Snowden was down to choices really do nothing more and just give up or release at least as much of what he had as he did.
He tried the official channels was ignored. The 'public' as a whole was not prepared to listen without some demonstration made. People who thought the NSA and more broadly the intelligence complex was up to no good already had reason to suspect much of what Snowden disclosed. We knew this from inferences that could be drawn about data center sizes, power being used, purchases of equipment that were public, whisperings form employees at various telco and equipment vendors etc. There was just no solid proof. It was to easy to get everyone who was speaking out dismissed as conspiracy nutters by a public that just wanted to feel 'safe'
Any foreign intel operators probably knew even more and were not the least bit surprised, they were most likely operating already under the assumption the NSA monitoring capabilities were at least at the level the Snowden releases indicated. If the officials want us to believe any real harm was done, I say its on them to show some proof of that!
The only harm Snowden did to the NSA and its efforts was political. Had he released any less nobody would have paid attention.
Right the rights of owners should usually prevail over renters, although some compromises do need to be made. If you have a year long lease I don't think your land lord should be able to tell you "be out by 6am tomorrow" without you having violated your agreement some way. So there probably has to be some regulator compromise. Which generally everywhere I have ever had reason to know anything about it here in the USA there has been. Usually you have at least 30 days.
On thing the government SHOULD NEVER DO is offer public housing. Public housing is strait up corporate welfare. Its asking you and I to cover the cost of housing a labor force for the 1%ers so they can turn around and pay them what would otherwise be below market rates.
No we need to make employers pay to create the labor pool they need. The answer really isn't minimum wages etc which are difficult to implement in a sufficiently local way to be economically efficient. Maybe a burger flipper should make $15 an hour in the trendiest part of LA but that is crazy in Stockton. The answer is nix the subsidized housing. That way if the employer class wants to be able to get a burger in their high price neighborhood they will have to offer the people who make them enough money to either live nearby or affordably commute there. The alternative is prices and property values in those places will fall because the affluent will actually leave because no services are available.
As you mention the bailouts are the other big problem. Had the banks been forced to liquidate assets to cover their obligations those houses would have hit the market. Real-estate values everywhere would be much much lower and the market would have found a buyer for all those properties. We would have a lot more people housed today if we had let the crisis run its course.
The wage gap problem exists because of the expanded social safety net not in spite of it. Its a combination "Great Society" and inflationary FED policy that has driven it.
Ok so now, before I want to use the app in offline mode
I doubt it. Lets face most of what people do on their mobile devices (at least the type that use 'apps') has almost no use whatsoever in an offline context.
I might want to compose a document in my word processor on my desktop or laptop maybe even just type up a long complex E-mail, I won't ever be doing that on my tablet or phone.
Honestly about the only thing I see people do offline on tablets and phones is game, and the vendors are doing everything they can to tie even basic single player puzzle games to some kind of network based service.
Especially if I have one which exercises the CPU since implementing it s a webpage will kill the performance.
Ah but will it at least on IOS and Android are large large portion of non-game apps are really just thin wrappers around web as it is. Frankly Apps suck and make nosense at all most of the time. Why the hell do I want to go the app store, search for the 'the tire stores app', install it, disable the shitty alerts etc, and then run the app; all so I can browse tires. Which I will do at most about once a year for the two cars I own. It would be way easier to open the browser and go to 'm.[tirestore].com'.
Every flipping business having their own app which is nothing more than a webpage anyway 90% of the time is aggressively stupid.
Maybe I need to watch the documentary but I don't understand where you are coming from really. You seem to be saying it should be shocking that game theory has both social and military applications. Pretty much all knowledge can be used for good or ill.
Even the basics like knowing how to make fire, I can increase my odds of surviving the winter with a way to keep warm, reduce disease by cooking food; or I can go burn the forest the rival tribe across the river makes their home in.
I agree with grand parent, the great grand parent is crazy. Iran getting the bomb would massively raise the stakes in the Middle East. The outcome isn't like to be an uneasy peace via MAD like we had with the Soviet Union.
The central conflict there is Shiite vs Sunni with some other sects and groups playing 'the enemy of my enemy' type games. The national boarders while control and organize the conflict somewhat are not the drivers of it. We have already seen with Iraq and Syria, and may of the North African conflicts the boarders melt away quickly when things heat up.
If a Shitte group gets the bomb the Sunni nations like Saudi Arabia will want it and shortly their after ISIS will get one somehow.
Well I expect when things like this get published its all a little more real to some people. Maybe it checks their 'rah rah, lets turn them into glass' attitudes and forces them out of denial and to confront the very real potential consequences of nuclear war.
You are right though none of this is really a surprise. What did people think we going to raise some wheat fields in rural Ukraine? Obviously a finite number of super weapons would be deployed to where they would have the greatest negative impact on the enemies ability to make war.
While destroying low population bread basket targets might be effective those areas are two large and dispersed to be totally destroyed by a short-term strike even with nukes. Hitting them also might not immediate cripple the retaliatory strike capability, which is also very very important in a possible nuclear exchange.
The only reason to blast some field someplace is if you have intel there is missile silo or weapons facility under it. As these plans were largely pre-ICBM there would be no reason at all do that. As stomach turning an affair as it might be the only rational targets would have been enemy air bases and then high population cities where the factories, and distribution of goods occurred.
This isn't a simple matter of needing government to get out of the way and let companies battle in the marketplace.
Yes it some ways it could perhaps ought to be exactly that. You can't regulate that which you can't control and perhaps some things where there is very very broad public agreement about them.
Either the Internet gets less global (I think this might be the best answers) or it will do what its always done and route around the damage. As Joe Public does not see what is so wrong about an app, well they will go elsewhere to get it and you will only produce more scoff laws.
I decided to exit the very tedious screening line to get a beer at an adjacent microbrewery in the portland airport. Big mistake.
So you think it was okay for them to question you and confiscate your personal property because you decided you'd rather get beer and see if the line got shorter a little later?
Wow just wow. So much for the forth amendment I guess.
The was a vast shortage of ill-considered responses by people who did not really read the question on the internet. I am glad Google is coming to save us from that absense of automatic human responses, with real automation.
Even a 'Tesla Auto Pilot' like feature would probably be a huge win for long haul trucking. Its just a fact long hours on the interstate means most of our minds wonder to thing that are not driving. Now that the technology exists it should be reasonably in expensive to implement and deploy on new vehicles. Seems like for a firm operating even a moderate number of rigs the added cost of having the feature would pay for itself if it prevents even a few highway accidents related to inattentiveness or a drowsy driver; given how big those legal settlements tend to be.
While I am incline toward agreement with you where exactly is the hypocrisy? Researches in other fields have a long history of being caught doing things that were illegal or determined to be unethical we can and do call them criminals, I am not sure we stop calling them scientists and researches. Its seems very possible to me to be both a criminal and researcher.
What you mean its not possible to completely abstract all management activities and decision making processes. Are you making the radical suggestion there isn't a completely generic way to run a business? Is you assertion you have to understand at least the basic nuts and bolts of what a company does to run it effectively?
No its not an either or but it is a situation where the 'we have to do something' crowd is going to have their blood sacrifice. Think of it just like the TSA. The TSA has not really made air transportation secure, but 'we did something about it' the TSA exits. There are not really any strong calls now to fix the remaining problems / address the remaining risks.
I think our political energy out to spend stopping good encryption from being effectively outlawed, stopping government intervention in private online services. You have to toss some somewhat realistic BS to the saftey crowd though. 'See no more terrist videos from *istan because folks in *istan can reach American IP blocks to post them and Americans can't reach hosts in *istan" sound pretty good even convincing. Now you and I know there will be VPNs leased lines etc, various gateways that let *some* people around those things but that really does not matter, it does not need to actually work and isn't really supposed to as far as I am concerned.
We can do speech to text, and search for groups of key words, that have a high statistical correlation. We can resolve video to a series of stills and use the same hashing methods and flesh tone detection porn filters use. Its actually not hard at all if you don't care about a high false positive rate.
The result though will be a very high false positive rate that makes these services way less useful.
I come back to it AGAIN the political sentiment is that something has to be 'done' about the the Internet. Noises form both side of the political aisle are being made, it can't be stopped. It will get tucked into appropriations bills etc even if the public makes a stink. Because we can't stop it we need instead to be working to make sure its the most favorable compromise possible.
To me Trump's vague statements about shutting some of that down are probably the best thing to run with. I would rather see Great Firewall of America where we largely cut off traffic to and from the rest of the world. At least if the alternative is government minders and though police peeking into every service, insisting every protocol use broken cryptography, and be registered and subject to monitoring etc. In the end that is really the choice.
Globalism isn't any better on a social level than on an economic level, its time make the Internet a little less global and like more of an America only sandbox. The rest of the world can do what they like with their own damn network.
Really? You're going to get in the way of emergency responders, then complain that something is being put in place to dissuade that?
Woah there hold up, *I* never got in the way of any emergency responders. But *I* am now expected to register and pay of fee, so yea I am going to complain. Also the registration process does not collect any serial numbers or any other details so there is still no way to actually tie a drone to a responsible owner. Which means that people who do register are really just being added to another special government list.
As the TFA states this action by the FAA is probably not even legal, like so much of the other stuff this Administration does. So if they in fact breaking the law themselves that is another VERY VALID reason to complain.
Yes but you have to consider the sophistication here. This was code designed to appear to be a debug statement. It might not be the very most cleverly obfuscated code in history but it was done by someone with a lot of knowledge about internal style and practices, and software development skills in general. Its like state sponsored as well. So we have at least the potential for a fairly advanced threat actor here.
I would say its highly unusual a skilled pentester doing an internal test does not enjoy at least some success. Even if they don't end up pwning all the key systems etc, they will as rule at least be able to get on some developers or administrators boxes. Somebody always slips up up somewhere. Assuming this person was willing to be patient and wait weeks or months and was on the inside, maybe a plant who got hired on, they could eventually compromise some developers box and get hold of their creds, signing keys, or whatever was needed to do a source commit. So attribution might be easy but correct attribution might be a hard problem. Just because someone clicks 'blame' and Bob Smith shows up, does not mean Bob had much to do with it other than he clicked the wrong link sometime, used a backdoored tool, etc..
Older versions of rails deserialized cookies to a Ruby object. That is an RCE if you make a complex object. The expectation of the web application is the cookie would ddeserialize to Hash or similar object. Well if you create an object that defines some of the methods commonly used on Hashes like [], select, each etc you will be able to put whatever you want there and get it called. The security Rails had in place on that was to check the signature. If the signature was valid than the browser faithfully regurgitated the cookie as sent by the application and the information was safe to use to construct an object for use in processing the next request. If the signature was not valid than the application knew the cookie should be discard. If an attacker discovers the secrets needed to sign the cookie than (s)he can tamper with them undetected and get remote code execution.
If I were doing a test of an application for an organization I did not have a defined client relationship and I saw something like this (I actually have done this) I would generally have injected something like `nslookup somewildlonguniquestring@mydomian.com` and watched DNS server to see if it gets such a request. Other variants like `ping myhost.mydomian.com1` or using curl or Ruby's httpclient to make some web requests that I could watch logs for would also be candidates. One of the challenges with a blind RCE is you don't know what will work on the remote system. Which is why when you have a defined relationship you usually go directly to your reverse-shell type payloads. In the case of bug bounties that isn't a good idea though. The web server should log requests hopefully even things like cookies, so if you don't go shell it should be EASY for forensics to confirm you did what you said you did and no more. As so as you invoke a shell or something now its a lot harder in most cases to be able to proved EXACTLY what you did or did not do.
I don't really see what is so bad about the optics of a decision maker learning a little something about the work involved in accomplishing the objectives that person is supposed to be making decisions about.
Healthcare reform was a big part of the presidential agenda, major parts of that included digitizing records and building a large computerized exchange. I am generally one of the presidents harsher critics, but I would have looked favorably upon him actually trying to learn something about the nuts and bolts of what he was doing. Personally I would rather have seen him sitting in rose garden reading a book on actuarial sciences, than learning python but..
Slackware is not winding down. There has not been a release because there has been little reason for one. With so much in flux Systemd, X/Wayland, GCC 5 stabilizing, and XFCE Slackware's 2nd of 2 DE's having only recently itself having a major release 14.1 has aged well. I think figuring out where udev/eudev were going also has held things up a bit.
The changelog has been very active the past couple months. Patrick is making noise about 'betas' etc and the other developers like Robby and Eric are also hinting. A new release is coming.
What you have to realize about Slackware is, releases are not done for their own sake. They done for the sake of major changes and improvements. Slackware only implements major changes / forklifts when its clear they won't be walking back those changes or replacing them again with something else in the near future. Slackware really takes stability and consistency very very seriously.
The 'faster' thing move in the Linux ecosystem the longer the Slackware team has to wait for the dust to settle.
Slashdot Mirror
Snowden was down to choices really do nothing more and just give up or release at least as much of what he had as he did.
He tried the official channels was ignored. The 'public' as a whole was not prepared to listen without some demonstration made. People who thought the NSA and more broadly the intelligence complex was up to no good already had reason to suspect much of what Snowden disclosed. We knew this from inferences that could be drawn about data center sizes, power being used, purchases of equipment that were public, whisperings form employees at various telco and equipment vendors etc. There was just no solid proof. It was to easy to get everyone who was speaking out dismissed as conspiracy nutters by a public that just wanted to feel 'safe'
Any foreign intel operators probably knew even more and were not the least bit surprised, they were most likely operating already under the assumption the NSA monitoring capabilities were at least at the level the Snowden releases indicated. If the officials want us to believe any real harm was done, I say its on them to show some proof of that!
The only harm Snowden did to the NSA and its efforts was political. Had he released any less nobody would have paid attention.
Right the rights of owners should usually prevail over renters, although some compromises do need to be made. If you have a year long lease I don't think your land lord should be able to tell you "be out by 6am tomorrow" without you having violated your agreement some way. So there probably has to be some regulator compromise. Which generally everywhere I have ever had reason to know anything about it here in the USA there has been. Usually you have at least 30 days.
On thing the government SHOULD NEVER DO is offer public housing. Public housing is strait up corporate welfare. Its asking you and I to cover the cost of housing a labor force for the 1%ers so they can turn around and pay them what would otherwise be below market rates.
No we need to make employers pay to create the labor pool they need. The answer really isn't minimum wages etc which are difficult to implement in a sufficiently local way to be economically efficient. Maybe a burger flipper should make $15 an hour in the trendiest part of LA but that is crazy in Stockton. The answer is nix the subsidized housing. That way if the employer class wants to be able to get a burger in their high price neighborhood they will have to offer the people who make them enough money to either live nearby or affordably commute there. The alternative is prices and property values in those places will fall because the affluent will actually leave because no services are available.
As you mention the bailouts are the other big problem. Had the banks been forced to liquidate assets to cover their obligations those houses would have hit the market. Real-estate values everywhere would be much much lower and the market would have found a buyer for all those properties. We would have a lot more people housed today if we had let the crisis run its course.
The wage gap problem exists because of the expanded social safety net not in spite of it. Its a combination "Great Society" and inflationary FED policy that has driven it.
Ok so now, before I want to use the app in offline mode
I doubt it. Lets face most of what people do on their mobile devices (at least the type that use 'apps') has almost no use whatsoever in an offline context.
I might want to compose a document in my word processor on my desktop or laptop maybe even just type up a long complex E-mail, I won't ever be doing that on my tablet or phone.
Honestly about the only thing I see people do offline on tablets and phones is game, and the vendors are doing everything they can to tie even basic single player puzzle games to some kind of network based service.
Especially if I have one which exercises the CPU since implementing it s a webpage will kill the performance.
Ah but will it at least on IOS and Android are large large portion of non-game apps are really just thin wrappers around web as it is. Frankly Apps suck and make nosense at all most of the time. Why the hell do I want to go the app store, search for the 'the tire stores app', install it, disable the shitty alerts etc, and then run the app; all so I can browse tires. Which I will do at most about once a year for the two cars I own. It would be way easier to open the browser and go to 'm.[tirestore].com'.
Every flipping business having their own app which is nothing more than a webpage anyway 90% of the time is aggressively stupid.
Maybe I need to watch the documentary but I don't understand where you are coming from really. You seem to be saying it should be shocking that game theory has both social and military applications. Pretty much all knowledge can be used for good or ill.
Even the basics like knowing how to make fire, I can increase my odds of surviving the winter with a way to keep warm, reduce disease by cooking food; or I can go burn the forest the rival tribe across the river makes their home in.
I keep an old CRC Handbook on a shelf in the kitchen next to all the cook books. Its just there make guest nervous...
I agree with grand parent, the great grand parent is crazy. Iran getting the bomb would massively raise the stakes in the Middle East. The outcome isn't like to be an uneasy peace via MAD like we had with the Soviet Union.
The central conflict there is Shiite vs Sunni with some other sects and groups playing 'the enemy of my enemy' type games. The national boarders while control and organize the conflict somewhat are not the drivers of it. We have already seen with Iraq and Syria, and may of the North African conflicts the boarders melt away quickly when things heat up.
If a Shitte group gets the bomb the Sunni nations like Saudi Arabia will want it and shortly their after ISIS will get one somehow.
Well I expect when things like this get published its all a little more real to some people. Maybe it checks their 'rah rah, lets turn them into glass' attitudes and forces them out of denial and to confront the very real potential consequences of nuclear war.
You are right though none of this is really a surprise. What did people think we going to raise some wheat fields in rural Ukraine? Obviously a finite number of super weapons would be deployed to where they would have the greatest negative impact on the enemies ability to make war.
While destroying low population bread basket targets might be effective those areas are two large and dispersed to be totally destroyed by a short-term strike even with nukes. Hitting them also might not immediate cripple the retaliatory strike capability, which is also very very important in a possible nuclear exchange.
The only reason to blast some field someplace is if you have intel there is missile silo or weapons facility under it. As these plans were largely pre-ICBM there would be no reason at all do that. As stomach turning an affair as it might be the only rational targets would have been enemy air bases and then high population cities where the factories, and distribution of goods occurred.
This isn't a simple matter of needing government to get out of the way and let companies battle in the marketplace.
Yes it some ways it could perhaps ought to be exactly that. You can't regulate that which you can't control and perhaps some things where there is very very broad public agreement about them.
Either the Internet gets less global (I think this might be the best answers) or it will do what its always done and route around the damage. As Joe Public does not see what is so wrong about an app, well they will go elsewhere to get it and you will only produce more scoff laws.
I decided to exit the very tedious screening line to get a beer at an adjacent microbrewery in the portland airport. Big mistake.
So you think it was okay for them to question you and confiscate your personal property because you decided you'd rather get beer and see if the line got shorter a little later?
Wow just wow. So much for the forth amendment I guess.
The was a vast shortage of ill-considered responses by people who did not really read the question on the internet. I am glad Google is coming to save us from that absense of automatic human responses, with real automation.
Even a 'Tesla Auto Pilot' like feature would probably be a huge win for long haul trucking. Its just a fact long hours on the interstate means most of our minds wonder to thing that are not driving. Now that the technology exists it should be reasonably in expensive to implement and deploy on new vehicles. Seems like for a firm operating even a moderate number of rigs the added cost of having the feature would pay for itself if it prevents even a few highway accidents related to inattentiveness or a drowsy driver; given how big those legal settlements tend to be.
being able to travel to ~20 other countries without a single border control
Well once you are here you could travel to 50 other states and few territories without a single boarder control, too. What's your point, again?
Really, I did a penetration test on your wife too, I thought it was excellent.
The Hypocrisy of it all is sickening
While I am incline toward agreement with you where exactly is the hypocrisy? Researches in other fields have a long history of being caught doing things that were illegal or determined to be unethical we can and do call them criminals, I am not sure we stop calling them scientists and researches. Its seems very possible to me to be both a criminal and researcher.
What you mean its not possible to completely abstract all management activities and decision making processes. Are you making the radical suggestion there isn't a completely generic way to run a business? Is you assertion you have to understand at least the basic nuts and bolts of what a company does to run it effectively?
No its not an either or but it is a situation where the 'we have to do something' crowd is going to have their blood sacrifice. Think of it just like the TSA. The TSA has not really made air transportation secure, but 'we did something about it' the TSA exits. There are not really any strong calls now to fix the remaining problems / address the remaining risks.
I think our political energy out to spend stopping good encryption from being effectively outlawed, stopping government intervention in private online services. You have to toss some somewhat realistic BS to the saftey crowd though. 'See no more terrist videos from *istan because folks in *istan can reach American IP blocks to post them and Americans can't reach hosts in *istan" sound pretty good even convincing. Now you and I know there will be VPNs leased lines etc, various gateways that let *some* people around those things but that really does not matter, it does not need to actually work and isn't really supposed to as far as I am concerned.
We can do speech to text, and search for groups of key words, that have a high statistical correlation. We can resolve video to a series of stills and use the same hashing methods and flesh tone detection porn filters use. Its actually not hard at all if you don't care about a high false positive rate.
The result though will be a very high false positive rate that makes these services way less useful.
I come back to it AGAIN the political sentiment is that something has to be 'done' about the the Internet. Noises form both side of the political aisle are being made, it can't be stopped. It will get tucked into appropriations bills etc even if the public makes a stink. Because we can't stop it we need instead to be working to make sure its the most favorable compromise possible.
To me Trump's vague statements about shutting some of that down are probably the best thing to run with. I would rather see Great Firewall of America where we largely cut off traffic to and from the rest of the world. At least if the alternative is government minders and though police peeking into every service, insisting every protocol use broken cryptography, and be registered and subject to monitoring etc. In the end that is really the choice.
Globalism isn't any better on a social level than on an economic level, its time make the Internet a little less global and like more of an America only sandbox. The rest of the world can do what they like with their own damn network.
Really? You're going to get in the way of emergency responders, then complain that something is being put in place to dissuade that?
Woah there hold up, *I* never got in the way of any emergency responders. But *I* am now expected to register and pay of fee, so yea I am going to complain. Also the registration process does not collect any serial numbers or any other details so there is still no way to actually tie a drone to a responsible owner. Which means that people who do register are really just being added to another special government list.
As the TFA states this action by the FAA is probably not even legal, like so much of the other stuff this Administration does. So if they in fact breaking the law themselves that is another VERY VALID reason to complain.
Yes but you have to consider the sophistication here. This was code designed to appear to be a debug statement. It might not be the very most cleverly obfuscated code in history but it was done by someone with a lot of knowledge about internal style and practices, and software development skills in general. Its like state sponsored as well. So we have at least the potential for a fairly advanced threat actor here.
I would say its highly unusual a skilled pentester doing an internal test does not enjoy at least some success. Even if they don't end up pwning all the key systems etc, they will as rule at least be able to get on some developers or administrators boxes. Somebody always slips up up somewhere. Assuming this person was willing to be patient and wait weeks or months and was on the inside, maybe a plant who got hired on, they could eventually compromise some developers box and get hold of their creds, signing keys, or whatever was needed to do a source commit. So attribution might be easy but correct attribution might be a hard problem. Just because someone clicks 'blame' and Bob Smith shows up, does not mean Bob had much to do with it other than he clicked the wrong link sometime, used a backdoored tool, etc..
Will it be possible to mount these things on a shark?
Older versions of rails deserialized cookies to a Ruby object. That is an RCE if you make a complex object. The expectation of the web application is the cookie would ddeserialize to Hash or similar object. Well if you create an object that defines some of the methods commonly used on Hashes like [], select, each etc you will be able to put whatever you want there and get it called. The security Rails had in place on that was to check the signature. If the signature was valid than the browser faithfully regurgitated the cookie as sent by the application and the information was safe to use to construct an object for use in processing the next request. If the signature was not valid than the application knew the cookie should be discard. If an attacker discovers the secrets needed to sign the cookie than (s)he can tamper with them undetected and get remote code execution.
If I were doing a test of an application for an organization I did not have a defined client relationship and I saw something like this (I actually have done this) I would generally have injected something like `nslookup somewildlonguniquestring@mydomian.com` and watched DNS server to see if it gets such a request. Other variants like `ping myhost.mydomian.com1` or using curl or Ruby's httpclient to make some web requests that I could watch logs for would also be candidates. One of the challenges with a blind RCE is you don't know what will work on the remote system. Which is why when you have a defined relationship you usually go directly to your reverse-shell type payloads. In the case of bug bounties that isn't a good idea though. The web server should log requests hopefully even things like cookies, so if you don't go shell it should be EASY for forensics to confirm you did what you said you did and no more. As so as you invoke a shell or something now its a lot harder in most cases to be able to proved EXACTLY what you did or did not do.
I don't really see what is so bad about the optics of a decision maker learning a little something about the work involved in accomplishing the objectives that person is supposed to be making decisions about.
Healthcare reform was a big part of the presidential agenda, major parts of that included digitizing records and building a large computerized exchange. I am generally one of the presidents harsher critics, but I would have looked favorably upon him actually trying to learn something about the nuts and bolts of what he was doing. Personally I would rather have seen him sitting in rose garden reading a book on actuarial sciences, than learning python but..
Its a good thing the current release 14.1 has UEFI support already.
I really think we should just end the Internet if this is the alternative, I really do. Lets just cut the cables and make it a domestic only affair.
Slackware is not winding down. There has not been a release because there has been little reason for one. With so much in flux Systemd, X/Wayland, GCC 5 stabilizing, and XFCE Slackware's 2nd of 2 DE's having only recently itself having a major release 14.1 has aged well. I think figuring out where udev/eudev were going also has held things up a bit.
The changelog has been very active the past couple months. Patrick is making noise about 'betas' etc and the other developers like Robby and Eric are also hinting. A new release is coming.
What you have to realize about Slackware is, releases are not done for their own sake. They done for the sake of major changes and improvements. Slackware only implements major changes / forklifts when its clear they won't be walking back those changes or replacing them again with something else in the near future. Slackware really takes stability and consistency very very seriously.
The 'faster' thing move in the Linux ecosystem the longer the Slackware team has to wait for the dust to settle.