about writing some tool to allow people in totalitarian countries free speech by creating something like TOR, IIRC.
Fuck asking where the company, an entity that is an artificial creation, 'lives'. Tax the things that physically exist where they actually are and tax the money going in and out where it's actually going in and out.
OK, I'll bite. I agree with the notion, but cannot see how you would tax somebody like Google without giving them opportunity to game the system. If some Chinese company buys Google ads for the USA, from Google China, but people watch them in the USA, there's no "American" money involved whatsoever, so nothing going "in and out". Maybe I lack imagination (and I really like your idea).
And how often has that happened? Hell, when were you a COO?
I was COO until last year, now I'm a freelance consultant making my money simply by telling CEOs how their business runs so much better if they just treat people like people, weed out the lazy sponges and get the fuck out of the way otherwise. It's kinda ironic really, which is another reason why I enjoy it so much.
Inviting people from different companies was a daily task, for every exec, even for middle management. And frequency doesn't really matter - it's enough when something the boss wants to do doesn't work *once* when it used to work before. If it becomes obvious that "vital" features got removed, expect heads to roll. While I agree that many things execs (or marketing) want isn't "vital" by any stretch, being able to make appointments is *pretty* vital.
But hey, maybe I'm just missing a piece of the puzzle. If there *is* any drop-in replacement for AD + Exchange, please, by all means, let me and all the lurkers know. Implementing this will make everyone a shitload of money.
I'm not sure why you're getting "Troll" mods for this.
Yes, that's pretty obvious.
It isn't a good idea to turn Linux into Windows. In fact, most mainstream OSs are switching to package managers.
Um, what? First of all, Windows doesn't even DO what this software does, so it's hardly "turning Linux into Windows", more of "turning Linux into OSX".
Second, there are three mainstream OS, Windows, OSX and Linux. None of those "are switching to package managers".
Let's take an example out of my own history: Say you're the COO of a Corporation with several companies, all organized in a Microsoft directory structure (AD or whatever they call it) over several levels of hierarchy and also different places around the country.
Now you need to schedule a meeting with the CTOs of the companies, plus some of the CEOs, and maybe a handful other people from the administrations. Those people are scattered across the directory.
With Exchange (which I shunned myself before working heavily with it), I can just open my schedule, enter the recipients (with working autocomplete, of course I don't have them in my AB), say I need 1.5 hours of time, and press the free/busy button. I've just made an appointment in about one minute. This works on Windows, OSX and Linux, and is pushed to all mobile devices also.
Now, I am admittedly uninformed about the commercial GMail services, but I'd be amazed if they have free/busy functionality that plays even in the same league. And as the genius submitter probably wants to replace the Windows directory, too, I wish him all of luck, because I really don't think such functionality is easily replaced with F/OSS.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big F/OSS proponent, but I can't imagine it can be feasible, both from a user and financial perspective. This guy just sounds as if he should find another job. He's already beyond his capacity, in several aspects.
But mostly because they probably don't personally use apps remotely and don't even realize that they are tossing one of the greatest ideas in computing history down the shitter.
And what's the worst part is *why* they're doing it - because they want better visual effects. Obviously *their* idea of being competitive with Windows is "adding more visual effects". What a bummer. If they said "to make games work and eat Windows' lunch in that field", yeah, I'd understand that. But "visual effects"? If I were younger, I'd have had a seizure reading that stupid blog entry of Shittleworth, but I just shrugged and thought "well, that's going to have a lot of knowlegdeable people use something else".
BTW, Ubuntu's decision isn't all that bad - X11 isn't going nowhere as long as "graphical" means X11 for apps. AIUI Wayland runs X11 as a Wayland client, so X11 remains in the system and can be used just as in the old times. And if applications in the long term really abandon X11 for Wayland, that will take years and you can bet somebody will implement network transparency for Wayland until then, or X11 will just remain usable.
I hear you. I really do. But I suggest you change your strategy just like I did.
No physical access to the machine? People living far away? Bad luck. I don't repair computers via phone. Key phrase is: "You can't fix computers via the phone." Because, really, you can't.
Magical Doomsmachine Believers? I agree this is a hard one. My Ubuntu convertites are all from this crowd. Being able to remotely access the machines and fix them via screen sharing is nice, because you can simply show them what's wrong. Remind them regularly that you support them free of charge, and if they keep calling every other day you *will* charge them for your time. And please, for the love of God, DO SO if they persist. And a *real* consultancy fee, preferably with an official invoice. Key phrase: "Those computer skills didn't fall from the sky. You wouldn't expect a lawyer to help you with your legal stuff for free, would you?"
Actually I have stopped supporting Windows altogether (except for some very old friend). If people want my advice, they can get Ubuntu and have me support it remotely, or be on their own. It's your life and you can and should choose what you want to do with it. Becoming all grey because of "having to" support ignorants using Windows probably isn't among them.
If you still spend *any* significant amount of time with "tracking down" stuff or "delousing", I guess the clue train hasn't stopped at your station yet. *DING DING DING*
Hint 1: As soon as a machine is compromised, there can be *anything* installed in *any* way possible, and just missing one single thing will leave the machine vulnerable. So it's futile anyway. Swallow your geek pride and go pro. This brings me to
Hint 2: Booting off an Ubuntu CD, copying user data to an external drive or some online server and reinstalling Windows is the quickest way, and the only one to be sure anyway (see hint 1). If the user doesn't have that much data, it will be accomplished in less than 1 hour. Bonus points for making an image of the machine to use later for even quicker recovery. If you're cheap, you can just boot that Ubuntu CD again and do a simple dd piped to ssh and there's your image.
Of course, if your friends aren't gamers, but of the e-mail/Office/browsing type, just installing Ubuntu will go a much longer way. Nowadays it's friendly enough really, and they usually already know Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice etc. I just show them Ubuntu for five minutes and ask them whether they want Windows or Ubuntu (and that it's perfectly okay to want Windows). I haven't had a single person choose Windows. The machines running out of the box with the live CD without having to hunt down drivers and installing stuff helped a lot, of course (the live CD even autoinstalls the printer). Put a shell script onto the desktop called "Let [your name] fix the computer" that phones home to your ssh server and gives you secure remote access without having to poke holes into their network. Voilà. C'est formidable.
That said, a fresh Windows install with MSE will do just fine, if that's what they need. But stop toying around and complaining. Really. Reinstall, make an image, be done with it.
LOL. Way to go, Slashdot.:-) I loaded the article, it showed 0 replies at -1, replied immediately, and there they are, 250+ comments.
Either Slashcode sucks big hairy donkey balls, or 250+ motherfuckers just jumped in to destroy my first fp try in about ten years. I'll go with the motherfucker theory because Perl code can never, ever fail.
Buying a company for its employees seems so much like a recapitulation of the feudal system.
Nah, that's nowhere near a feudal system. People can just quit if they don't like the new owners. In feudal systems that isn't possible.
That is also why I think buying a company for the people is only useful if the buyer has a good reputation, because otherwise the people he's "bought" will just quit in droves, and there's nothing the buyer can do about that.
This applies not only to reputation, but also to culture. If for example Microsoft bought a company with a hard-core F/OSS culture, I'd doubt many people would stay.
Congratulations! You've just found out which prefix my native language uses for the adjective "elegant"! You win as many washing machines as you can carry at once. Collect at the exit to your left.;P
You know, this is Slashdot, and I am among those who use AdBlock Pro, NoScript and/etc/hosts autoupdated via cron for a nice, clean surfing experience. So I hear what you're saying concerning Google Analytics going to the loop interface. Not allowing GA via NoScript also works well.
But being a freelance consultant with multiple web sites using GA (and Piwik, mind you), it's not feasible, because if you block GA via *any* method, you can't query your own statistics any more. Allowing and disallowing GA every time isn't very practical, as is using a different browser just for accessing one web site.
If someone has a nice idea concerning this dilemma, I'm open for suggestions. Until then, I'll keep using Safari for my commercial needs, but boy, this is unelegant.
You guys obviously haven't been watching your documentaries. I remember well that episode from Captain Future in the 70's where they state that Saturn's rings are the result of the destruction of the Katein. This is why Captain Future travels back in time to have the people of the Katein build one of their moons into a spaceship to travel to their old holy planet.
Um. For one, there's Exposé, then you can Cmd-Tab like on Windows, you can click onto the Dock icon of the desired application... add in Spaces and attaching apps to specific Spaces and you have everything you need. Especially the last option gives you the opporunity to switch to any application you like with one keystroke, Ctrl+[# of desired Space]. But hey, if you want to grind an axe, don't let me or facts get into your way.;-)
You probably weren't, if I look at your history of e-mail accounts. I had a CompuServe address that went under with CompuServe itself, so that's another good reason to switch, just as you had good reasons.
The difference is that you probably a) set up redirections || still check the addresses and b) informed the important people of the change. Those people the OP meant don't do any of that.
Catering to the stupid
on
Facebook Is Down
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
There go my mod points, but fuck it, I can't bear reading this stupidity once more.
E-mail accounts don't change. People change them because they're lazy or stupid.
The same people don't forget their Facebook logins and passwords, do they? Then why do they change e-mail addresses like others change their underwear?
It's often the same people who have a handful of addresses, so you never know which of those they monitor and which they don't, and they will often reply to mail from another address than the one you mailed, regularly from ones you've never heard of before.
Oh, and don't forget those who don't even *know* their correct addresses and tell you some guess instead. I've been the recipient of such mail for years when some gal gave out an address from my domain because she couldn't remember her TLD even if her life depended on it (I have a.de, she was on something else but giving out a.de address to everyone and their dog). She was a very active hotchatter, judging from the "erotic" stories and dick shots I received. The guys usually were quite embarrassed when I replied "nice cock shot, but the stupid fuck doesn't know her own e-mail address - please tell her when you meet her again".
That was in the Old Days(TM) before this was a common spam topic, around when Eternal September started. I never got to know her real e-mail address even though I've really tried. Cornelia. If the German proverb that "stupidity fucks best" holds water, she must be one of the best fucks ever.
But I digress.
Long story short, tell people that e-mail addresses are meant to be permanent and they won't get their pregnancy updates if they change their e-mail address without notifying you. It can be done. I've only met one or two people who didn't at least keep one permanent address around after my explanation. Oh, and be kind. They just don't understand.
Oh, come on. There's 80 GB of garbage, you give them the key to one partition, they look at the file sizes of stuff in there and go "And how about the rest? You could store about 80 GB in there and we've only got the key to 20 of them."
Don't assume people are stupid. If the suspected crime is bad enough, they will look closely.
No, you ALL miss the point. How are you going to explain having a HDD or partition full of "garbage"? Nobody with half a brain will believe you there's nothing encrypted in the noise.
(Yeah, an entropy file would be easy to explain, but entropy files usually don't come in sizes big enough to hide data in, PLUS, who apart from us here understands what an entropy file is? A judge sure doesn't.)
Steganography, OTOH, would be very useful. I have around 50 GB of family photos on my machine, that would make for a nice data storage.
Depends on the creator of the PDF, though. I wanted to code a quick and dirty web app for customizing business cards, so I remembered that it was just like you said, and all I had to do is open up the InDesign layouts, replace the name with $name$, the address with $address$ and so on and export a PDF X/3 for printing. I'd then have the user input the values and just search and replace the variable names with the values entered.
Only that the resulting PDF contained none of my field names. It was a PDF which could be rendered just fine, but when you opened it up in a text editor, it was basically a blob.
So I thought that was because I used X/3, maybe it's compressed for that. I then tried every other standard setting it had, to no success. I gave up and changed to using INX (Indesign Exchange Format) which at least contained the text blocks in plain text, but it showed me that in practice, PDF's aren't plain text any more, at least if you use the "professional" from the fucking INVENTORS of the format. It's blobs all the way down.
Slashdot Mirror
What a great idea. It's a pity though that businesses will never use it because of its name. Can you imagine "monkeysphere compliant" on a product website? There you go.
A great example on how to have great stupid names: "Bacula" is a pretty clever stupid name that businesses never ever will understand. It's the plural of baculum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum). Always makes me grin when I see it in a corporate environment.
That's actually a pretty great name. Really, people, look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
What's keeping us from creating something like this, and what would seperate it from other approaches such as darknet et al.? I'm sure there are several infrastructures like that as we speak, we just don't know about them. (Hint: There must be something hidden in all that spam.)
Could you elaborate on the problems with FogBugz (or "the FuckBox" as my new coworkers call it)? My new employer has a FogBugz installation that is half-assedly used for product development, but we want to manage support via FB too (using the mail feature) and merge in existing tickets from our Bugzilla (which doesn't handle "standard" tickets at all) so that we end up using FugBogz only for everything. We're only 30 people living off a specialized software, so load won't be an issue. I'm intrigued by the time tracking features and the resulting projected release schedules, but I'm still testing stuff out and would like to know the pitfalls to see whether we can/want to accomodate them.
Actually "hacktivist" is a pretty old phrase - I remember reading about "hacktivism" on the cDc homepage at least ten years ago. At that time it was about writing some tool to allow people in totalitarian countries free speech by creating something like TOR, IIRC.
Fuck asking where the company, an entity that is an artificial creation, 'lives'. Tax the things that physically exist where they actually are and tax the money going in and out where it's actually going in and out.
OK, I'll bite. I agree with the notion, but cannot see how you would tax somebody like Google without giving them opportunity to game the system. If some Chinese company buys Google ads for the USA, from Google China, but people watch them in the USA, there's no "American" money involved whatsoever, so nothing going "in and out". Maybe I lack imagination (and I really like your idea).
And how often has that happened? Hell, when were you a COO?
I was COO until last year, now I'm a freelance consultant making my money simply by telling CEOs how their business runs so much better if they just treat people like people, weed out the lazy sponges and get the fuck out of the way otherwise. It's kinda ironic really, which is another reason why I enjoy it so much.
Inviting people from different companies was a daily task, for every exec, even for middle management. And frequency doesn't really matter - it's enough when something the boss wants to do doesn't work *once* when it used to work before. If it becomes obvious that "vital" features got removed, expect heads to roll. While I agree that many things execs (or marketing) want isn't "vital" by any stretch, being able to make appointments is *pretty* vital.
But hey, maybe I'm just missing a piece of the puzzle. If there *is* any drop-in replacement for AD + Exchange, please, by all means, let me and all the lurkers know. Implementing this will make everyone a shitload of money.
I'm not sure why you're getting "Troll" mods for this.
Yes, that's pretty obvious.
It isn't a good idea to turn Linux into Windows. In fact, most mainstream OSs are switching to package managers.
Um, what? First of all, Windows doesn't even DO what this software does, so it's hardly "turning Linux into Windows", more of "turning Linux into OSX".
Second, there are three mainstream OS, Windows, OSX and Linux. None of those "are switching to package managers".
Let's take an example out of my own history: Say you're the COO of a Corporation with several companies, all organized in a Microsoft directory structure (AD or whatever they call it) over several levels of hierarchy and also different places around the country.
Now you need to schedule a meeting with the CTOs of the companies, plus some of the CEOs, and maybe a handful other people from the administrations. Those people are scattered across the directory.
With Exchange (which I shunned myself before working heavily with it), I can just open my schedule, enter the recipients (with working autocomplete, of course I don't have them in my AB), say I need 1.5 hours of time, and press the free/busy button. I've just made an appointment in about one minute. This works on Windows, OSX and Linux, and is pushed to all mobile devices also.
Now, I am admittedly uninformed about the commercial GMail services, but I'd be amazed if they have free/busy functionality that plays even in the same league. And as the genius submitter probably wants to replace the Windows directory, too, I wish him all of luck, because I really don't think such functionality is easily replaced with F/OSS.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big F/OSS proponent, but I can't imagine it can be feasible, both from a user and financial perspective. This guy just sounds as if he should find another job. He's already beyond his capacity, in several aspects.
Oh MAN, fuck you very much for reminding me of Supergreg. I've met people back then who thought he was serious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8wrIgbiCgs
DUDE. It's Sacha Baron Cohen. So obviously that was the first thing I've ever seen from him. ^^
Um, "a chance to build the browser once again"? It's not as if Marc has built *any* browser in the first place.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html
But mostly because they probably don't personally use apps remotely and don't even realize that they are tossing one of the greatest ideas in computing history down the shitter.
And what's the worst part is *why* they're doing it - because they want better visual effects. Obviously *their* idea of being competitive with Windows is "adding more visual effects". What a bummer. If they said "to make games work and eat Windows' lunch in that field", yeah, I'd understand that. But "visual effects"? If I were younger, I'd have had a seizure reading that stupid blog entry of Shittleworth, but I just shrugged and thought "well, that's going to have a lot of knowlegdeable people use something else".
BTW, Ubuntu's decision isn't all that bad - X11 isn't going nowhere as long as "graphical" means X11 for apps. AIUI Wayland runs X11 as a Wayland client, so X11 remains in the system and can be used just as in the old times. And if applications in the long term really abandon X11 for Wayland, that will take years and you can bet somebody will implement network transparency for Wayland until then, or X11 will just remain usable.
I hear you. I really do. But I suggest you change your strategy just like I did.
No physical access to the machine? People living far away? Bad luck. I don't repair computers via phone. Key phrase is: "You can't fix computers via the phone." Because, really, you can't.
Magical Doomsmachine Believers? I agree this is a hard one. My Ubuntu convertites are all from this crowd. Being able to remotely access the machines and fix them via screen sharing is nice, because you can simply show them what's wrong. Remind them regularly that you support them free of charge, and if they keep calling every other day you *will* charge them for your time. And please, for the love of God, DO SO if they persist. And a *real* consultancy fee, preferably with an official invoice. Key phrase: "Those computer skills didn't fall from the sky. You wouldn't expect a lawyer to help you with your legal stuff for free, would you?"
Actually I have stopped supporting Windows altogether (except for some very old friend). If people want my advice, they can get Ubuntu and have me support it remotely, or be on their own. It's your life and you can and should choose what you want to do with it. Becoming all grey because of "having to" support ignorants using Windows probably isn't among them.
If you still spend *any* significant amount of time with "tracking down" stuff or "delousing", I guess the clue train hasn't stopped at your station yet. *DING DING DING*
Hint 1: As soon as a machine is compromised, there can be *anything* installed in *any* way possible, and just missing one single thing will leave the machine vulnerable. So it's futile anyway. Swallow your geek pride and go pro. This brings me to
Hint 2: Booting off an Ubuntu CD, copying user data to an external drive or some online server and reinstalling Windows is the quickest way, and the only one to be sure anyway (see hint 1). If the user doesn't have that much data, it will be accomplished in less than 1 hour. Bonus points for making an image of the machine to use later for even quicker recovery. If you're cheap, you can just boot that Ubuntu CD again and do a simple dd piped to ssh and there's your image.
Of course, if your friends aren't gamers, but of the e-mail/Office/browsing type, just installing Ubuntu will go a much longer way. Nowadays it's friendly enough really, and they usually already know Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice etc. I just show them Ubuntu for five minutes and ask them whether they want Windows or Ubuntu (and that it's perfectly okay to want Windows). I haven't had a single person choose Windows. The machines running out of the box with the live CD without having to hunt down drivers and installing stuff helped a lot, of course (the live CD even autoinstalls the printer). Put a shell script onto the desktop called "Let [your name] fix the computer" that phones home to your ssh server and gives you secure remote access without having to poke holes into their network. Voilà. C'est formidable.
That said, a fresh Windows install with MSE will do just fine, if that's what they need. But stop toying around and complaining. Really. Reinstall, make an image, be done with it.
LOL. Way to go, Slashdot. :-) I loaded the article, it showed 0 replies at -1, replied immediately, and there they are, 250+ comments.
Either Slashcode sucks big hairy donkey balls, or 250+ motherfuckers just jumped in to destroy my first fp try in about ten years. I'll go with the motherfucker theory because Perl code can never, ever fail.
So, this is proof that Mary was actually a Boa Constrictor?
Oh, and FP, I think.
Buying a company for its employees seems so much like a recapitulation of the feudal system.
Nah, that's nowhere near a feudal system. People can just quit if they don't like the new owners. In feudal systems that isn't possible.
That is also why I think buying a company for the people is only useful if the buyer has a good reputation, because otherwise the people he's "bought" will just quit in droves, and there's nothing the buyer can do about that.
This applies not only to reputation, but also to culture. If for example Microsoft bought a company with a hard-core F/OSS culture, I'd doubt many people would stay.
Congratulations! You've just found out which prefix my native language uses for the adjective "elegant"! You win as many washing machines as you can carry at once. Collect at the exit to your left. ;P
You know, this is Slashdot, and I am among those who use AdBlock Pro, NoScript and /etc/hosts autoupdated via cron for a nice, clean surfing experience. So I hear what you're saying concerning Google Analytics going to the loop interface. Not allowing GA via NoScript also works well.
But being a freelance consultant with multiple web sites using GA (and Piwik, mind you), it's not feasible, because if you block GA via *any* method, you can't query your own statistics any more. Allowing and disallowing GA every time isn't very practical, as is using a different browser just for accessing one web site.
If someone has a nice idea concerning this dilemma, I'm open for suggestions. Until then, I'll keep using Safari for my commercial needs, but boy, this is unelegant.
You guys obviously haven't been watching your documentaries. I remember well that episode from Captain Future in the 70's where they state that Saturn's rings are the result of the destruction of the Katein. This is why Captain Future travels back in time to have the people of the Katein build one of their moons into a spaceship to travel to their old holy planet.
Sheesh. Kids these days.
Um. For one, there's Exposé, then you can Cmd-Tab like on Windows, you can click onto the Dock icon of the desired application... add in Spaces and attaching apps to specific Spaces and you have everything you need. Especially the last option gives you the opporunity to switch to any application you like with one keystroke, Ctrl+[# of desired Space]. But hey, if you want to grind an axe, don't let me or facts get into your way. ;-)
You probably weren't, if I look at your history of e-mail accounts. I had a CompuServe address that went under with CompuServe itself, so that's another good reason to switch, just as you had good reasons.
The difference is that you probably a) set up redirections || still check the addresses and b) informed the important people of the change. Those people the OP meant don't do any of that.
There go my mod points, but fuck it, I can't bear reading this stupidity once more.
E-mail accounts don't change. People change them because they're lazy or stupid.
The same people don't forget their Facebook logins and passwords, do they? Then why do they change e-mail addresses like others change their underwear?
It's often the same people who have a handful of addresses, so you never know which of those they monitor and which they don't, and they will often reply to mail from another address than the one you mailed, regularly from ones you've never heard of before.
Oh, and don't forget those who don't even *know* their correct addresses and tell you some guess instead. I've been the recipient of such mail for years when some gal gave out an address from my domain because she couldn't remember her TLD even if her life depended on it (I have a .de, she was on something else but giving out a .de address to everyone and their dog). She was a very active hotchatter, judging from the "erotic" stories and dick shots I received. The guys usually were quite embarrassed when I replied "nice cock shot, but the stupid fuck doesn't know her own e-mail address - please tell her when you meet her again".
That was in the Old Days(TM) before this was a common spam topic, around when Eternal September started. I never got to know her real e-mail address even though I've really tried. Cornelia. If the German proverb that "stupidity fucks best" holds water, she must be one of the best fucks ever.
But I digress.
Long story short, tell people that e-mail addresses are meant to be permanent and they won't get their pregnancy updates if they change their e-mail address without notifying you. It can be done. I've only met one or two people who didn't at least keep one permanent address around after my explanation. Oh, and be kind. They just don't understand.
Oh, come on. There's 80 GB of garbage, you give them the key to one partition, they look at the file sizes of stuff in there and go "And how about the rest? You could store about 80 GB in there and we've only got the key to 20 of them."
Don't assume people are stupid. If the suspected crime is bad enough, they will look closely.
No, you ALL miss the point. How are you going to explain having a HDD or partition full of "garbage"? Nobody with half a brain will believe you there's nothing encrypted in the noise.
(Yeah, an entropy file would be easy to explain, but entropy files usually don't come in sizes big enough to hide data in, PLUS, who apart from us here understands what an entropy file is? A judge sure doesn't.)
Steganography, OTOH, would be very useful. I have around 50 GB of family photos on my machine, that would make for a nice data storage.
Depends on the creator of the PDF, though. I wanted to code a quick and dirty web app for customizing business cards, so I remembered that it was just like you said, and all I had to do is open up the InDesign layouts, replace the name with $name$, the address with $address$ and so on and export a PDF X/3 for printing. I'd then have the user input the values and just search and replace the variable names with the values entered.
Only that the resulting PDF contained none of my field names. It was a PDF which could be rendered just fine, but when you opened it up in a text editor, it was basically a blob.
So I thought that was because I used X/3, maybe it's compressed for that. I then tried every other standard setting it had, to no success. I gave up and changed to using INX (Indesign Exchange Format) which at least contained the text blocks in plain text, but it showed me that in practice, PDF's aren't plain text any more, at least if you use the "professional" from the fucking INVENTORS of the format. It's blobs all the way down.