The biggest threat is that it will be embedded within the next generation of Intel CPUs. Up until then you could build a PC using standard parts and avoid Palladium. But once it's within the CPU, you'd have to find a CPU that didn't have it...and both Intel and AMD are in bed with Microsoft.
Maybe IBM, or one of the Asian manufacturers would be interested in producing a non-Palladium CPU...if the market resists Palladium enough, there will be a demand for non-Palladium CPUs...and the PCs that are built around them.
Refusing to release code under the GPL, but simultaneously allowing vendors to appropriate code developed with public money, smacks of hypocrisy and shows a clear bias in how they approach this issue. It is obvious that they bowed to pressure from a few whiney corporations threatened by Linux.
Quite true. When you think about it, anything developed by the NSA or any other government entity is research or product paid for by the U.S. Taxpayer...and hence is public property. Can that public property be given or sold to a private company? I think not, or at least not without a public auction of the technology.
Actually, the GPL is very closely aligned to the original intent of government research. Such research is to be for the public good. GPL software is freely available to the public, source code and all. Closed-source software, on the other hand, is not available to the public. You can't own it, only license a copy for use under very specific terms and perhaps only for a specific period of time.
So government-funded research such as SE Linux should be encouraged...the only real question being "do we release this as open-source, or do we keep it strictly for internal (i.e., governmental) use only?"
You're suggesting that because the Konquerer team fixed it in 90 minutes, they must be irreponsible (presumably by not testing their fix). You don't think that maybe Konquerer was written using best coding practices (instead of spaghetti-coding in an attempt to make it difficult to remove an application from the operating system) so that the fix simply involves updating a library?
Or are you suggesting that Microsoft is being responsible by taking weeks or months to fix a known security hole?
Actually, if you were to send out an email message with a gopher link in the message, you could trick untold thousands of people to click on that link. Set up right, you could have that gopher link:
send you information from that person's PC;
install a backdoor so that you could easily access that PC later, at will;
install code for use in a DDOS attack;
send a new message from that user's mailbox to further spread your email.
Think what CodeRed and Nimda did...this could be worse, because instead of attaching servers, this would attack user's PCs. All because a user could be tricked into clicking on a gopher URL, thereby opening themselves up to whatever you want to do to them.
It's an old frustration I've had with Windows having to do with the time it takes to boot. Why can't they put Windows on an EPROM chip (perhaps on the motherboard, perhaps on a card) so that the OS is all in hardware? Booting would be so much faster.
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How is hardware not currently open?
The biggest threat is that it will be embedded within the next generation of Intel CPUs. Up until then you could build a PC using standard parts and avoid Palladium. But once it's within the CPU, you'd have to find a CPU that didn't have it...and both Intel and AMD are in bed with Microsoft.
Maybe IBM, or one of the Asian manufacturers would be interested in producing a non-Palladium CPU...if the market resists Palladium enough, there will be a demand for non-Palladium CPUs...and the PCs that are built around them.
Refusing to release code under the GPL, but simultaneously allowing vendors to appropriate code developed with public money, smacks of hypocrisy and shows a clear bias in how they approach this issue. It is obvious that they bowed to pressure from a few whiney corporations threatened by Linux.
Quite true. When you think about it, anything developed by the NSA or any other government entity is research or product paid for by the U.S. Taxpayer...and hence is public property. Can that public property be given or sold to a private company? I think not, or at least not without a public auction of the technology.
Actually, the GPL is very closely aligned to the original intent of government research. Such research is to be for the public good. GPL software is freely available to the public, source code and all. Closed-source software, on the other hand, is not available to the public. You can't own it, only license a copy for use under very specific terms and perhaps only for a specific period of time. So government-funded research such as SE Linux should be encouraged...the only real question being "do we release this as open-source, or do we keep it strictly for internal (i.e., governmental) use only?"
You're suggesting that because the Konquerer team fixed it in 90 minutes, they must be irreponsible (presumably by not testing their fix). You don't think that maybe Konquerer was written using best coding practices (instead of spaghetti-coding in an attempt to make it difficult to remove an application from the operating system) so that the fix simply involves updating a library? Or are you suggesting that Microsoft is being responsible by taking weeks or months to fix a known security hole?
Think what CodeRed and Nimda did...this could be worse, because instead of attaching servers, this would attack user's PCs. All because a user could be tricked into clicking on a gopher URL, thereby opening themselves up to whatever you want to do to them.
It's an old frustration I've had with Windows having to do with the time it takes to boot. Why can't they put Windows on an EPROM chip (perhaps on the motherboard, perhaps on a card) so that the OS is all in hardware? Booting would be so much faster.
Has anyone thought of doing this with Linux?