The article you link mentions that Saddam had small caches of chemical weapons, probably ones that we gave him, left over from before the Gulf War (i.e. at least 12 years old when Gulf War II began). Bush alleged that they were manufacturing and stockpiling WMDs, and that he was looking to sell them to Al Qaeda terrorist; there is still no evidence for either allegation. As another poster mentioned, Saddam may not have known where all the WMDs were or even that they existed, but I won't give him the benefit of the doubt.
2) If the invasion of Iraq for really for the oil, then why is it over $75/barrel?
The war started for a number of reasons. The WMDs were either a lie or a mistake, or some combination. The stronger reasons were oil, Saddam being evil, some amount of a personal grudge, some amount of support for Israel against a dangerous SCUD-weilding neighbor, and possibly some amount of 1984-style "war is peace" politicking.
It failed on almost all counts. We didn't find the WMDs (at least, not any new ones). The insurgency targets oil rigs and convoys, making oil production very expensive. Saddam is out of power and will be on trial for the rest of his life, but Iraq is still a chaotic hellhole. Israel is under a greater threat now, because they can't play Iraq and Iran against each other (in particular, we'll have a harder time stopping Iran from getting nukes).
I used to dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux (right now I run them both virtualized under Mac OS X).
This was primarily for games, (Starcraft just doesn't run on a console), but it also allowed me to test web sites I wasa working on in Internet Explorer (and now Safari as well).
Also, while you asked for Windows, MacOS X has much better chat clients than Linux (Adium, iChat AV for video conferencing). Ubuntu, however, has more packages available via apt (I use Fink, but it's pretty limited) and a nicer environment for *nix development.
Dual booting is for people who can't really decide why they bought a PC in the first place.
No, it's for people who bought a PC for more than one purpose. Like gaming, communication, programming, and word processing. Or programming and video editing. Or multi-platform programming.
Usually people speak of the future and the past in their own frame. This doesn't usually cause arguments. Humans tend to move slowly wrt each other and wrt most phenomena they observe (slowly compared to c), and don't tend to fall into particularly deep gravitational wells (that Indian kid notwithstanding).
Which is, in the nutshell, just the old "security by obscurity" argument. Which has already been debated to hell and back and is known to not work that way.
RANT!
I'm sick and tired of the "what the other guy says is security by obscurity" argument. The real truth of the matter is Kerckhoff's principle, which says that a security system (in Kerckhoff's case, a cyrptosystem, but it generalizes) should remain secure if its design falls into the hands of the attacker, or equivalently "the smaller the secret, the more secure the system". This is a statement about design principles, not about disclosure; non-disclosure is a defense in depth. Of course, it also prevents other qualified people from reviewing your designs, so there's a trade-off to make, but there are advantages on both sides.
Kerckhoff's principle doesn't mean that you should disclose the design of a security system, just that the system should be designed to remain secure if you do. Note that the NSA designs its ciphers to remain secure if their workings are disclosed, but it doesn't disclose them. Kerckhoff's principle also doesn't mean that a flawed system is more secure if you publish vulnerabilities complete with exploit code. It does mean that by design, the system should remain secure no matter how much code you publish, but obviously once you have a vulnerability that's not true anymore.
Under the assumption that criminals have already discovered and are already exploiting a vulnerability, it may be argued that disclosing vulnerabilities improves security by forcing the vendor to patch, or by alerting systems administrators to the vulnerability (particularly if a workaround is available). Neither of these is improved by widely-distributed, fully-functional exploit code, so lacking some other reason (please enlighten me), publishing such code is a terrible security decision.
Surprisingly, DRM actually likes virtualization. Here's how it works: you make a small, stable and lightweight hypervisor, and a lightweight DRM OS to run under it. You then checksum them at boot through a TPM, and require that they check out to some specific version before the TPM will decrypt your DRMed media.
This is pretty hard to break. Your hypervisor and DRM OS are very small, and can be locked down and checked carefully. Any data not fixed by the TPM checksumming can be encrypted, so you can't hack it by removing the hard drive . You need an IOMMU to shield against DMA attacks from the host OS, but other than that it's very secure.
Very funny sample! I can read it substantially without errors -- its choice of words doesn't bother me, but the rhythm is broken as it stands -- meter isn't consistent.
Meter isn't consistent throughout the poem, but it usually is between the two lines of a couplet. What I'd meant, though, is "without pausing to work out pronunciation," rather than "without botching the meter by misreading."
But English wasn't any tougher 30-40 years ago than it is today... yet kids of that era didn't, and as adults don't, have the problems that kids of our Modren Era do... which in itself points at education, or lack of it, as the culprit.
I'll have to take your word for it. I haven't noticed a widespread problem with spelling or pronunciation among students near my age, but I've mostly associated with nerds. I also haven't paid much attention to normal children: I've mostly talked with either smart kids or kids in need of tutoring.
Still, it says something about our written language that we can have spelling bees. Autistic middle schoolers study spelling for hours a day, weeks or months on end, and yet the tournament ends as one after another screws up. Given that they screw up, it might benefit the rest of us if the spelling were more consistent.
It's not just that kids aren't taught early enough. English is genuinely tough stuff. Try to read that poem quickly; I'm a native speaker and not stupid by any means, but I couldn't get though it without errors or breaking rhythm (at least, not on the first try).
Supposedly, Longhorn is named for a pub between Whistler (XP) and Blackcomb (Windows 2009?). It was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to The Next Big Thing.
I don't suggest EPIA if what you're after is speed. They're small and low-power, but not fast. The 25 Gb/s is a joke, I don't even think the chip even has that much memory bandwidth: you might get it for ECB mode cache->cache, but the whole system will crawl.
If you count other things your OS will be doing, an Athlon system will be faster and cheaper. However, the EPIA will be half the size and draw a third the power.
My point is that it's probably not enough to be an expert hacker to burst a dam. You'd have to be an insider. At that point, you can just blow it up with a car bomb.
If you're trying to kill people, computers are currently not the way to do it. Most critical systems are airwalled, and for the ones that aren't, you'll still have to hack nearly blind through a totally unfamiliar system.
It's easy to inconvenience people with cyberattacks, but that's not really terrorism, is it?
It would take an expert insider a lot of work to cause the kind of catastrophes the author is predicting here. Making a bomb is quick, easy way to kill a lot of people, and it gets a lot more media attention. It's also much closer to Al-Quaeda's traditional area of expertise.
Developers: Screw your programming model, it locks me into Windows, managed code is slow, I can't run it on XP without 100MB of runtime installs and so on.
Having not used WinFX, I can't really comment on this, but when a system is so slow and memory-hungry that Microsoft doesn't use it for most internal development, it's easy to see why developers complain.
General consumer market: we don't want SO much security, we don't want SO much graphics, we don't want the sleep mode SO much, and your games suck.
I haven't seen Aero since alpha days, but when I was using it, it was hideous, at least as ugly as the pinstriped Mac OS 10.1. Additionally, it had lots of gratuitous fancy effects, but didn't add to usability in any significant way. For example, in MacOS X, when you minimize a window, the animation shows you where the window went. In Aero, it rotates and fades into the desktop, which is candiful but gives no information. Apple figured out how to make visual effects that are (for the most part) useful, tell you what's going on and don't attract too much attention. In Vista, they're just distracting.
As for security, remember that it's always a trade-off. I had hoped that Microsoft learned its lesson on the modals thing, but apparently not: bothering the user with dozens of system-modal windows is really annoying. Asking the user to confirm everything is annoying. It doesn't make things more secure if the user learns to click through everything. In contrast, on OS X and on Linux, you don't have to enter your password very often, which is better.
There's still lots of room for improvement here. All these systems should recognize certain types of safe actions, and allow the user to run them without a password or confirmation (eg, running update-manager in Ubuntu). They all could figure out a secure window manager design which would avoid the need to make security dialogs system-modal. They could figure out a happy medium for bothering the user about firewall and AV. They could snapshot the user's documents. Mac OS X could tighten up its security against admin account compromises. Vista seems to be moving in the right direction, but it's two steps forward, one step back, and it's been 5 years in coming.
Microsoft have a de facto monopoly in the operating systems market. If Microsoft bindles a 'free'[1] web browser with their operating system, then they make it much harder for other browsers to compete.
This is entirely true; however...
This is anti-competitive behaviour.
While it hurt the competition, I honestly think that bundling a web browser with their OS was an improvement to their product. Think about it: people want to browse the web. People expect the default install of an operating system to include most of the functionality that they'll need for everyday tasks, and a web browser definitely part of that. Every major desktop OS today ships with at least one in the base install for this reason. Several Linux distributions have more than one (konqueror, firefox, galeon?). And while we bitch about Media Player, I haven't heard complaints about their built-in calculator, email client, scheduling software, solitaire game, screen saver...
It would have been acceptable for them to produce a web browser as a free download...
Yeah, I'll just surf on over to microsoft.com and grab it... oh wait...
Seriously, this brings up a bunch of issues. How do you download it if you don't have a web browser? Some FTP client? But then they have to separate the FTP client from IE, and bundle it... And how long does it take to download over 14.4? Where do you give the user directions to get the web browser, and do you have to give directions to get Netscape too?
If you're going to offer it for free, and anticipate that even a significant minority of your users will want it... why not bundle?
Now, pressuring OEMs is clearly illegal, as are the API shenanigans, but I don't understand the bundling thing.
There are current encryption technologies already deployed in the market that allow for two sets of data to be encrypted with two keys into a single file. This allows a user to encrypt a sensitive file with an innocuous one, so that when required to disclose a private key the user can just give the one that decrypts the innocent data.
Except not: plausible deniability only works if you're innocent until proven guilty. In the U.S., and even more so in Britain, if you're using crypto, it isn't true anymore. Just having a crypto program on your hard drive shows criminal intent, and if it does layered encryption, that shows intent to commit perjury also.
The Harvard-discounted Core Duo one is $2861 list, $1631 discounted. That's with 1.66GHz ULV Core Duo, 80GB SATA HDD, 1.5GB RAM, DVD burner, standard connectivity (802.11abg, Bluetooth2, IRDA, Gigabit, USB2, Firewire) plus a CDMA antenna, crappy Intel graphics (GMA950,1024x768), fingerprint reader, Windows XP Pro, 3 year warranty (except on the battery). It gets 8 hours of battery life in Lenovo's (presumably rigged) benchmarks, is 0.8" thick and weighs 3.5 lbs.
BTW - if you want to make the Apple premium look really good, you should compare the new MacBooks to the higher end Lenovo or Sony.
True, but the Lenovo 12" machines are 0.8" thick. Depending on the battery, you get either 3.5 lbs, 8 hours of battery life or 3 lbs, 4 hours battery life.
Of course, I'm biased because my college is giving a 43% discount on Lenovo stuff...
While this is true for packages outside the distribution, those inside are very easy to install. Firefox comes by default, but say you wanted to install Inkscape.
Hm, funny I haven't noticed this, and I'm using a lot of extensions...
Could be that it takes a very long time to eat a lot of RAM, or that I occasionally close the browser, but I really haven't had problems with my system running low on memory.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Iraq DID have WMDs. See FoxNews.
The article you link mentions that Saddam had small caches of chemical weapons, probably ones that we gave him, left over from before the Gulf War (i.e. at least 12 years old when Gulf War II began). Bush alleged that they were manufacturing and stockpiling WMDs, and that he was looking to sell them to Al Qaeda terrorist; there is still no evidence for either allegation. As another poster mentioned, Saddam may not have known where all the WMDs were or even that they existed, but I won't give him the benefit of the doubt.
2) If the invasion of Iraq for really for the oil, then why is it over $75/barrel?
The war started for a number of reasons. The WMDs were either a lie or a mistake, or some combination. The stronger reasons were oil, Saddam being evil, some amount of a personal grudge, some amount of support for Israel against a dangerous SCUD-weilding neighbor, and possibly some amount of 1984-style "war is peace" politicking.
It failed on almost all counts. We didn't find the WMDs (at least, not any new ones). The insurgency targets oil rigs and convoys, making oil production very expensive. Saddam is out of power and will be on trial for the rest of his life, but Iraq is still a chaotic hellhole. Israel is under a greater threat now, because they can't play Iraq and Iran against each other (in particular, we'll have a harder time stopping Iran from getting nukes).
The "war is peace" politicking worked, though.
I used to dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux (right now I run them both virtualized under Mac OS X).
This was primarily for games, (Starcraft just doesn't run on a console), but it also allowed me to test web sites I wasa working on in Internet Explorer (and now Safari as well).
Also, while you asked for Windows, MacOS X has much better chat clients than Linux (Adium, iChat AV for video conferencing). Ubuntu, however, has more packages available via apt (I use Fink, but it's pretty limited) and a nicer environment for *nix development.
Dual booting is for people who can't really decide why they bought a PC in the first place.
No, it's for people who bought a PC for more than one purpose. Like gaming, communication, programming, and word processing. Or programming and video editing. Or multi-platform programming.
Usually people speak of the future and the past in their own frame. This doesn't usually cause arguments. Humans tend to move slowly wrt each other and wrt most phenomena they observe (slowly compared to c), and don't tend to fall into particularly deep gravitational wells (that Indian kid notwithstanding).
Which is, in the nutshell, just the old "security by obscurity" argument. Which has already been debated to hell and back and is known to not work that way.
RANT!
I'm sick and tired of the "what the other guy says is security by obscurity" argument. The real truth of the matter is Kerckhoff's principle, which says that a security system (in Kerckhoff's case, a cyrptosystem, but it generalizes) should remain secure if its design falls into the hands of the attacker, or equivalently "the smaller the secret, the more secure the system". This is a statement about design principles, not about disclosure; non-disclosure is a defense in depth. Of course, it also prevents other qualified people from reviewing your designs, so there's a trade-off to make, but there are advantages on both sides.
Kerckhoff's principle doesn't mean that you should disclose the design of a security system, just that the system should be designed to remain secure if you do. Note that the NSA designs its ciphers to remain secure if their workings are disclosed, but it doesn't disclose them. Kerckhoff's principle also doesn't mean that a flawed system is more secure if you publish vulnerabilities complete with exploit code. It does mean that by design, the system should remain secure no matter how much code you publish, but obviously once you have a vulnerability that's not true anymore.
Under the assumption that criminals have already discovered and are already exploiting a vulnerability, it may be argued that disclosing vulnerabilities improves security by forcing the vendor to patch, or by alerting systems administrators to the vulnerability (particularly if a workaround is available). Neither of these is improved by widely-distributed, fully-functional exploit code, so lacking some other reason (please enlighten me), publishing such code is a terrible security decision.
There's words in this, I can't understand word
That's why the EU wants Microsoft to document it, silly!
But then shouldn't they have killed you? Something's fishy....
He was just an intern. He didn't have a license to kill.
Surprisingly, DRM actually likes virtualization. Here's how it works: you make a small, stable and lightweight hypervisor, and a lightweight DRM OS to run under it. You then checksum them at boot through a TPM, and require that they check out to some specific version before the TPM will decrypt your DRMed media.
This is pretty hard to break. Your hypervisor and DRM OS are very small, and can be locked down and checked carefully. Any data not fixed by the TPM checksumming can be encrypted, so you can't hack it by removing the hard drive . You need an IOMMU to shield against DMA attacks from the host OS, but other than that it's very secure.
Very funny sample! I can read it substantially without errors -- its choice of words doesn't bother me, but the rhythm is broken as it stands -- meter isn't consistent.
Meter isn't consistent throughout the poem, but it usually is between the two lines of a couplet. What I'd meant, though, is "without pausing to work out pronunciation," rather than "without botching the meter by misreading."
But English wasn't any tougher 30-40 years ago than it is today... yet kids of that era didn't, and as adults don't, have the problems that kids of our Modren Era do... which in itself points at education, or lack of it, as the culprit.
I'll have to take your word for it. I haven't noticed a widespread problem with spelling or pronunciation among students near my age, but I've mostly associated with nerds. I also haven't paid much attention to normal children: I've mostly talked with either smart kids or kids in need of tutoring.
Still, it says something about our written language that we can have spelling bees. Autistic middle schoolers study spelling for hours a day, weeks or months on end, and yet the tournament ends as one after another screws up. Given that they screw up, it might benefit the rest of us if the spelling were more consistent.
Eep. More complete version.
It's not just that kids aren't taught early enough. English is genuinely tough stuff. Try to read that poem quickly; I'm a native speaker and not stupid by any means, but I couldn't get though it without errors or breaking rhythm (at least, not on the first try).
Supposedly, Longhorn is named for a pub between Whistler (XP) and Blackcomb (Windows 2009?). It was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to The Next Big Thing.
Right crossover point, but you got it backward.
PayPal is cheaper for anything over $100.
Sorry, you are only allowed to charge for your physical costs of disribution.
There's some things money can't buy...
I don't suggest EPIA if what you're after is speed. They're small and low-power, but not fast. The 25 Gb/s is a joke, I don't even think the chip even has that much memory bandwidth: you might get it for ECB mode cache->cache, but the whole system will crawl.
If you count other things your OS will be doing, an Athlon system will be faster and cheaper. However, the EPIA will be half the size and draw a third the power.
My point is that it's probably not enough to be an expert hacker to burst a dam. You'd have to be an insider. At that point, you can just blow it up with a car bomb.
If you're trying to kill people, computers are currently not the way to do it. Most critical systems are airwalled, and for the ones that aren't, you'll still have to hack nearly blind through a totally unfamiliar system.
It's easy to inconvenience people with cyberattacks, but that's not really terrorism, is it?
It would take an expert insider a lot of work to cause the kind of catastrophes the author is predicting here. Making a bomb is quick, easy way to kill a lot of people, and it gets a lot more media attention. It's also much closer to Al-Quaeda's traditional area of expertise.
Developers: Screw your programming model, it locks me into Windows, managed code is slow, I can't run it on XP without 100MB of runtime installs and so on.
Having not used WinFX, I can't really comment on this, but when a system is so slow and memory-hungry that Microsoft doesn't use it for most internal development, it's easy to see why developers complain.
General consumer market: we don't want SO much security, we don't want SO much graphics, we don't want the sleep mode SO much, and your games suck.
I haven't seen Aero since alpha days, but when I was using it, it was hideous, at least as ugly as the pinstriped Mac OS 10.1. Additionally, it had lots of gratuitous fancy effects, but didn't add to usability in any significant way. For example, in MacOS X, when you minimize a window, the animation shows you where the window went. In Aero, it rotates and fades into the desktop, which is candiful but gives no information. Apple figured out how to make visual effects that are (for the most part) useful, tell you what's going on and don't attract too much attention. In Vista, they're just distracting.
As for security, remember that it's always a trade-off. I had hoped that Microsoft learned its lesson on the modals thing, but apparently not: bothering the user with dozens of system-modal windows is really annoying. Asking the user to confirm everything is annoying. It doesn't make things more secure if the user learns to click through everything. In contrast, on OS X and on Linux, you don't have to enter your password very often, which is better.
There's still lots of room for improvement here. All these systems should recognize certain types of safe actions, and allow the user to run them without a password or confirmation (eg, running update-manager in Ubuntu). They all could figure out a secure window manager design which would avoid the need to make security dialogs system-modal. They could figure out a happy medium for bothering the user about firewall and AV. They could snapshot the user's documents. Mac OS X could tighten up its security against admin account compromises. Vista seems to be moving in the right direction, but it's two steps forward, one step back, and it's been 5 years in coming.
Microsoft have a de facto monopoly in the operating systems market. If Microsoft bindles a 'free'[1] web browser with their operating system, then they make it much harder for other browsers to compete.
This is entirely true; however...
This is anti-competitive behaviour.
While it hurt the competition, I honestly think that bundling a web browser with their OS was an improvement to their product. Think about it: people want to browse the web. People expect the default install of an operating system to include most of the functionality that they'll need for everyday tasks, and a web browser definitely part of that. Every major desktop OS today ships with at least one in the base install for this reason. Several Linux distributions have more than one (konqueror, firefox, galeon?). And while we bitch about Media Player, I haven't heard complaints about their built-in calculator, email client, scheduling software, solitaire game, screen saver...
It would have been acceptable for them to produce a web browser as a free download...
Yeah, I'll just surf on over to microsoft.com and grab it... oh wait...
Seriously, this brings up a bunch of issues. How do you download it if you don't have a web browser? Some FTP client? But then they have to separate the FTP client from IE, and bundle it... And how long does it take to download over 14.4? Where do you give the user directions to get the web browser, and do you have to give directions to get Netscape too?
If you're going to offer it for free, and anticipate that even a significant minority of your users will want it... why not bundle?
Now, pressuring OEMs is clearly illegal, as are the API shenanigans, but I don't understand the bundling thing.
Don't be silly. Goombas don't have hands, so there's no way you could have typed that post!
He did say "speaking"... maybe he's using speech-to-text?
There are current encryption technologies already deployed in the market that allow for two sets of data to be encrypted with two keys into a single file. This allows a user to encrypt a sensitive file with an innocuous one, so that when required to disclose a private key the user can just give the one that decrypts the innocent data.
Except not: plausible deniability only works if you're innocent until proven guilty. In the U.S., and even more so in Britain, if you're using crypto, it isn't true anymore. Just having a crypto program on your hard drive shows criminal intent, and if it does layered encryption, that shows intent to commit perjury also.
They start at $1500 with a Core Duo.
The Harvard-discounted Core Duo one is $2861 list, $1631 discounted. That's with 1.66GHz ULV Core Duo, 80GB SATA HDD, 1.5GB RAM, DVD burner, standard connectivity (802.11abg, Bluetooth2, IRDA, Gigabit, USB2, Firewire) plus a CDMA antenna, crappy Intel graphics (GMA950,1024x768), fingerprint reader, Windows XP Pro, 3 year warranty (except on the battery). It gets 8 hours of battery life in Lenovo's (presumably rigged) benchmarks, is 0.8" thick and weighs 3.5 lbs.
BTW - if you want to make the Apple premium look really good, you should compare the new MacBooks to the higher end Lenovo or Sony.
True, but the Lenovo 12" machines are 0.8" thick. Depending on the battery, you get either 3.5 lbs, 8 hours of battery life or 3 lbs, 4 hours battery life.
Of course, I'm biased because my college is giving a 43% discount on Lenovo stuff...
While this is true for packages outside the distribution, those inside are very easy to install. Firefox comes by default, but say you wanted to install Inkscape.
Applications -> Add/Remove -> Graphics -> Inkscape Vector Illustrator
Apply. Enter your password. Done.
Windows' "Add/Remove Applications" feature pales in comparison.
Hm, funny I haven't noticed this, and I'm using a lot of extensions...
Could be that it takes a very long time to eat a lot of RAM, or that I occasionally close the browser, but I really haven't had problems with my system running low on memory.