You have to be kidding. This is the best thing ever.
I don't like most cell phone users. They talk on the phone while driving ("Yeah, I'm safe, uh huh"), talk near me (not their fault, but it always makes me think that they're talking to me), have their ringers go off in lectures I'm in, play incredibly annoying ring tones, and have a whole host of other irritating behaviors.
I *also* don't like the constant Bushie trumpeting about how "terrorist this" and "terrorist that" and therefore we all have to take action foo. It's blown way out of proportion.
This is a win-win situation. No matter who loses (cell phone users or terorist hypers), I can't lose, and it's likely that cell phone manufacturers will work on making cells less annoying and that the "anti-terrorism" arguments will become weaker.
Now if only Microsoft and BayStar could clash heads, my weekend would be complete.
The cell phones used in the Madrid bobmings were used for their timers. That's why they found one undetonated bomb, the clock read PM instead of AM. None of the bombs were detonated via recieving a call.
I thought Euro-folks used a 24-hour clock, unlike we unfortunate USians.
To be fair, he had pretty good documentation of what he was doing -- all the discussion on eBay, a fraud complaint, etc.
I hope that someone ends up contacting the Indiana State University professor. He's almost certainly the innocent victim of identity theft (in which case he would probably like to be able to do something about it) or (rather less likely, unless he's extremely stupid about giving out data pointing to him) running a nasty financial scam, in which case...darn, I'm not sure who should be contacted. eBay probably doesn't care, the FBI does interstate but will want larger dollar amounts involved, I'm guessing that the local police know next to nothing about technology...
<Unknown__> hostmask of Ago on the 11th of october: frb9-d9bb4a51.pool.mediaWays.net <Unknown__> earlier this week <Unknown__> in a private channel.... <Unknown__> the person having access to the beta, sources and other released stuff
You know, it sounds as if they could have dug this up from IRC server logs. Now, obviously it's quite *possible* to log all channels on an IRC server (it still boggles the mind that IRC clients don't have encryption support as standard), but I wasn't actually aware that this was being actively done -- and it would have to be in order to snag this from a minor, private channel well in advance of anyone knowing who the responsible parties might be.
That's a bit Orwellian.
I've never actually looked up whether AOL's privacy policy says anything that would keep them from logging all ICQs/AIM messages, but that could be quite a valuable storehouse of information as well. The only mainstream IM protocol that I know of where clients support end-to-end encryption as standard is Jabber.
A worm that installed Freenet nodes would be much more effective, as this would increase effective bandwidth, anonymity, and disk space on Freenet, without causing the issues of "who has rights to write to the machine" that FTP would produce.
There was a massive DDoS against CMU at one point that did slow down the univ. connection a bit.
The thing is that not only are the pipes quite fast, CERT is based at CMU -- and those are the folks doing some of the main research on identifying and avoiding DDoSes.
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract.
No. Kudzu is strictly an autoconfiguration utility. It doesn't download and install new drivers.
While I'm posting anyway, I'll drop in my other thoughts on the story to avoid multiple posts:
I could see something like this happening, but I think that it's going to need heavy interaction with the big distros to come out.
If money is a concern (as it apparently is, based on your requests for it) you could try to get hired on at one of the distro companies, though I wouldn't count your chickens (especially since this isn't in a " v1 state" yet). This is stuff related to end-user-experience and configuration, which has traditionally fallen more into the hands of the distro people.
Personally, I don't see any reason this couldn't be used with GPLed drivers or even source distributions of drivers-- download, build, install. I still don't intend to purchase hardware that only has a binary driver.
I'm not entirely sure that it wouldn't be better to extend existing (well supported) management and distribution systems like apt, yum, or red-carpet. It'd be a little weird to have a completely different system for providing driver downloads. Furthermore, your system seems to require that one be online when installing drivers. A caching mechanism may be more useful.
I don't think that you maintaining full control over the distribution server is feasible. Some software vendors will complain ("Why do we need to go through you to make updates available? Are you providing serious testing and QA services for us, or is it just a speed bump?"), and some distros may want to provide reliability guarantees. I really think that, at the least, this should be a distro vendor-provided service (if the drivers undergo distro QA), and if not, the server should basically be a "server tracker" that links to drivers on manufacturer-provided sites.
A couple of issues:
* Because you're specifically providing third-party services, almost all Linux kernel hackers will be much less interested in fixing drivers, and those drivers will not be maintained. Users of binary-only drivers are generally SOL when it comes to kernel hackers providing fixes, and even thirt-party people that don't merge drivers into the mainstream kernel run the risk of having the Linux folks break their driver at every release. Linux provides very weak binary backwards compatability guarantees -- the field is strongly tilted toward open-source drivers. It is difficult to produce and support a binary-only driver.
If you use a signing mechanism, I would recommend GPG rather than a homebrew. It's well-built, widely-available, and there are keyservers already out there. It's what RPM uses.
Remember that signing is *only* useful to the end user if it leverages some degree of trust. Signing on Windows is useless to the end user, because Microsoft does little effective testing of signed drivers -- the only reason the signing mechanism is present is to give them control over who can release hardware products for Windows. It doesn't provide the user a whit of good to have a "signed" driver. That means either letting the end user or distro designate manufacturers that they trust (having a system where any "manufacturer" can be add themselves to the list and their drivers trusted just doesn't work), having distro vendors sign the software after testing it, or signing it yourself after testing (which I'm assuming that you don't have the resources to do).
You should provide a GUI, given that that's all the rage when it comes to configuration these days. It should be optional, as a number of folks only have a TUI available (or only want to use a TUI).
You should provide a mechanism for drivers superceding others (for example, Tulip Ethernet chipsets have a couple of drivers out there -- one is designated as "recommended").
IMHO, you should have a non-interactive mode in which drivers can be installed without users being asked for parameters (and the driver is required to attempt
Because we read left-to-right before top-to-bottom, it's easier for people to identify and move to the next line of text if they have a skinnier piece of paper.
We claim to be one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the world, but we can't adopt a useful standard that the _rest_ of the scientific community uses.
It's a power game.
Switching involves the replacement of massive amounts of documentation, tools, machinery, equipment, and so forth. Whoever forces the other people to undergo a change enjoys the upper economic hand for a while.
The problem is that the US is *not* going to win the metric battle, and the slow switchover is in fact just increasing economic costs.
The federal government uses metric for most things now. Engineering is a mix of metric and imperial. Common usage is generally imperial (I walk seven miles, not ten kilometers).
Knoppix is not a great solution for serious use; I think it's wonderful for troubleshooting and hope that it stays around, but the inability to update software and the like is a pain in the ass.
#2 implies that he's a prop-up president. But, given the amount of discord there seems to be over his presidency, it seems that there could have been a better choice were this the case.
He's a Bush. They are phenomenally politically and financially powerful, and they wanted to control the Presidency again.
You know, the US has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and has already used two against other nations. Nobody else has that kind of record. I'm not sure that anyone else would do as poorly with nukes as the US has, really.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists-- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."
-John Ashcroft, 12/6/2001
We all know what the current administration does to those it percieves as aiding people associated with terrorists.
I think newsgroups tend to be populated more by Demms. When I think Republican, I think "wealthy businessman" or "uneducated religious conservative", neither of which is a common sort of person to be mucking around on non-Web non-email turf. Skilled professionals (yes, including those darn lawyers) and academics -- the sorts that you're more likely to find in odd corners of the Internet -- are generally Democrat.
McCarthy was ultimately defeated by his 'fellow' Anti-communists, because he was an opportunist loonie who did more damage to the cause of freedom than even most Communists.
Uh -- unless you're being over-my-head sarcastic, I don't see how you can say that Bush & Ashcroft are anything different. There are Republican legislators saying "whoah -- we screwed up when we passed the PATRIOT Act" now.
Second that. The President has *never* been supposed to have the degree of power that he does today, but the Executive Branch has steadily gotten bigger and acquired more power -- taking it from the state governments and from the other two federal branches -- since it was created.
It would also be reverse, because most of the police powers of Soviet Russia have already happened here or are being pushed through by the Administration.
Secrecy allows people to plan how to remove the powers of others -- coups, assassinations, PR campaigns.
It's unacceptable to remove the ability to obtain secrecy from the People -- doing so would eliminate their control over the Administration, and free the Administration from needing to serve the People.
The Administration, however, should have no reason for secrecy from the People, as the Administration should not be plotting in secret how to remove the powers of the People.
I do not think that it would be feasible to do this for every public servant. I do think that it would be reasonable for the President and Vice President. The President doesn't need to be playing secret spy games anyway -- that's the role of officers at the CIA. I want the person with the most power in the United States of America (granted him by me) to be damn well accountable for his actions (to me).
The thing is, that's no guarantee that a Kerry administration would have proposed the PATRIOT Act and put it before Congress. It's one thing to avoid proposing a bill, and a completely different thing to vote against something named "PATRIOT" right after a horrendous attack on your country when everyone is screaming "you need to stand with your President and your country".
Kerry, frankly, made a mistake. A lot of legislators now (including Republicans) are questioning whether they did the right thing, and many have come out and said "we did the wrong thing".
However, his vote then certainly does not prove that he would go to the same liberty-denying extent that Bush has. Given his history and his upset over the monitoring that the FBI did of him in the past (when he spoke out against the Vietnam War), I suspect that he would have been quite unlikely to propose such a bill.
So far, the current administration has held American citizens incommunicado without charges, violated the Geneva convention many hundreds of times, demanded vast police powers without oversight, has arrested a man for providing volunteer webmonkey work to a site that links to groups that the administration has declared are "linked to terrorism" (by that metric, Rob Malda could be jailed at federal whim), demanded the right to demand information on books read and made it a federal crime to tell anyone that such information has been siezed, tortured prisoners...I'm not going to list them all. It would take hours just to list and cite atrocities and abuses associated with Iraq, much less other disagreeable things the administration has done.
The point is, it's easy to say "oh, it's just Bush". The thing is, he is our *elected representative* (well, more or less -- but he did get a lot of votes, and even if he lost the popular vote and it was dubious whether he won the electoral college vote, there are a lot of people that supported him to blame). One cannot pass off all the horrors of Soviet Russia on, say, Stalin. The people of the country chose to allow him to remain in place, granted him economic and military power, and the things he did to other countries were weighed against the Soviet people by foreigners. We, also, are judged by what Bush does.
If Bush retains office this autumn, it will be due to a complete failure of people to vote and guide their country, and a decision that will have far-reaching effects in people around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to be kidding. This is the best thing ever.
I don't like most cell phone users. They talk on the phone while driving ("Yeah, I'm safe, uh huh"), talk near me (not their fault, but it always makes me think that they're talking to me), have their ringers go off in lectures I'm in, play incredibly annoying ring tones, and have a whole host of other irritating behaviors.
I *also* don't like the constant Bushie trumpeting about how "terrorist this" and "terrorist that" and therefore we all have to take action foo. It's blown way out of proportion.
This is a win-win situation. No matter who loses (cell phone users or terorist hypers), I can't lose, and it's likely that cell phone manufacturers will work on making cells less annoying and that the "anti-terrorism" arguments will become weaker.
Now if only Microsoft and BayStar could clash heads, my weekend would be complete.
The cell phones used in the Madrid bobmings were used for their timers. That's why they found one undetonated bomb, the clock read PM instead of AM. None of the bombs were detonated via recieving a call.
I thought Euro-folks used a 24-hour clock, unlike we unfortunate USians.
Seriously, people on cells in their car may not be malicious, but they're damned dangerous.
I wish more people had cell phone jammers. It seems like quite the patriotic action "Do you support terrorists? No? Own a cell phone jammer!"
To be fair, he had pretty good documentation of what he was doing -- all the discussion on eBay, a fraud complaint, etc.
I hope that someone ends up contacting the Indiana State University professor. He's almost certainly the innocent victim of identity theft (in which case he would probably like to be able to do something about it) or (rather less likely, unless he's extremely stupid about giving out data pointing to him) running a nasty financial scam, in which case...darn, I'm not sure who should be contacted. eBay probably doesn't care, the FBI does interstate but will want larger dollar amounts involved, I'm guessing that the local police know next to nothing about technology...
<Unknown__> hostmask of Ago on the 11th of october: frb9-d9bb4a51.pool.mediaWays.net
<Unknown__> earlier this week
<Unknown__> in a private channel....
<Unknown__> the person having access to the beta, sources and other released stuff
You know, it sounds as if they could have dug this up from IRC server logs. Now, obviously it's quite *possible* to log all channels on an IRC server (it still boggles the mind that IRC clients don't have encryption support as standard), but I wasn't actually aware that this was being actively done -- and it would have to be in order to snag this from a minor, private channel well in advance of anyone knowing who the responsible parties might be.
That's a bit Orwellian.
I've never actually looked up whether AOL's privacy policy says anything that would keep them from logging all ICQs/AIM messages, but that could be quite a valuable storehouse of information as well. The only mainstream IM protocol that I know of where clients support end-to-end encryption as standard is Jabber.
Let me guess, he also blew up the World Trade Center?
A worm that installed Freenet nodes would be much more effective, as this would increase effective bandwidth, anonymity, and disk space on Freenet, without causing the issues of "who has rights to write to the machine" that FTP would produce.
There was a massive DDoS against CMU at one point that did slow down the univ. connection a bit.
The thing is that not only are the pipes quite fast, CERT is based at CMU -- and those are the folks doing some of the main research on identifying and avoiding DDoSes.
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract.
The irony here is just sickening.
No. Kudzu is strictly an autoconfiguration utility. It doesn't download and install new drivers.
While I'm posting anyway, I'll drop in my other thoughts on the story to avoid multiple posts:
I could see something like this happening, but I think that it's going to need heavy interaction with the big distros to come out.
If money is a concern (as it apparently is, based on your requests for it) you could try to get hired on at one of the distro companies, though I wouldn't count your chickens (especially since this isn't in a " v1 state" yet). This is stuff related to end-user-experience and configuration, which has traditionally fallen more into the hands of the distro people.
Personally, I don't see any reason this couldn't be used with GPLed drivers or even source distributions of drivers-- download, build, install. I still don't intend to purchase hardware that only has a binary driver.
I'm not entirely sure that it wouldn't be better to extend existing (well supported) management and distribution systems like apt, yum, or red-carpet. It'd be a little weird to have a completely different system for providing driver downloads. Furthermore, your system seems to require that one be online when installing drivers. A caching mechanism may be more useful.
I don't think that you maintaining full control over the distribution server is feasible. Some software vendors will complain ("Why do we need to go through you to make updates available? Are you providing serious testing and QA services for us, or is it just a speed bump?"), and some distros may want to provide reliability guarantees. I really think that, at the least, this should be a distro vendor-provided service (if the drivers undergo distro QA), and if not, the server should basically be a "server tracker" that links to drivers on manufacturer-provided sites.
A couple of issues:
* Because you're specifically providing third-party services, almost all Linux kernel hackers will be much less interested in fixing drivers, and those drivers will not be maintained. Users of binary-only drivers are generally SOL when it comes to kernel hackers providing fixes, and even thirt-party people that don't merge drivers into the mainstream kernel run the risk of having the Linux folks break their driver at every release. Linux provides very weak binary backwards compatability guarantees -- the field is strongly tilted toward open-source drivers. It is difficult to produce and support a binary-only driver.
If you use a signing mechanism, I would recommend GPG rather than a homebrew. It's well-built, widely-available, and there are keyservers already out there. It's what RPM uses.
Remember that signing is *only* useful to the end user if it leverages some degree of trust. Signing on Windows is useless to the end user, because Microsoft does little effective testing of signed drivers -- the only reason the signing mechanism is present is to give them control over who can release hardware products for Windows. It doesn't provide the user a whit of good to have a "signed" driver. That means either letting the end user or distro designate manufacturers that they trust (having a system where any "manufacturer" can be add themselves to the list and their drivers trusted just doesn't work), having distro vendors sign the software after testing it, or signing it yourself after testing (which I'm assuming that you don't have the resources to do).
You should provide a GUI, given that that's all the rage when it comes to configuration these days. It should be optional, as a number of folks only have a TUI available (or only want to use a TUI).
You should provide a mechanism for drivers superceding others (for example, Tulip Ethernet chipsets have a couple of drivers out there -- one is designated as "recommended").
IMHO, you should have a non-interactive mode in which drivers can be installed without users being asked for parameters (and the driver is required to attempt
Because we read left-to-right before top-to-bottom, it's easier for people to identify and move to the next line of text if they have a skinnier piece of paper.
We claim to be one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the world, but we can't adopt a useful standard that the _rest_ of the scientific community uses.
It's a power game.
Switching involves the replacement of massive amounts of documentation, tools, machinery, equipment, and so forth. Whoever forces the other people to undergo a change enjoys the upper economic hand for a while.
The problem is that the US is *not* going to win the metric battle, and the slow switchover is in fact just increasing economic costs.
The federal government uses metric for most things now. Engineering is a mix of metric and imperial. Common usage is generally imperial (I walk seven miles, not ten kilometers).
Why don't you like transistors?
Knoppix is not a great solution for serious use; I think it's wonderful for troubleshooting and hope that it stays around, but the inability to update software and the like is a pain in the ass.
#2 implies that he's a prop-up president. But, given the amount of discord there seems to be over his presidency, it seems that there could have been a better choice were this the case.
He's a Bush. They are phenomenally politically and financially powerful, and they wanted to control the Presidency again.
You know, the US has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and has already used two against other nations. Nobody else has that kind of record. I'm not sure that anyone else would do as poorly with nukes as the US has, really.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists-- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."
-John Ashcroft, 12/6/2001
We all know what the current administration does to those it percieves as aiding people associated with terrorists.
I think newsgroups tend to be populated more by Demms. When I think Republican, I think "wealthy businessman" or "uneducated religious conservative", neither of which is a common sort of person to be mucking around on non-Web non-email turf. Skilled professionals (yes, including those darn lawyers) and academics -- the sorts that you're more likely to find in odd corners of the Internet -- are generally Democrat.
McCarthy was ultimately defeated by his 'fellow' Anti-communists, because he was an opportunist loonie who did more damage to the cause of freedom than even most Communists.
Uh -- unless you're being over-my-head sarcastic, I don't see how you can say that Bush & Ashcroft are anything different. There are Republican legislators saying "whoah -- we screwed up when we passed the PATRIOT Act" now.
This November promises new opportunities to the depths of being ashamed to be an American -- consider the potential of Bush being re-elected.
Second that. The President has *never* been supposed to have the degree of power that he does today, but the Executive Branch has steadily gotten bigger and acquired more power -- taking it from the state governments and from the other two federal branches -- since it was created.
It would also be reverse, because most of the police powers of Soviet Russia have already happened here or are being pushed through by the Administration.
Secrecy allows people to plan how to remove the powers of others -- coups, assassinations, PR campaigns.
It's unacceptable to remove the ability to obtain secrecy from the People -- doing so would eliminate their control over the Administration, and free the Administration from needing to serve the People.
The Administration, however, should have no reason for secrecy from the People, as the Administration should not be plotting in secret how to remove the powers of the People.
I do not think that it would be feasible to do this for every public servant. I do think that it would be reasonable for the President and Vice President. The President doesn't need to be playing secret spy games anyway -- that's the role of officers at the CIA. I want the person with the most power in the United States of America (granted him by me) to be damn well accountable for his actions (to me).
The thing is, that's no guarantee that a Kerry administration would have proposed the PATRIOT Act and put it before Congress. It's one thing to avoid proposing a bill, and a completely different thing to vote against something named "PATRIOT" right after a horrendous attack on your country when everyone is screaming "you need to stand with your President and your country".
Kerry, frankly, made a mistake. A lot of legislators now (including Republicans) are questioning whether they did the right thing, and many have come out and said "we did the wrong thing".
However, his vote then certainly does not prove that he would go to the same liberty-denying extent that Bush has. Given his history and his upset over the monitoring that the FBI did of him in the past (when he spoke out against the Vietnam War), I suspect that he would have been quite unlikely to propose such a bill.
So far, the current administration has held American citizens incommunicado without charges, violated the Geneva convention many hundreds of times, demanded vast police powers without oversight, has arrested a man for providing volunteer webmonkey work to a site that links to groups that the administration has declared are "linked to terrorism" (by that metric, Rob Malda could be jailed at federal whim), demanded the right to demand information on books read and made it a federal crime to tell anyone that such information has been siezed, tortured prisoners...I'm not going to list them all. It would take hours just to list and cite atrocities and abuses associated with Iraq, much less other disagreeable things the administration has done.
The point is, it's easy to say "oh, it's just Bush". The thing is, he is our *elected representative* (well, more or less -- but he did get a lot of votes, and even if he lost the popular vote and it was dubious whether he won the electoral college vote, there are a lot of people that supported him to blame). One cannot pass off all the horrors of Soviet Russia on, say, Stalin. The people of the country chose to allow him to remain in place, granted him economic and military power, and the things he did to other countries were weighed against the Soviet people by foreigners. We, also, are judged by what Bush does.
If Bush retains office this autumn, it will be due to a complete failure of people to vote and guide their country, and a decision that will have far-reaching effects in people around the world.