I'd argue that it's only now that it is making the slow climb to legitimacy, where one can argue with a straight face that it isn't just pirates using it.
BitTorrent is the best business argument for not banning the concept of P2P outright; it's a far better distribution model than having your customers visit FilePlanet and sit in line to grab a patch or demo for your program. I very much think that BitTorrent-style distribution is on its way towards broad acceptance, provided that authentication of the file contents and (in the event of commercial content) of the user's payment for use the file is easy and ensured... and FurtherNet is a good demonstration that both should be possible.
He DID obtain a copy of the form she partially filled out, with N/A in the signature. I'd say that's a pretty good sign somebody submitted the request against her will.
Make games that are a little more epic in scope, and sell them for more.
For example, a three-volume RPG that has a good storyline and length well beyond that of the average RPG -- relying, of course, on cutscenes and size of 'world' rather than things like the 20-second summons in FF7 or popping up an enemy every seven steps.
The game mechanics and storyline would have to be really good, there would have to be much more techniques/characteristics/equipment to gather, and they'd need to pay careful attention to make sure your character doesn't become too powerful too early (nothing sucks the fun out of a game like that; adjustable difficulty inside the game would be helpful). Make the game something where you can easily save, too, to make it less frustrating for gamers that don't have an hour to kill trying to get to a save point.
Gamers are changing, and perhaps the business should change with them instead of churning out the same old thing. Nintendo's been burned trying out new strategies, of course, but they also made a big score when they went from playing cards to video games. One has to innovate to stay relevant, and not stick with cartridges in a world of plastic discs.
My first reaction would be that the Internet would be largely better off without two classes of people: the ones that flocked to it after AOL made it popular and began demanding things without any thought or care about respecting the rules in place (spammers and DDoSers, for example), and the ones that mostly cluster in IRC channels and USENET newsgroups that go megalomaniacal and either ban or shout anybody they disagree with out of existence (some anti-spammers, for example).
However, CB is a broadcast medium, with the price of entry being your rig, and no monthly access charge necessary. The popularity of the Internet, while being destructive to the culture that was here before it, has the side effect of virtually guaranteeing inexpensive access anywhere I'm likely to live. I miss the old Internet, but I don't miss the situation where I had to be a university student or pay through the nose for long distance + monthly + limited Internet access.
That's not to say that I couldn't afford the tradeoff now, but there is space enough to share on the Internet. I couldn't have learned nearly as much as I have if I didn't have access to free development tools/tutorials via the Internet, and denying the same to the next generation of programmers would be part of the tradeoff I wouldn't want to make.
Friend, your complete and utter misunderstanding of the pitfalls of cryptography implementation only reinforces my:
Extreme depression with the level of technical expertise demonstrated on Slashdot in particular and within the computer industry in general
Sincere belief that Freenet is nothing more than two ROT13s and a Caesar cipher (using original Roman) fed by a PRNG believed by all to be a RNG
Renewed dedication to feed only well-decorated bullshit into this site, because I'm sick of wasting hard-earned knowledge on schmucks like you who already think they know it all
You don't use a pseudorandom number generator (such as that provided by rand() under C or the device/dev/random under Linux) because it's predictable and the measure of a good cipher is how random the output seems (a poor man's way of testing either closed or open ciphers is to try compressing the output -- generally good ciphers compress very poorly, but that's just one criterion).
Electrical engineering comes into play when you're having a discussion about what to base a solid random number generator on. One such interchange I witnessed was regarding using entropy from network devices to feed into/dev/urandom (Linux's 'secure' random number generator, which attempts to gather 'randomness' from various sources that are unlikely to generate a recognizable pattern) -- it isn't necessarily a good idea, because on some machines network traffic is very periodic. There is a tradeoff consideration in determining which sources of entropy to use within computer hardware: how quickly do you want to be able to draw on the sources of entropy vs. how secure do you want the final entropic stream to be?
I mention the 1's complement because it's an example of a problem I personally encountered. I had a 16-bit 1's complement checksum I implemented that worked quite well, except for the fact that the software it interfaced to used a zero value to indicate no checksum was present on the packet. However, there were cases where the checksum would really BE zero, and the thing to do was to subtract one in that event (leaving 0xFFFF, which pulled double-duty for values checksumming to 0xFFFF or 0).
I have it on good authority that similar errors have happened and are easy to make particularly in cryptographic implementations, while not necessarily making themselves evident to the implementor in the output. Feeding data through an encrypt -> decrypt phase isn't proof-positive your implementation is correct just because data comes back out unscathed -- maybe you forgot an XOR in two spots or are only putting blocks through 7 of the 8 S-Boxes because of an off-by-one error. Testing is non-trivial.
I mention games because they also combine several disciplines, and the evidence of poor design and implentation is much easier for the layperson to notice. If you think closer attention is paid to cryptography, you haven't been reading Crypto-Gram.
In conclusion, I don't normally give a sizeable rebuttal because that's usually the work of a terminal trollbiter, but frankly I'm kind of shocked at your response given your impressive choice of field in school and Open Source projects (going by your Slashdot description) and think maybe you'll benefit from the details.
Cryptographic programming is one of those disciplines that comingles heavy mathematics, electrical engineering, and programming in the same field.
One can browse a manual on the topic and write an implementation that technically works (when paired with a similarly shoddily-designed decoder), but be fully unaware that the pseudorandom generator is just that. Or that the ones-complement portion of the crypto engine fails when X=0, weakening the whole thing by sixteen bits while not producing garbage.
Unlike a crappily-designed game, it's a lot harder to spot when crypto goes wrong. And most of those thousands of eyes supposedly peering over the code aren't looking that hard.
I'd still contend that commercial crypto has had more and bigger flaws overall, but he's right that the open source process alone isn't going to give you good crypto.
Frankly I don't really care about it, and if I used Mandrake this wouldn't stop me.
But I think the irritating factor for some people is having ads in something you've paid for, and from what I've heard there will be (easily removable Linux-related) ads even in the commercial version. Now in many cases we accept ads on things we pay for, such as cable television and magazines, because we recognize our subscription fees alone are not enough to keep some things afloat.
I don't know enough about Mandrake to know if this is the case with their commercial packs, but it's entirely possible. Perhaps they could offer separate no-commercial packs for a premium, but it costs money when you increase selection. If things will be as unobtrusive as they claim, and they make five or six figures from advertising in each release, I'd hope Mandrake enthusiasts could deal with it.
I used to visit isonews (before it was shut down, of course) because a lot of their forum users would download and play warezed games and knew what was worth spending your time on and what wasn't. It didn't mean that I supported piracy, but it did mean that I was able to take advantage of a resource created by people who did in order to choose what to spend my money on and which games to skip entirely.
My guess is that they'd be fine with losing this resource if it meant people would stop downloading music that didn't belong to them, but as long as the latter keeps occurring they might as well take advantage of the statistics they can generate from it. Lemons, lemonade.
Admittedly, Divx (the obsolete thin plastic wafer) fell not because of a boycott but because it cost too much for the level of convenience the customer could expect. But rather than setting themselves up for a boycott on principle, perhaps the treadmill being built out of DRM in hardware and obnoxious 'protection' mechanisms in the music, whether purchased in downloadable form or plastic wafer, will be enough to get people fed up with the stuff from a simple "I want to play this album I bought for $16 but blue screens keep popping up" point of view.
Then again, with Divx there was already a more popular alternative: DVD. What would have happened if the industry had gone straight to Divx, no longer offering movies on laserdisc, VHS, or DVD? What if a Divx wafer had been priced slightly under the cost of a new VHS movie to own at the outset, so that the industry could point at the cost benefit for the consumer to accept this new form of pseudo-ownership? (Historical note: when a Divx movie was purchased, the machine still needed to phone home to prove you had a license to the movie... you couldn't bring a movie you 'owned' to a friend's house and expect to play it and after the whole scheme went under Divx discs were worthless.) How many similar failures could paying customers be expected to put up with should the music industry adopt a similar scheme, as is currently popular with many current legal music download sites?
My point is that while we won't be able to rely on the public for a boycott on altruistic purposes, the selfish ones may very well do.
One of the things that bothers me is that systems based on RPM don't seem that stable. They install fine, but upgrades always break things, and the upgrade process is different for each distribution.
I wish Linux would standardize on a decent packaging format for binaries and source, much as the Windows world has with.ZIP, and we could put a stake through the heart of this everybody does it different crap. Mandrake would otherwise be almost perfect to introduce people who have only used Windows to Linux... although for serious development and other usage I'd still lean towards Gentoo.
I was thinking along the same lines as your post when I read the comment that started this thread. However, I believe it is quite likely that should we develop the so-called space escalator and run out of places to bury the trash whether because of too much trash or too many people, the economics of using infinity as our trash can will look more appealing than appalling.
I doubt we'll have stable colonies on Mars or the Moon to ship people off to before this becomes a problem, although perhaps we'll discover more ways to make things out of easily biodegradable material and recycle what we can't using fewer resources than we'd expend burying or expelling into space the stuff. But the idea will almost certainly look attractive and feasible at some point.
The only way any of us are going to have a chance to experience space travel is if space is open to commercial entities. Nobody wants to put tax money into something that we'll all benefit from, and every disaster we experience gives us cold feet and slows down the whole process.
The types of subsidy commercial entities are able to offer to space travel are nothing to scoff at, either. I would be willing to put up with advertising on the side of a shuttle, or under an orbital satellite, or even time-limited advertisements on the moon if it meant people got to ride there for free, and people who would complain about such things are no better than the ones who won't explore the heavens and won't let anybody else do so, either.
We've got to start looking at these alternatives if we're ever going to get anywhere.
Re:Good news for Mandrake users.
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 1
I wanted to make the switch from libc5 to glibc much more quickly than Slackware would permit it to happen. There was a binary-only application or game at the time that wasn't being compiled against libc5, and I discovered a few incompatibilities between Slackware binaries and glibc after I compiled and installed it. A couple of years ago was actually something like four or five according to my backup history. Tried Debian, which I kind of liked but lost interest in after a couple of major packages were severely delayed, and am now at Gentoo.
Actually, I really liked Slackware, and am still using it in a somewhat minor role as an internal server. If anything keeps me from going back to it, it's my lack of trust in myself to keep the binaries up to date on any distribution that cannot simplify the process to a handful of commands. But it was ideal to learn on back when I was starting out (download A, AP, D, N, and occasionally games... what were they, Y?)
Good news for Mandrake users.
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It was one of the distributions I tried after deciding to move off of Slackware a couple of years ago. Looked like it would be nice and simple for people who were just starting out with Linux but didn't really want to learn that much about it, but unfortunately all that only gets in the way when you're actually trying to do something meaningful with your installation. Lots and lots of stuff in the commercial pack to play around with if that's your bag, though.
I have to say that after trying all of them (Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo) that only Gentoo really seemed to be a power-user distribution. Course that means you spend more time fixing than getting done, but boy is it fast once you get the system up and running.
If you want to run real PC software, why not get a real PC? It's only like $300 for something that'll run ten times faster than any Apple emulated environment.
Somebody ought to get to work making emulator cards for the Mac that are essentially one of those mini PCs. It'd be pretty cool to have a true dual environment without having the emulation slowdown.
In this country at least, when you're offering to provide a service in exchange for money you're obligated to actually provide that service.
Many individuals using these ISPs that spam-block are most likely unaware that any measures are being taken on their behalf to filter their mail. Most would probably be quite happy to discover that if they realized there was a torrent of spam that was being diverted from their account. But all it takes is one that is thoroughly pissed at not getting a job because a potential employer was being ignored for a week (because he's on a blacklisted ISP without knowing it) to pop a hole in your private property argument as defense.
People would have no problem with spam if it was opt-in only... hell, that'd defeat the definition. I'd have no problem with spam filters if they worked the same way. But many of these anti-spam individuals -- people with whom I think I share a great deal of ideology about the problem -- think it's OK for these filters to be fobbed off onto individual users by sysadmins. Obviously, administrators have a choice whether or not to apply the filters, but the unknowing users are subject to injury by such an action. Surely an intelligent argument cannot be made that the users have a choice if they aren't even aware of the problem.
Yes, most of us think the economy needs a good kick while its down. Particularly our hardest hit segment of it, which has a greater reliance on intellectual property than any other field.
I know that when I was in academia, it was extremely inexpensive to pick up Microsoft software (in my case, Visual C++ Professional). But I don't know what the problem is.
They know the biggest amount of piracy goes on in college campuses, so they make it cheap to be legit. They know they're competing with open source, so they lower their prices to get rid of the 'but it's free' reason for using less-than-compatible free software. They're aware that if students use their free time with Microsoft software they're going to build their skills in that area and be more likely to carry them to work with them later.
I think that Microsoft is very charitable in this regard, and this doesn't even include when they donate fully-loaded computers to communities. In my mind, this is a win-win for students, and I'd be ashamed if I was trying to put pressure on them to stop this. Not very good advocacy to lock somebody into software via politics no matter who is doing it.
We all share the Internet, and worms such as this muddy the waters for even those of us who use properly secured systems. Events like this make it plain that best security practices are no longer optional for a stable Internet, and we'd all be better off if some degree of diligence was mandated legally or as a term of service by each ISP before it became possible to connect a system to everybody else's.
Antiviral software is virtually a must to avoid the myriad of malware that circulates the WWW. People who don't keep upgrading to the most recent version of Windows/related applications leave us all open via their vulnerability. A closer look is necessary at providing services like P2P and binary downloads via e-mail or Usenet, which are responsible for nine out of ten infections (the rest being worms that automatically exploit bugs in networked computers without user intervention).
At some point, all software should be vetted for buffer overflows and certified by a trusted entity before being permitted for use on an open network. Only then can we stem the tide of attacks on our greatest electronic resource from these malcontents.
That's actually quite fascinating. I think people get a little too hung up on preserving current scientific thought as well (Big Bang, evolution, meteors causing death of dinosaurs, etc.) which may be correct but should be continually reexamined in the light of new evidence.
Unfortunately, too many treat these things like sacred cows, which is ironic given that science and faith are so continually at odds.
Isn't it blatently illegal to analyze the majority of the binaries out there? You can't even give benchmarks on many of them without violating the EULA, let alone actually dig through the internals, because it's damaging to the rights of the software designer under the license.
Then again, it's not like virus scanners don't do the same thing.
I see no reason to get up in arms over this. They're using no different criterion to set pricing than they have in the past: consumer demand. This is no more discriminatory than generic peas costing less than the ones with the shiny label.
Slap privacy on something and you can generate controversy pretty easily, but soda machines charging more when the weather's hot is nothing new.
I'm concerned about the recent increase in GPL stories lately where companies that are embracing Linux are being carefully scrutinized. Maybe it's counterproductive to constantly play the hardline approach when Linux is finally starting to get decent drivers... I know part of the reason I switched to Linux in the first place was because I didn't like some of the tactics commercial software vendors were using.
Is this going to chase away companies adopting Linux for use with their products?
These must be those super cellphones that are built around computers rather than the ones you get with a basic plan. Better use than games on the things, although I'm at a loss as to how you'd actually type using the twelve digit keypad.
I thought it was illegal to encrypt over wireless connections... just for speech, I guess? Irregardless, I'd definently wipe this off the phone before travelling abroad just in case.
Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent is the best business argument for not banning the concept of P2P outright; it's a far better distribution model than having your customers visit FilePlanet and sit in line to grab a patch or demo for your program. I very much think that BitTorrent-style distribution is on its way towards broad acceptance, provided that authentication of the file contents and (in the event of commercial content) of the user's payment for use the file is easy and ensured... and FurtherNet is a good demonstration that both should be possible.
He DID obtain a copy of the form she partially filled out, with N/A in the signature. I'd say that's a pretty good sign somebody submitted the request against her will.
For example, a three-volume RPG that has a good storyline and length well beyond that of the average RPG -- relying, of course, on cutscenes and size of 'world' rather than things like the 20-second summons in FF7 or popping up an enemy every seven steps.
The game mechanics and storyline would have to be really good, there would have to be much more techniques/characteristics/equipment to gather, and they'd need to pay careful attention to make sure your character doesn't become too powerful too early (nothing sucks the fun out of a game like that; adjustable difficulty inside the game would be helpful). Make the game something where you can easily save, too, to make it less frustrating for gamers that don't have an hour to kill trying to get to a save point.
Gamers are changing, and perhaps the business should change with them instead of churning out the same old thing. Nintendo's been burned trying out new strategies, of course, but they also made a big score when they went from playing cards to video games. One has to innovate to stay relevant, and not stick with cartridges in a world of plastic discs.
However, CB is a broadcast medium, with the price of entry being your rig, and no monthly access charge necessary. The popularity of the Internet, while being destructive to the culture that was here before it, has the side effect of virtually guaranteeing inexpensive access anywhere I'm likely to live. I miss the old Internet, but I don't miss the situation where I had to be a university student or pay through the nose for long distance + monthly + limited Internet access.
That's not to say that I couldn't afford the tradeoff now, but there is space enough to share on the Internet. I couldn't have learned nearly as much as I have if I didn't have access to free development tools/tutorials via the Internet, and denying the same to the next generation of programmers would be part of the tradeoff I wouldn't want to make.
- Extreme depression with the level of technical expertise demonstrated on Slashdot in particular and within the computer industry in general
- Sincere belief that Freenet is nothing more than two ROT13s and a Caesar cipher (using original Roman) fed by a PRNG believed by all to be a RNG
- Renewed dedication to feed only well-decorated bullshit into this site, because I'm sick of wasting hard-earned knowledge on schmucks like you who already think they know it all
You don't use a pseudorandom number generator (such as that provided by rand() under C or the deviceElectrical engineering comes into play when you're having a discussion about what to base a solid random number generator on. One such interchange I witnessed was regarding using entropy from network devices to feed into /dev/urandom (Linux's 'secure' random number generator, which attempts to gather 'randomness' from various sources that are unlikely to generate a recognizable pattern) -- it isn't necessarily a good idea, because on some machines network traffic is very periodic. There is a tradeoff consideration in determining which sources of entropy to use within computer hardware: how quickly do you want to be able to draw on the sources of entropy vs. how secure do you want the final entropic stream to be?
I mention the 1's complement because it's an example of a problem I personally encountered. I had a 16-bit 1's complement checksum I implemented that worked quite well, except for the fact that the software it interfaced to used a zero value to indicate no checksum was present on the packet. However, there were cases where the checksum would really BE zero, and the thing to do was to subtract one in that event (leaving 0xFFFF, which pulled double-duty for values checksumming to 0xFFFF or 0).
I have it on good authority that similar errors have happened and are easy to make particularly in cryptographic implementations, while not necessarily making themselves evident to the implementor in the output. Feeding data through an encrypt -> decrypt phase isn't proof-positive your implementation is correct just because data comes back out unscathed -- maybe you forgot an XOR in two spots or are only putting blocks through 7 of the 8 S-Boxes because of an off-by-one error. Testing is non-trivial.
I mention games because they also combine several disciplines, and the evidence of poor design and implentation is much easier for the layperson to notice. If you think closer attention is paid to cryptography, you haven't been reading Crypto-Gram.
In conclusion, I don't normally give a sizeable rebuttal because that's usually the work of a terminal trollbiter, but frankly I'm kind of shocked at your response given your impressive choice of field in school and Open Source projects (going by your Slashdot description) and think maybe you'll benefit from the details.
One can browse a manual on the topic and write an implementation that technically works (when paired with a similarly shoddily-designed decoder), but be fully unaware that the pseudorandom generator is just that. Or that the ones-complement portion of the crypto engine fails when X=0, weakening the whole thing by sixteen bits while not producing garbage.
Unlike a crappily-designed game, it's a lot harder to spot when crypto goes wrong. And most of those thousands of eyes supposedly peering over the code aren't looking that hard.
I'd still contend that commercial crypto has had more and bigger flaws overall, but he's right that the open source process alone isn't going to give you good crypto.
No excuse on this one. It's not like Blaster happened eons ago, and this is virtually the same type of flaw. Patch your systems.
But I think the irritating factor for some people is having ads in something you've paid for, and from what I've heard there will be (easily removable Linux-related) ads even in the commercial version. Now in many cases we accept ads on things we pay for, such as cable television and magazines, because we recognize our subscription fees alone are not enough to keep some things afloat.
I don't know enough about Mandrake to know if this is the case with their commercial packs, but it's entirely possible. Perhaps they could offer separate no-commercial packs for a premium, but it costs money when you increase selection. If things will be as unobtrusive as they claim, and they make five or six figures from advertising in each release, I'd hope Mandrake enthusiasts could deal with it.
My guess is that they'd be fine with losing this resource if it meant people would stop downloading music that didn't belong to them, but as long as the latter keeps occurring they might as well take advantage of the statistics they can generate from it. Lemons, lemonade.
Then again, with Divx there was already a more popular alternative: DVD. What would have happened if the industry had gone straight to Divx, no longer offering movies on laserdisc, VHS, or DVD? What if a Divx wafer had been priced slightly under the cost of a new VHS movie to own at the outset, so that the industry could point at the cost benefit for the consumer to accept this new form of pseudo-ownership? (Historical note: when a Divx movie was purchased, the machine still needed to phone home to prove you had a license to the movie... you couldn't bring a movie you 'owned' to a friend's house and expect to play it and after the whole scheme went under Divx discs were worthless.) How many similar failures could paying customers be expected to put up with should the music industry adopt a similar scheme, as is currently popular with many current legal music download sites?
My point is that while we won't be able to rely on the public for a boycott on altruistic purposes, the selfish ones may very well do.
I wish Linux would standardize on a decent packaging format for binaries and source, much as the Windows world has with .ZIP, and we could put a stake through the heart of this everybody does it different crap. Mandrake would otherwise be almost perfect to introduce people who have only used Windows to Linux... although for serious development and other usage I'd still lean towards Gentoo.
I doubt we'll have stable colonies on Mars or the Moon to ship people off to before this becomes a problem, although perhaps we'll discover more ways to make things out of easily biodegradable material and recycle what we can't using fewer resources than we'd expend burying or expelling into space the stuff. But the idea will almost certainly look attractive and feasible at some point.
The types of subsidy commercial entities are able to offer to space travel are nothing to scoff at, either. I would be willing to put up with advertising on the side of a shuttle, or under an orbital satellite, or even time-limited advertisements on the moon if it meant people got to ride there for free, and people who would complain about such things are no better than the ones who won't explore the heavens and won't let anybody else do so, either.
We've got to start looking at these alternatives if we're ever going to get anywhere.
Actually, I really liked Slackware, and am still using it in a somewhat minor role as an internal server. If anything keeps me from going back to it, it's my lack of trust in myself to keep the binaries up to date on any distribution that cannot simplify the process to a handful of commands. But it was ideal to learn on back when I was starting out (download A, AP, D, N, and occasionally games... what were they, Y?)
I have to say that after trying all of them (Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo) that only Gentoo really seemed to be a power-user distribution. Course that means you spend more time fixing than getting done, but boy is it fast once you get the system up and running.
Somebody ought to get to work making emulator cards for the Mac that are essentially one of those mini PCs. It'd be pretty cool to have a true dual environment without having the emulation slowdown.
Many individuals using these ISPs that spam-block are most likely unaware that any measures are being taken on their behalf to filter their mail. Most would probably be quite happy to discover that if they realized there was a torrent of spam that was being diverted from their account. But all it takes is one that is thoroughly pissed at not getting a job because a potential employer was being ignored for a week (because he's on a blacklisted ISP without knowing it) to pop a hole in your private property argument as defense.
People would have no problem with spam if it was opt-in only... hell, that'd defeat the definition. I'd have no problem with spam filters if they worked the same way. But many of these anti-spam individuals -- people with whom I think I share a great deal of ideology about the problem -- think it's OK for these filters to be fobbed off onto individual users by sysadmins. Obviously, administrators have a choice whether or not to apply the filters, but the unknowing users are subject to injury by such an action. Surely an intelligent argument cannot be made that the users have a choice if they aren't even aware of the problem.
Yes, most of us think the economy needs a good kick while its down. Particularly our hardest hit segment of it, which has a greater reliance on intellectual property than any other field.
They know the biggest amount of piracy goes on in college campuses, so they make it cheap to be legit. They know they're competing with open source, so they lower their prices to get rid of the 'but it's free' reason for using less-than-compatible free software. They're aware that if students use their free time with Microsoft software they're going to build their skills in that area and be more likely to carry them to work with them later.
I think that Microsoft is very charitable in this regard, and this doesn't even include when they donate fully-loaded computers to communities. In my mind, this is a win-win for students, and I'd be ashamed if I was trying to put pressure on them to stop this. Not very good advocacy to lock somebody into software via politics no matter who is doing it.
Antiviral software is virtually a must to avoid the myriad of malware that circulates the WWW. People who don't keep upgrading to the most recent version of Windows/related applications leave us all open via their vulnerability. A closer look is necessary at providing services like P2P and binary downloads via e-mail or Usenet, which are responsible for nine out of ten infections (the rest being worms that automatically exploit bugs in networked computers without user intervention).
At some point, all software should be vetted for buffer overflows and certified by a trusted entity before being permitted for use on an open network. Only then can we stem the tide of attacks on our greatest electronic resource from these malcontents.
Unfortunately, too many treat these things like sacred cows, which is ironic given that science and faith are so continually at odds.
Then again, it's not like virus scanners don't do the same thing.
Slap privacy on something and you can generate controversy pretty easily, but soda machines charging more when the weather's hot is nothing new.
Is this going to chase away companies adopting Linux for use with their products?
I thought it was illegal to encrypt over wireless connections... just for speech, I guess? Irregardless, I'd definently wipe this off the phone before travelling abroad just in case.