The three companies' declining to comment, to me, implies that there are some things going on between them, but not necessarily that it's a done deal. My suspicion is that Apple has indeed been in talks with Intel, but mainly to turn up the heat on IBM, who has been consistently missing performance and price goals for the PowerPC 970.
I seriously doubt that Apple wants to switch processor architectures at this point; it just seems more likely that they're trying to put pressure on IBM to get them to do faster better work. And if IBM cannot meet those goals, then Apple (who undoubtedly already has OS X running on Intel) will have a backup plan.
Actually, the Win in Wintel raises an interesting possibility. What if Apple, having moved to x86 chips, adapted WINE (the Windows ABI-executor and Win32 compatibility library) to Quartz? That would let any Windows program run on Mac OS X, without modifications. Of course, Windows-style user interfaces would probably look mediocre on OS X, but it would help Apple in the long run -- people wanting to use OS X can painlessly make a transition, and that increases demand for Apple hardware and software, and that means that third-party developers are more likely to make true native ports of their apps.
I know I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but I see you have discovered the secret of Slashdot: that any post that starts with something like "I know I'll probably get modded down for saying this" will get modded up.
Holy shit... just a few minutes ago (before I saw this/. article) I suddenly thought of that Mark Twain quote. Seriously. And it was basically unexplained; it's not like I think about Mark Twain's witticisms on a regular basis. And now I see this. Yow!
(It's happened before. I'm always having precognitions of Simpsons episodes, for example. I guess I'm psychic about really unimportant things.)
So you can receive ransom notices from megalomaniacal supervillains. That's how all the high-tech conference rooms are in movies, so they must be emulated. After all, if someone hijacks a nuclear warhead and is holding your company ransom, how else are you going to know, unless you have a huge live feed of them on the wall?
("Hey Butt-head, this chick has three boobs." "How many butts does she have?" "Huhuhuh.")
Originally, Bram Cohen intended BitTorrent to be used for personal/commercial content distribution by the content creators, or when permitted by copyright, such as Linux distributions. All of those are legal uses. For anexample of personal content distribution, consider when a person creates their own videos or songs, and wants to give some of it away for free online, but doesn't have the bandwidth to serve a full copy to each downloader. The decentralization, and especially the addition of a search engine, seem to benefit illegal movie/music/software sharing more than legitimate content/software distribution. Moral judgment aside, does this mean Bram changed his mind, or just that he wants to expand the possible uses of BitTorrent regardless of what they are?
Your criticism of the article summary is perfectly appropriate. I agree that it should have had more detail about the reason for the recall.
But what violent reaction were you referring to? I see nothing that could be taken as a violent reaction in my reply to your original comment. Just curious, and I apologize if I said anything that sounded hostile.
It puts a bigger in Steve Jobs pocket? Oh noes!! I wouldn't want Steve Jobs pocket to have a bigger!
I mean, seriously, WTF, is that some sort of innuendo? Are you saying that higher-priced products make Jobs get turned on?
Well, normally I don't respond to idiot trolls, but speaking of dispelling myths, I'd like to point out that nothing that I said was pro-Apple, and also that I use both Mac OS X and Linux regularly. So there.
Notice that it's in the Apple section. If Apple isn't of interest to you, you can disable it in your account. For those who do use Macs, this might be important. The risk is certainly small, but at least for a person with one of these three models, why take the chance? Apple's wouldn't be recalling the batteries if they thought it so minor. I think it's perfectly appropriate for the Apple section of Slashdot to spread this news more widely.
It would be trampling on your rights -- in particular, one form of privacy, I think -- if someone installed a Freenet node on your computer without permission and used it to host content. But since distributed anonymous storage is the whole point of Freenet, you can't say that your rights are being infringed if you voluntarily install and run Freenet. Surely you're not suggesting that everyone running Freenet is having their rights infringed just by running a program out of their own free will.
It's not like it's spyware or malware, where you don't know that it's running a node. Your "right" not to host content you find offensive is waived whenever you run Freenet.
You raise a good point about "passive support," though. If I understand correctly, it's the issue of whether a person can be found liable for Freenet-stored content on their computer, on the basis that they were knowingly storing potentially illegal content just by running Freenet. It is an interesting point, and it probably hasn't been tested in the courts yet (I'm speaking mainly from a US perspective, which is where I and most Freenet users are). I'm sure Internet law enforcers are well aware of Freenet's existence and use, so only time will tell.
I submitted this yesterday. It was quickly rejected. And now it's posted, by someone else.
I mean, I'm not trying to whine -- I'm not such a loser that I'd get jealous of other people for getting articles posted. I'm just honestly wondering if Slashdot claims to have any sort of process for determining if a story gets posted or not. If not, and an article's fate depends on the unpredictable mood fluctuations of the editor who sees it first, then fine, but I'd rather they not make it seem like a precise and intricate process. "Confusing or hysterical sounding writeup" or "Someone already submitted your story"? Ha!
(Apologies for offtopicness.)
Re:IF by legal you mean NOT ILLEGAL ...
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Not only that, this program benefits China and 'the Middle East' according to the site. Sorry, I'm not 'down' with a program that caters to communists and terrorists."
Are you ignorant, or are you just flamebaiting? Freenet benefits those who work *against* China's oppressive government or terror-supporting Middle Eastern regimes.
Or is everybody in China a Communist/fascist, and everybody in the Middle East a terrorist?
Freenet caters to anybody who has something to say. It doesn't know or care, for example, whether that speech is supporting or attacking terrorism, or whether it's defending or opposing the government of China. Freenet helps information be free, but whether or not Freenet exists, the information still does.
That's what conventional P2P networks do, but Freenet doesn't, because of its goal of total anonymity. With Freenet, when you upload a file to the network, it's randomly stored on other people's nodes. And when you request a file, your request is bounced randomly through other nodes (completely encrypted along the way). And if the file is found anywhere, parts of it are stored on all of the nodes in the chain on its way back to you, although it's stored on yours also. Freedom-geeks call this "plausible deniability," because this arrangement implies two things for anonymity:
If the network is being monitored, an adversary couldn't tell whether a person was initiating a request or merely passing it along for someone else. (Actually, unless the public-key encryption is compromised, it would be hard to tell what the requests even were.)
If a Freenet user's hard drive or computer is physically seized, as long as they didn't leave any clues outside of Freenet's control (browser cache, etc.), there's no practical way of telling from their Freenet node cache whether they requested any of the content there.
Of course it's impossible for the nature of the protocol to absolutely force people to storing this content, or to keep them from knowing what it is, but the Freenet reference implementation (properly called Fred, IIRC) does its best not to give the user any voluntary say in this.
Re:Unfortunately, not a troll
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The thing about Freenet is that you can't report or block offending IPs; that's the exact thing it's designed to prevent.
When you retrieve a file from Freenet (at least the current "stable" implementation), your request is bounced through several other random nodes on the network; and relaying a request for another node looks exactly the same, protocol-wise, as initiating one. They call it "plausible deniability;" if a person's node contains stuff considered "bad," or illegal, then there's absolutely no way of knowing (as long as the person frequently clears their browser history and cache) whether the user of that node initiated the requests for any of that content or if they were just unknowingly relaying it for someone else.
A while ago, I saw a Freesite linked on the Freedom Engine (one of Freenet's most popular portals, probably because its operator links to kiddy porn and murder pictures, considering them to be "free speech") which claimed to filter content matching a certain list of hashes out of your node, so that your node would neither store that content nor relay requests for it. It came preloaded with a filter-list (somehow obfuscated so the real file keys couldn't be extracted by people who like that kind of stuff) of miscellaneous generally-objectional content. I'm not sure what the reaction to that was, if there was much.
But there's no way of finding out who's actually storing and retrieving that content. The current Freenet implementation leaves absolutely nothing to "security through obscurity." The only way to censor it would be through legal means, perhaps by declaring that allowing one's Freenet node to be used for illegal things is a contributory crime. But due to the nature of Freenet it would still be very hard to enforce.
A tail, and opposable toes on handlike feet. Totally. Damn lucky apes/monkeys, why did they get tails and opposable toes, while we humans are stuck with useless tailbones and flat feet with pointless toes? Bah.
I mean, seriously, that would be awesome. If I got tired of typing with my hands, I could do it with my feet. And I could use my mouse/trackpad with my tail for maximum efficiency. Wouldn't that rock?
"Think about it: what would a world look like without protection for intellectual property?" (cite)
This gave me some good ideas for parody submissions. Either a hugely exaggerated sarcastic one -- where this future IPless world is a barren wasteland where "thought theft" has degenerated into actual theft, and nobody has any reservation about stealing, so everyone locks themselves into their homes just for defense -- or a Microsoft-mocking portrayal of a future IPless world as a glorious utopia of free thought and sharing of ideas for collective technological progress.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the video-making skills to do either of these, but anyone's welcome to steal these thoughts.
Slashdot Mirror
The three companies' declining to comment, to me, implies that there are some things going on between them, but not necessarily that it's a done deal. My suspicion is that Apple has indeed been in talks with Intel, but mainly to turn up the heat on IBM, who has been consistently missing performance and price goals for the PowerPC 970.
I seriously doubt that Apple wants to switch processor architectures at this point; it just seems more likely that they're trying to put pressure on IBM to get them to do faster better work. And if IBM cannot meet those goals, then Apple (who undoubtedly already has OS X running on Intel) will have a backup plan.
Actually, the Win in Wintel raises an interesting possibility. What if Apple, having moved to x86 chips, adapted WINE (the Windows ABI-executor and Win32 compatibility library) to Quartz? That would let any Windows program run on Mac OS X, without modifications. Of course, Windows-style user interfaces would probably look mediocre on OS X, but it would help Apple in the long run -- people wanting to use OS X can painlessly make a transition, and that increases demand for Apple hardware and software, and that means that third-party developers are more likely to make true native ports of their apps.
I know I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but I see you have discovered the secret of Slashdot: that any post that starts with something like "I know I'll probably get modded down for saying this" will get modded up.
"733T 5P3AK"
:)
"TEET SPEAK" ?
Teat speak?
Talking like a boob?
[Insert standard I'm-joking-not-trolling disclaimer here...]
Real men use Nano!
Holy shit... just a few minutes ago (before I saw this /. article) I suddenly thought of that Mark Twain quote. Seriously. And it was basically unexplained; it's not like I think about Mark Twain's witticisms on a regular basis. And now I see this. Yow!
(It's happened before. I'm always having precognitions of Simpsons episodes, for example. I guess I'm psychic about really unimportant things.)
So you can receive ransom notices from megalomaniacal supervillains. That's how all the high-tech conference rooms are in movies, so they must be emulated. After all, if someone hijacks a nuclear warhead and is holding your company ransom, how else are you going to know, unless you have a huge live feed of them on the wall?
("Hey Butt-head, this chick has three boobs." "How many butts does she have?" "Huhuhuh.")
only outlaws will use encryption.
Ubj gur uryy pna lbh or n xnezn juber vs lbh'er nabalzbhf?
Originally, Bram Cohen intended BitTorrent to be used for personal/commercial content distribution by the content creators, or when permitted by copyright, such as Linux distributions. All of those are legal uses. For anexample of personal content distribution, consider when a person creates their own videos or songs, and wants to give some of it away for free online, but doesn't have the bandwidth to serve a full copy to each downloader. The decentralization, and especially the addition of a search engine, seem to benefit illegal movie/music/software sharing more than legitimate content/software distribution. Moral judgment aside, does this mean Bram changed his mind, or just that he wants to expand the possible uses of BitTorrent regardless of what they are?
Yeah, big deal. He predicts that every year. Maybe he was lucky this time. :)
Your criticism of the article summary is perfectly appropriate. I agree that it should have had more detail about the reason for the recall.
But what violent reaction were you referring to? I see nothing that could be taken as a violent reaction in my reply to your original comment. Just curious, and I apologize if I said anything that sounded hostile.
It puts a bigger in Steve Jobs pocket? Oh noes!! I wouldn't want Steve Jobs pocket to have a bigger!
I mean, seriously, WTF, is that some sort of innuendo? Are you saying that higher-priced products make Jobs get turned on?
Well, normally I don't respond to idiot trolls, but speaking of dispelling myths, I'd like to point out that nothing that I said was pro-Apple, and also that I use both Mac OS X and Linux regularly. So there.
Notice that it's in the Apple section. If Apple isn't of interest to you, you can disable it in your account. For those who do use Macs, this might be important. The risk is certainly small, but at least for a person with one of these three models, why take the chance? Apple's wouldn't be recalling the batteries if they thought it so minor. I think it's perfectly appropriate for the Apple section of Slashdot to spread this news more widely.
And the really smart kids won't buy the shoes.
It would be trampling on your rights -- in particular, one form of privacy, I think -- if someone installed a Freenet node on your computer without permission and used it to host content. But since distributed anonymous storage is the whole point of Freenet, you can't say that your rights are being infringed if you voluntarily install and run Freenet. Surely you're not suggesting that everyone running Freenet is having their rights infringed just by running a program out of their own free will.
It's not like it's spyware or malware, where you don't know that it's running a node. Your "right" not to host content you find offensive is waived whenever you run Freenet.
You raise a good point about "passive support," though. If I understand correctly, it's the issue of whether a person can be found liable for Freenet-stored content on their computer, on the basis that they were knowingly storing potentially illegal content just by running Freenet. It is an interesting point, and it probably hasn't been tested in the courts yet (I'm speaking mainly from a US perspective, which is where I and most Freenet users are). I'm sure Internet law enforcers are well aware of Freenet's existence and use, so only time will tell.
Yes. Yes you are.
I mean, I'm not trying to whine -- I'm not such a loser that I'd get jealous of other people for getting articles posted. I'm just honestly wondering if Slashdot claims to have any sort of process for determining if a story gets posted or not. If not, and an article's fate depends on the unpredictable mood fluctuations of the editor who sees it first, then fine, but I'd rather they not make it seem like a precise and intricate process. "Confusing or hysterical sounding writeup" or "Someone already submitted your story"? Ha!
(Apologies for offtopicness.)
"Not only that, this program benefits China and 'the Middle East' according to the site. Sorry, I'm not 'down' with a program that caters to communists and terrorists."
Are you ignorant, or are you just flamebaiting? Freenet benefits those who work *against* China's oppressive government or terror-supporting Middle Eastern regimes.
Or is everybody in China a Communist/fascist, and everybody in the Middle East a terrorist?
Freenet caters to anybody who has something to say. It doesn't know or care, for example, whether that speech is supporting or attacking terrorism, or whether it's defending or opposing the government of China. Freenet helps information be free, but whether or not Freenet exists, the information still does.
Of course it's impossible for the nature of the protocol to absolutely force people to storing this content, or to keep them from knowing what it is, but the Freenet reference implementation (properly called Fred, IIRC) does its best not to give the user any voluntary say in this.
The thing about Freenet is that you can't report or block offending IPs; that's the exact thing it's designed to prevent.
When you retrieve a file from Freenet (at least the current "stable" implementation), your request is bounced through several other random nodes on the network; and relaying a request for another node looks exactly the same, protocol-wise, as initiating one. They call it "plausible deniability;" if a person's node contains stuff considered "bad," or illegal, then there's absolutely no way of knowing (as long as the person frequently clears their browser history and cache) whether the user of that node initiated the requests for any of that content or if they were just unknowingly relaying it for someone else.
A while ago, I saw a Freesite linked on the Freedom Engine (one of Freenet's most popular portals, probably because its operator links to kiddy porn and murder pictures, considering them to be "free speech") which claimed to filter content matching a certain list of hashes out of your node, so that your node would neither store that content nor relay requests for it. It came preloaded with a filter-list (somehow obfuscated so the real file keys couldn't be extracted by people who like that kind of stuff) of miscellaneous generally-objectional content. I'm not sure what the reaction to that was, if there was much.
But there's no way of finding out who's actually storing and retrieving that content. The current Freenet implementation leaves absolutely nothing to "security through obscurity." The only way to censor it would be through legal means, perhaps by declaring that allowing one's Freenet node to be used for illegal things is a contributory crime. But due to the nature of Freenet it would still be very hard to enforce.
Well, just for comparison, here he is in green...
A tail, and opposable toes on handlike feet. Totally. Damn lucky apes/monkeys, why did they get tails and opposable toes, while we humans are stuck with useless tailbones and flat feet with pointless toes? Bah.
I mean, seriously, that would be awesome. If I got tired of typing with my hands, I could do it with my feet. And I could use my mouse/trackpad with my tail for maximum efficiency. Wouldn't that rock?
This gave me some good ideas for parody submissions. Either a hugely exaggerated sarcastic one -- where this future IPless world is a barren wasteland where "thought theft" has degenerated into actual theft, and nobody has any reservation about stealing, so everyone locks themselves into their homes just for defense -- or a Microsoft-mocking portrayal of a future IPless world as a glorious utopia of free thought and sharing of ideas for collective technological progress.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the video-making skills to do either of these, but anyone's welcome to steal these thoughts.