My system *does* update Firefox when there are updates.
However, my system also has an update system where it belongs -- as a general purpose tool.
If your operating system lacks apt support, that's a flaw in your operating system, not in Firefox. Seriously, the idea that every software package has to have some hacked-up non-automated GUI update procedure is just silly.
I see a trend in which people submitting slashdot items use skewed data with no disclaimers.
Amen.
The real numbers from general sites have Firefox climbing, sure, but still well within the single digits. And IE (all versions) is still over 80%.
Yes. I second this. Story submitters -- it doesn't do you or anyone any good to submit yet another story with misleading statistics about how much Firefox is in use, and it makes it more difficult to get real numbers.
Firefox is nice. It's a better browser than IE from a technical standpoint. Have fun using it. The market share will come, given continued superiority and time.
That being said, I have a longstanding policy of marking as foe those who write egregiously bullshit and misleading Slashdot articles, so this story author has won a place on my foes list. If you feel the same way, here's a link to your relationship page for him.
GPG give syou end-to-end encryption, but authentication is only as good as your way of getting people's public key.
Use keyservers, and have each client advertise the key its using.
Worst case, even if the end user is doing no trust management whatsoever, end-to-end encryption is provided -- roughly the same as SSL (well, SSL without server/client cert pairs) but for the entire route. If the end user *does* choose to trust specific people, they gain full authentication and encryption end-to-end. A server compromise will not compromise their data, man-in-the-middle is not possible (and given that I've never installed any certs on any SSL-using jabber clients, it's a good bet that these are still open to man-in-the-middle attacks).
I'm not saying that Kerberos is bad. I'm saying that it doesn't solve a portion of the security problem that GPG *can* solve.
GPG can be just as transparent as Kerberos -- but the point is that it can also, in the hands of expert users (or users with a configured client or with an easy-to-use client), allow end-to-end secured connection instead of just client-server secured connections.
The open source libjpeg that just about all open source software depends on has had its own share of problems.
It's good to see that file parsers, not something that traditionally recieves the degree of scrutiny that network-facing server code gets, are being examined for security vulnerabilities, though.
His health plan is socialist crap that will limit the citizens' medical choices and steal more money from the people who've earned it.
To be blunt, I'd say that both candidates' health plans are pretty socialist in nature -- neither wants to eliminate subsidized health care
His views on defense are weak and he favors U.N. control of our military.
[shrug] *I*'m not particularly a fan of offense -- I like a more traditional, Revolutionary-War-esque policy, where we don't try to constantly militarily intervene in conflicts around the globe. Saying that you won't wage war when faced with a UN condemnation is hardly UN control of the military. If Iraq had used such a policy, they'd still be the richest Middle Eastern nation.
Won't protect you!
This sort of statement frightens me. I have a friend, an ex-Soviet, to whom I spoke about Putin's recent statements. Putin is ex-KGB, and his response to the school hostage situation is that "we need a stronger party". It seemed to me like things were simply falling back to Soviet days -- I would have thought that this sort of thing would alarm the Russian people, and I mentioned so to my friend. He described the Soviet mindset, the reason people are willing to be exploited -- they want a strong figure, a father figure, someone who can "protect" them, and they don't mind giving up civil rights to do so. The tsars had a lot of flaws, but they were strong leaders. Lenin was a strong leader. Stalin had plenty of flaws, but he was still a strong leader. Gorbochev and Yeltsin have been comparatively weak leaders, not someone that people can look at and feel safe. That's the sort of mindset that concerns me, a sort of 1984ish feeling that I see the US sliding toward somewhat. "Give extensive police power to me and I'll take care of you" is just something with implications that I worry greatly about.
They are handing out EC voted based only on the percent of the population received.
True, but the total number of EC votes is still not a direct representation of population.
All this means is that if Colorado is a swing state (just about tied), politicians will be less interested in it under the proposed system, and if it is not a swing state (say it's voting heavily for one candidate) it will get more interest. So you'll have candidates campaign in all the swing states -- and Colorado. On the other hand, you'll never have candidates as interested in Colorado as any *other* swing states.
Please, hate MS all you want, but at least hate them for a reason, not the typical/. drooling paranoia I see here.
The drooling paranoia was built because of years of times when Microsoft really *did* screw over customers or competition in quite an unethical manner, like the DR-DOS application compatibility, or the IIS Netscape Navigator deprioritization. Microsoft generally didn't get in trouble for its misdeeds, so now IT folk angry after years of poor treatment have simply started attacking Microsoft for all sorts of things that really aren't very bad at all. Microsoft is simply paying back in installments for earlier nasty deeds.
Where I come from, most organizations *want* to log these conversations for security and ethics reasons.
"Ethics" reasons? Most large companies want to keep *zero* records so nothing they have can be supeonaed to get them in trouble.
More to the point, it's fine if they want to have a "no GPG" policy. That's perfectly reasonable. They can simply disallow GPG usage (actually, if they're doing this, they're probably using an IMing system that is more conducive to logging).
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable for me to want to say "I want to send this message, and I don't want *anyone* other than the end recipient reading it." GPG provides for such a guarantee. If I enable GPG, nobody but the intended recipient can read my message, and *if* the organization allows it, the receipient will get my message.
Oh, rest assured, I'm sure that US.government already has these ideas. My guess is their either waiting for the election to be over, or for the next crisis to shoehorn it in.
The Reichstag is burning! The Reichstag is burning!
Seriously, so far we've had suspension of civil rights and an increase of police powers with terrorism as an excuse in the cases of Bush, Hitler, and Putin (I'm kind of appalled about his latest quotes about how Russia needs "a stronger party" to "fight terrorism" -- I had to have a Soviet emigree explain to me how Russians like having a "father figure", a strong leader, even if that leader has a tendency to screw them over).
So what elements of the PATRIOT (not "Patriot") Act do you think are so effective?
Because, frankly, I find it to be pretty intrusive and while I haven't read the full text, I've been unimpressed with what summarized versions of the bill can do to "prevent terrorism".
It basically makes Colorado's vote totally and completely meaningless.
Wrong.
What it does is says to candidates:
"If Colorado is a swing state, pay less attention to it. If Colorado is not a swing state, pay more attention to it."
Now, I admit that Colorado is, in the current election, a swing state, which means that candidates are likely to pay less attention to it -- but in 2008, if Colorado is going to vote 70% Republican, it means that both sides *still* have interest in campaigning and doing things for the state, because they can still win votes in the state.
If states like Texas, California, and New York (which all currently vote firmly Republican or Democrat) did this, it would mean that they would recieve *more* attention from candidates, rather than simply be ignored.
The electoral college prevents the big states (new york, california, and florida) from determining the agenda for the whole nation (and judging from current events...would you really want them to?.
Don't forget Texas.
You're wrong here -- the weighting of each non-populous-state voter's vote to be more important than each populous-state voter's vote is what reduces NY, CA, FL, etc's influence. This can be done perfectly well without winner-take all (or, for that matter, the electoral college).
Bullshit. The current system weights extra-heavily each vote of a rural voter. If you want to do so (as is being proposed in Colorado) you can continue to overweight the value of votes in rural states. The weighting to "save rural states from urban tyranny" has nothing to do with the electoral college/popular vote issue, and is not even up for question in Colorado.
The proposed system will tend to decrease candidate interest in Colorado if Colorado is the only vote to do this.
If many states adopt this, it will mean that candidates will stop ignoring all states except swing states. Generally, I'd say that this is a good thing (and unless you live in Pennsylvania or Florida or similar, you probably agree).
If this system didn't exist, as many people have pointed out above, a persons vote in a populous state has a much bigger impact.
You're misunderstanding what the story is about.
This isn't about eliminating the electoral college at a national level -- it's about insituting it, using instead of winner-take-all, for the state.
This does give a better map of what the people in the state actually feel. If two states use this system, it does *not* make any person's vote weaker based on the population of the state (though, just because winner-take-all provides more votes for a given candidate, it's possible that Colorado would see less campaigning than states that do not use this system).
Frankly, I'd like all states to use this setup. There's little reason not to do so, as long as everyone does it
I think this is a *good* idea when universalized, though I agree that it might decrease how much candidates will pander to a state (on the off chance that it happens to be a swing state) at the expense of other states.
Your premise, that this is not a good thing for Colorado, is probably true.
However, it is probably a good thing for the system as a whole.
I really thought that you had some interesting political insight -- then I took a look at your blog and realized that you were just probably concerned that Kerry not win the election. You pointed out that drug law is probably not a good way to win voters, but then proceeded to bash Kerry for "looking French".
Please, please, please include GPG support (a la gabber), Apple. Business have been wanting secure instant messaging for a long time -- I'd like it too.
Slashdot Mirror
My system *does* update Firefox when there are updates.
However, my system also has an update system where it belongs -- as a general purpose tool.
If your operating system lacks apt support, that's a flaw in your operating system, not in Firefox. Seriously, the idea that every software package has to have some hacked-up non-automated GUI update procedure is just silly.
I use Firefox and never seem to run into any IE only sites.
Try registering to take the General GRE online.
I see a trend in which people submitting slashdot items use skewed data with no disclaimers.
Amen.
The real numbers from general sites have Firefox climbing, sure, but still well within the single digits. And IE (all versions) is still over 80%.
Yes. I second this. Story submitters -- it doesn't do you or anyone any good to submit yet another story with misleading statistics about how much Firefox is in use, and it makes it more difficult to get real numbers.
Firefox is nice. It's a better browser than IE from a technical standpoint. Have fun using it. The market share will come, given continued superiority and time.
That being said, I have a longstanding policy of marking as foe those who write egregiously bullshit and misleading Slashdot articles, so this story author has won a place on my foes list. If you feel the same way, here's a link to your relationship page for him.
Until FireFox offers a centralized way to update
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Unless, of course, your operating system lacks a general-purpose update utility, as is the case for Mac OS X and Windows.
I wish we Americans had such a fuel tax.
The number of our international problems that have derived from the fact that we drive SUVs and demand massive amounts of cheap oil is just stupid.
GPG give syou end-to-end encryption, but authentication is only as good as your way of getting people's public key.
Use keyservers, and have each client advertise the key its using.
Worst case, even if the end user is doing no trust management whatsoever, end-to-end encryption is provided -- roughly the same as SSL (well, SSL without server/client cert pairs) but for the entire route. If the end user *does* choose to trust specific people, they gain full authentication and encryption end-to-end. A server compromise will not compromise their data, man-in-the-middle is not possible (and given that I've never installed any certs on any SSL-using jabber clients, it's a good bet that these are still open to man-in-the-middle attacks).
I'm not saying that Kerberos is bad. I'm saying that it doesn't solve a portion of the security problem that GPG *can* solve.
GPG can be just as transparent as Kerberos -- but the point is that it can also, in the hands of expert users (or users with a configured client or with an easy-to-use client), allow end-to-end secured connection instead of just client-server secured connections.
Read my last journal entry. The PC colorspace is not sufficient to handle a virtual window.
I've generally felt that MSNBC is, if anything, particularly critical of Microsoft, actually.
The open source libjpeg that just about all open source software depends on has had its own share of problems.
It's good to see that file parsers, not something that traditionally recieves the degree of scrutiny that network-facing server code gets, are being examined for security vulnerabilities, though.
His health plan is socialist crap that will limit the citizens' medical choices and steal more money from the people who've earned it.
To be blunt, I'd say that both candidates' health plans are pretty socialist in nature -- neither wants to eliminate subsidized health care
His views on defense are weak and he favors U.N. control of our military.
[shrug] *I*'m not particularly a fan of offense -- I like a more traditional, Revolutionary-War-esque policy, where we don't try to constantly militarily intervene in conflicts around the globe. Saying that you won't wage war when faced with a UN condemnation is hardly UN control of the military. If Iraq had used such a policy, they'd still be the richest Middle Eastern nation.
Won't protect you!
This sort of statement frightens me. I have a friend, an ex-Soviet, to whom I spoke about Putin's recent statements. Putin is ex-KGB, and his response to the school hostage situation is that "we need a stronger party". It seemed to me like things were simply falling back to Soviet days -- I would have thought that this sort of thing would alarm the Russian people, and I mentioned so to my friend. He described the Soviet mindset, the reason people are willing to be exploited -- they want a strong figure, a father figure, someone who can "protect" them, and they don't mind giving up civil rights to do so. The tsars had a lot of flaws, but they were strong leaders. Lenin was a strong leader. Stalin had plenty of flaws, but he was still a strong leader. Gorbochev and Yeltsin have been comparatively weak leaders, not someone that people can look at and feel safe. That's the sort of mindset that concerns me, a sort of 1984ish feeling that I see the US sliding toward somewhat. "Give extensive police power to me and I'll take care of you" is just something with implications that I worry greatly about.
They are handing out EC voted based only on the percent of the population received.
True, but the total number of EC votes is still not a direct representation of population.
All this means is that if Colorado is a swing state (just about tied), politicians will be less interested in it under the proposed system, and if it is not a swing state (say it's voting heavily for one candidate) it will get more interest. So you'll have candidates campaign in all the swing states -- and Colorado. On the other hand, you'll never have candidates as interested in Colorado as any *other* swing states.
Please, hate MS all you want, but at least hate them for a reason, not the typical /. drooling paranoia I see here.
The drooling paranoia was built because of years of times when Microsoft really *did* screw over customers or competition in quite an unethical manner, like the DR-DOS application compatibility, or the IIS Netscape Navigator deprioritization. Microsoft generally didn't get in trouble for its misdeeds, so now IT folk angry after years of poor treatment have simply started attacking Microsoft for all sorts of things that really aren't very bad at all. Microsoft is simply paying back in installments for earlier nasty deeds.
Where I come from, most organizations *want* to log these conversations for security and ethics reasons.
"Ethics" reasons? Most large companies want to keep *zero* records so nothing they have can be supeonaed to get them in trouble.
More to the point, it's fine if they want to have a "no GPG" policy. That's perfectly reasonable. They can simply disallow GPG usage (actually, if they're doing this, they're probably using an IMing system that is more conducive to logging).
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable for me to want to say "I want to send this message, and I don't want *anyone* other than the end recipient reading it." GPG provides for such a guarantee. If I enable GPG, nobody but the intended recipient can read my message, and *if* the organization allows it, the receipient will get my message.
I admit that it depends how it is being implemented, but Kerberos is generally used to solve a different set of problems from GPG.
It's probably just the framework to authenticate to the server. It's not as good as GPG end-to-end encryption and authentication.
Oh, rest assured, I'm sure that US.government already has these ideas. My guess is their either waiting for the election to be over, or for the next crisis to shoehorn it in.
The Reichstag is burning! The Reichstag is burning!
Seriously, so far we've had suspension of civil rights and an increase of police powers with terrorism as an excuse in the cases of Bush, Hitler, and Putin (I'm kind of appalled about his latest quotes about how Russia needs "a stronger party" to "fight terrorism" -- I had to have a Soviet emigree explain to me how Russians like having a "father figure", a strong leader, even if that leader has a tendency to screw them over).
So what elements of the PATRIOT (not "Patriot") Act do you think are so effective?
Because, frankly, I find it to be pretty intrusive and while I haven't read the full text, I've been unimpressed with what summarized versions of the bill can do to "prevent terrorism".
It basically makes Colorado's vote totally and completely meaningless.
Wrong.
What it does is says to candidates:
"If Colorado is a swing state, pay less attention to it. If Colorado is not a swing state, pay more attention to it."
Now, I admit that Colorado is, in the current election, a swing state, which means that candidates are likely to pay less attention to it -- but in 2008, if Colorado is going to vote 70% Republican, it means that both sides *still* have interest in campaigning and doing things for the state, because they can still win votes in the state.
If states like Texas, California, and New York (which all currently vote firmly Republican or Democrat) did this, it would mean that they would recieve *more* attention from candidates, rather than simply be ignored.
The electoral college prevents the big states (new york, california, and florida) from determining the agenda for the whole nation (and judging from current events...would you really want them to?.
Don't forget Texas.
You're wrong here -- the weighting of each non-populous-state voter's vote to be more important than each populous-state voter's vote is what reduces NY, CA, FL, etc's influence. This can be done perfectly well without winner-take all (or, for that matter, the electoral college).
Bullshit. The current system weights extra-heavily each vote of a rural voter. If you want to do so (as is being proposed in Colorado) you can continue to overweight the value of votes in rural states. The weighting to "save rural states from urban tyranny" has nothing to do with the electoral college/popular vote issue, and is not even up for question in Colorado.
The proposed system will tend to decrease candidate interest in Colorado if Colorado is the only vote to do this.
If many states adopt this, it will mean that candidates will stop ignoring all states except swing states. Generally, I'd say that this is a good thing (and unless you live in Pennsylvania or Florida or similar, you probably agree).
I think we need to change the all or nothing portion of the system, but we cannot do away with it entirely.
Which is exactly what is being proposed in Colorado.
If this system didn't exist, as many people have pointed out above, a persons vote in a populous state has a much bigger impact.
You're misunderstanding what the story is about.
This isn't about eliminating the electoral college at a national level -- it's about insituting it, using instead of winner-take-all, for the state.
This does give a better map of what the people in the state actually feel. If two states use this system, it does *not* make any person's vote weaker based on the population of the state (though, just because winner-take-all provides more votes for a given candidate, it's possible that Colorado would see less campaigning than states that do not use this system).
Frankly, I'd like all states to use this setup. There's little reason not to do so, as long as everyone does it
I think this is a *good* idea when universalized, though I agree that it might decrease how much candidates will pander to a state (on the off chance that it happens to be a swing state) at the expense of other states.
Your premise, that this is not a good thing for Colorado, is probably true.
However, it is probably a good thing for the system as a whole.
I really thought that you had some interesting political insight -- then I took a look at your blog and realized that you were just probably concerned that Kerry not win the election. You pointed out that drug law is probably not a good way to win voters, but then proceeded to bash Kerry for "looking French".
You can have state-weighted voting power and still not need the electoral college, you know.
Please, please, please include GPG support (a la gabber), Apple. Business have been wanting secure instant messaging for a long time -- I'd like it too.
It's rather depressing how many people equate "NAT" (i.e. major functionality limitation) with "security".