One of the biggest problems (for me, at least) is the differing 'security' requirements for how you should choose a password.
One system has a maximum length of eight characters, while a website has a minimum of ten. Some require mixed case, some don't. It would help enormously if webmasters were a little more relaxed and just allowed users to pick their own passwords - particularly for things like the NYT which are not exactly 'top secret'.
All of this wiretapping crap is done "in your best interest". Well, maybe I know what my best interest is, dumbass.
Government intervention in cases like this is about trading individual freedom off against freedom for everyone. In many cases, it could be in _your_ self-interest to do X, but if everyone did X, we'd all be worse off. So the government has to step in and forbid X. In this particular case, you're trading off individual freedom to encrypted communciations, against freedom for everyone from terrorist attacks, crime and the like.
This is not to say that I agree with what the US government and the FBI are doing. Quite the opposite in fact. But you can't just say 'Get your hands off me, let me do whatever the hell I want'.
Maybe you don't agree with the tradeoff that the government has made - it gives too much emphasis to the group and not enough to individual freedoms. But in other cases, even you depend on the government to restrict people's freedom. What if everyone decided to apply your 'I know what my best interest is, dumbass' principle to serve their own 'best interest' by, say, stealing? It's in the 'best interest' of individuals, but not of society as a whole.
Not to mention that gun thing - You can ask the poor people in Kosovo about what happens when you take all the guns.
You can ask them what happens when you have militias with guns roaming the streets. The most important task in Kosovo right now is to disarm the KLA, and get rid of the guns. Otherwise you get revenge attacks, such as those Serbian farmers who were murdered while bringing in their harvest. If the KLA had been disarmed, that would not have happened.
You might argue that the best answer to Serbian military aggression is to arm the KLA and let them fight back; but if countries like Russia had not armed the Serbs in the first place, the war could not have happened.
What you need is an encryption system that can insert random rubbish into the encrypted output. For example, if I encrypt a 100KB file, the output will be around 200KB, of which half is rubbish. The rubbish is stripped out when decrypting, but without decrypting, you can't tell what is rubbish and what isn't.
The next stage is to have two different files, encrypted into the same output with two different keys. So I could have one 100KB file containing secret information, and a 100KB dummy file. The encrypted output contains both; but which you get depends on what key you use. To somebody who knows only one of the keys, it would appear that the output contains one file and 100KB of rubbish. There is no difference to tell what is rubbish and what might actually be encrypted data, unless you know all the keys.
Then, when the police ask you to hand over your keys, give them the key that produces the dummy file. You can just claim that the other 100KB of encrypted data is rubbish. If your encryption software routinely pads out files with 50% rubbish, such a claim would be believable.
Why not have a single cache, shared between all the CPUs? Okay, if two CPUs wanted to access it at once, one of them would have to wait, but only for one cycle.
You may be right that Apple are just being honest, and that they are bound by the patent laws whether they like it or not. But for me as a non-American user, it is a real problem that Apple can use their copyright to effectively extend American patent laws to where I live.
Any other vendor would probably stop distributing code also. But at least if I already had the code, they would not be able to revoke code I was already using. Don't forget that the problem here is that Apple is trying to stop me *using* the code, not just distribute it.
You might argue that since copyright law doesn't cover using software, that particular clause is not enforcable. But you still have the problem of not being allowed to distribute the code, even if you are in a country where patents do not apply.
There is no similar obnoxious patent clause in the GPL, or the BSDL, or the NPL, or the Artistic License, or the MIT licence. Yet all of those cover software produced in the US too. Why is Apple so different?
It also means that we get two advert free TV channels, who can think about content rather than trying to boost audience ratings for the advertisers. Well, that's the theory anyhow:-)
It pays for two national TV channels (BBC1 and BBC2), several TV channels available on digital and cable (BBC Choice, News 24, Knowledge, Parliament, and maybe others), five national radio stations, and local radio stations for every region. Oh, and it funds BBC Online and the BBC's Internet news service (often linked to from Slashdot) as well. All of these are free of charge and without advertising, at least for people in the UK.
The best thing SuSE could do for free software development would be to free YaST, their proprietary setup tool.
It would also help solve the problem of SuSE being less well known than Red Hat - there are many meta-distributions such as Mandrake or Yellow Dog based on Red Hat Linux, but none based on SuSE, because of the YaST licence.
Unfortunately, the new APSL 1.1 is still not free software, and should not (IMHO) be considered Open Source. It still has the problem that Apple can 'suspend' (ie revoke) your rights to use a piece of code if there is a patent lawsuit against it in the US. Even if the lawsuit is totally baseless, but Apple don't want to fight it, they can revoke your rights to use the code. And for users outside the US, the APSL exposes them to the stupid software patent system.
And all the hundreds of vigorously competing CPU vendors in between, I suppose.
It's quite worrying that Intel and AMD now seem to have a duopoly on x86 processors. I wonder how people like Centaur (or for that matter, Transmeta) are getting on. We need somebody to replace Cyrix.
To me, what sucks about the Palm offering is that you have to use their particular mail service (with a 50KB/month limit, and a new address). If this device has real Internet connectivity, why can't you run a suitable mail server or forwarder on your own PC or corporate server?
I think that the term 'white hat hacker' is misguided, as it implies that plain 'hackers' are bad.
Re:Good Open Source Citizens
on
Corel Linux FAQ
·
· Score: 1
Windows also comes with far less stuff the linux, no web browser for instatnce.
Well, for a start, Windows already has a web browser. It's compulsory in fact. But Win2k will include lots of stuff, eg web server (IIS), directory (MS Active Directory or MAD), and probably some other bits and bobs too. It's still true that Linux has more, but NT these days is hardly a 'lightweight' install.
I don't think it's a moderator's job to decide that sort of thing, no matter how well-informed the moderator may be. The idea is that you can't moderate and post in the same discussion; being able to 'disagree' with posts would go against the spirit of this.
Rebuttals to wrong posts should be in other posts, that explain why something is wrong. You can't just rubber-stamp something 'Wrong' without giving justification and being accountable (moderators are anonymous to ordinary Slashdot readers).
I don't believe "open source" implies "give away source".
The accepted definition of Open Source is the same as 'free software'. That is, you can use, share and change the software without having to pay licence fees.
Unfortunately, the term Open Source can be misinterpreted as meaning 'you can get the source code' - this is one of the reasons I would have preferred to stick with 'free software'.
It seems to me that once notified of a potentially libellous posting, Demon have to remove it to avoid legal action.
But what if they didn't believe me when I said the posting was libellous? What if they had good reasons to believe I was lying?
If everyone submitted three or four messages each day to Demon, claiming that random articles were libellous and demanding they be withdrawn, then any 'real' complaints would get totally lost under all the chaff. Demon could claim that they were justified in ignoring all such requests. But IANAL and I don't know how well such an argument would work in court.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest problems (for me, at least) is the differing 'security' requirements for how you should choose a password.
One system has a maximum length of eight characters, while a website has a minimum of ten. Some require mixed case, some don't. It would help enormously if webmasters were a little more relaxed and just allowed users to pick their own passwords - particularly for things like the NYT which are not exactly 'top secret'.
Government intervention in cases like this is about trading individual freedom off against freedom for everyone. In many cases, it could be in _your_ self-interest to do X, but if everyone did X, we'd all be worse off. So the government has to step in and forbid X. In this particular case, you're trading off individual freedom to encrypted communciations, against freedom for everyone from terrorist attacks, crime and the like.
This is not to say that I agree with what the US government and the FBI are doing. Quite the opposite in fact. But you can't just say 'Get your hands off me, let me do whatever the hell I want'.
Maybe you don't agree with the tradeoff that the government has made - it gives too much emphasis to the group and not enough to individual freedoms. But in other cases, even you depend on the government to restrict people's freedom. What if everyone decided to apply your 'I know what my best interest is, dumbass' principle to serve their own 'best interest' by, say, stealing? It's in the 'best interest' of individuals, but not of society as a whole.
You can ask them what happens when you have militias with guns roaming the streets. The most important task in Kosovo right now is to disarm the KLA, and get rid of the guns. Otherwise you get revenge attacks, such as those Serbian farmers who were murdered while bringing in their harvest. If the KLA had been disarmed, that would not have happened.
You might argue that the best answer to Serbian military aggression is to arm the KLA and let them fight back; but if countries like Russia had not armed the Serbs in the first place, the war could not have happened.
You mean, 'it's about freedom, like free speech'. *Not* 'free beer'.
RMS has compared free software with 'a free press', which seems to work quite well too.
But if you had two keys, one producing the real message and one a fake, then law enforcement could make you reveal both.
The idea of rubbish is needed so that you can convincingly claim that there is no other data in the message, and no other key.
What you need is an encryption system that can insert random rubbish into the encrypted output. For example, if I encrypt a 100KB file, the output will be around 200KB, of which half is rubbish. The rubbish is stripped out when decrypting, but without decrypting, you can't tell what is rubbish and what isn't.
The next stage is to have two different files, encrypted into the same output with two different keys. So I could have one 100KB file containing secret information, and a 100KB dummy file. The encrypted output contains both; but which you get depends on what key you use. To somebody who knows only one of the keys, it would appear that the output contains one file and 100KB of rubbish. There is no difference to tell what is rubbish and what might actually be encrypted data, unless you know all the keys.
Then, when the police ask you to hand over your keys, give them the key that produces the dummy file. You can just claim that the other 100KB of encrypted data is rubbish. If your encryption software routinely pads out files with 50% rubbish, such a claim would be believable.
Why not have a single cache, shared between all the CPUs? Okay, if two CPUs wanted to access it at once, one of them would have to wait, but only for one cycle.
See also Danny O'Brien's take on this at http://www.spesh.com/danny/wireduk/index.html .
You may be right that Apple are just being honest, and that they are bound by the patent laws whether
they like it or not. But for me as a non-American user, it is a real problem that Apple can use their copyright to effectively extend American patent laws to where I live.
Any other vendor would probably stop distributing code also. But at least if I already had the code, they would not be able to revoke code I was already using. Don't forget that the problem here is that Apple is trying to stop me *using* the code, not just distribute it.
You might argue that since copyright law doesn't cover using software, that particular clause is not enforcable. But you still have the problem of not being allowed to distribute the code, even if you are in a country where patents do not apply.
There is no similar obnoxious patent clause in the GPL, or the BSDL, or the NPL, or the Artistic License, or the MIT licence. Yet all of those cover software produced in the US too. Why is Apple so different?
[about the TV licence in Britain]
It also means that we get two advert free TV channels, who can think about content rather than trying to boost audience ratings for the advertisers. Well, that's the theory anyhow :-)
It pays for two national TV channels (BBC1 and BBC2), several TV channels available on digital and cable (BBC Choice, News 24, Knowledge, Parliament, and maybe others), five national radio stations, and local radio stations for every region. Oh, and it funds BBC Online and the BBC's Internet news service (often linked to from Slashdot) as well. All of these are free of charge and without advertising, at least for people in the UK.
When you get a cumulative score >n (what number? does anybody know), all your comments start at 2 points.
Let me guess, it would be something like:
The best thing SuSE could do for free software development would be to free YaST, their proprietary setup tool.
It would also help solve the problem of SuSE being less well known than Red Hat - there are many meta-distributions such as Mandrake or Yellow Dog based on Red Hat Linux, but none based on SuSE, because of the YaST licence.
What do I think is lacking in Win2k? UNIX!
Have a look at Cygwin , it provides a fairly full Unix environment where many programs will compile out of the box.
Unfortunately, the new APSL 1.1 is still not free software, and should not (IMHO) be considered Open Source. It still has the problem that Apple can 'suspend' (ie revoke) your rights to use a piece of code if there is a patent lawsuit against it in the US. Even if the lawsuit is totally baseless, but Apple don't want to fight it, they can revoke your rights to use the code. And for users outside the US, the APSL exposes them to the stupid software patent system.
Maybe it was developed by Krusty's Krypto Kompany or something.
Of course Microsoft will benefit from the deal. That doesn't mean the German government is 'subsidizing' Microsoft.
The idea of deals is that both parties benefit.
It includes everything from the PIII to the K6-2.
And all the hundreds of vigorously competing CPU vendors in between, I suppose.
It's quite worrying that Intel and AMD now seem to have a duopoly on x86 processors. I wonder how people like Centaur (or for that matter, Transmeta) are getting on. We need somebody to replace Cyrix.
To me, what sucks about the Palm offering is that you have to use their particular mail service (with a 50KB/month limit, and a new address). If this device has real Internet connectivity, why can't you run a suitable mail server or forwarder on your own PC or corporate server?
No, it's not out yet, the article was a _preview_. So you'll have to stick with 1.1 for a while.
I think that the term 'white hat hacker' is misguided, as it implies that plain 'hackers' are bad.
Windows also comes with far less stuff the linux, no web browser for instatnce.
Well, for a start, Windows already has a web browser. It's compulsory in fact. But Win2k will include lots of stuff, eg web server (IIS), directory (MS Active Directory or MAD), and probably some other bits and bobs too. It's still true that Linux has more, but NT these days is hardly a 'lightweight' install.
You can't measure bandwidth in terabits; that's like measuring a car's speed in miles. Surely they mean 2 Tb per second?
Why not a moderator choice of "Wrong!"
I don't think it's a moderator's job to decide that sort of thing, no matter how well-informed the moderator may be. The idea is that you can't moderate and post in the same discussion; being able to 'disagree' with posts would go against the spirit of this.
Rebuttals to wrong posts should be in other posts, that explain why something is wrong. You can't just rubber-stamp something 'Wrong' without giving justification and being accountable (moderators are anonymous to ordinary Slashdot readers).
It looks a bit like the logo in the top left-hand corner of http://www.walls.com.sg/ .
I don't believe "open source" implies "give away source".
The accepted definition of Open Source is the same as 'free software'. That is, you can use, share and change the software without having to pay licence fees.
Unfortunately, the term Open Source can be misinterpreted as meaning 'you can get the source code' - this is one of the reasons I would have preferred to stick with 'free software'.
It seems to me that once notified of a potentially libellous posting, Demon have to remove it to avoid legal action.
But what if they didn't believe me when I said the posting was libellous? What if they had good reasons to believe I was lying?
If everyone submitted three or four messages each day to Demon, claiming that random articles were libellous and demanding they be withdrawn, then any 'real' complaints would get totally lost under all the chaff. Demon could claim that they were justified in ignoring all such requests. But IANAL and I don't know how well such an argument would work in court.