So, they have stolen/hacked the passwords for... public hotspots?
I guess the scenario is this: some cafes have their AP password protected. The password is either printed in a receipt or written on a board on the counter. Which means that customers have the password, but people in the vicinity who are not customers don't. Presumably they have to change the password each day.
Hotels sometimes have internet included in the price of the room, and use a similar system.
Assuming you were even correct, you will be very hard pressed to find a single public network owner be upset that someone took it upon themselves to clean up their network for them.
In the UK at least, the vast majority of public wifi hotspots are run by large network operators that have thousands of points. If they didn't want to allow bittorrent, they have the knowledge and facility to configure their hotspots to not allow it. Yet the only places I've found that do so are ones run by the state - in libraries and so forth. It's therefore perfectly obvious that the mainstream commercial providers are perfectly happy for people to use bittorrent.
Note that they DO enforce using Google in "safe" (censored) mode, so they can and do enforce other wishes about what the user can do.
This is a kid behaving behaving like a selfish jerk. And being a criminal.
Assuming that he got the owners permission
Very bad assumption. The owner of the AP is probably not there (as pointed out they're mostly big networks). And on the off chance that this is a single AP owned by a person who's on site, the chance of him understanding what this thing is is minimal. And how many people would even ask. It's a fig leaf of dishonesty, equal to the bittorrent users that claim to use the protocol for downloading legal content.
What I find particularly sad is people like you who would rather defend abusers and vilify good samaritans, instead of the other way around.
Using this program is not only not being a good samaritan, it's probably illegal, in the real use case of it not being used with the network owner's permission.
Just because someone isn't agreeing with your dubious opinion doesn't make them a troll.
This program isn't for his own network. It's to poison other people's public wifi hotspots for bittorrent traffic, so he gets to use the bandwidth for something else instead.
This program is not about banning bittorrent on his own network. For that he could just configure his own router. It's when he uses other people's public wifi, and being frustrated that it's slow, and so he breaks other people's bittorrent traffic by spoofing.
It's rather like jamming radio signals. Except that it leaves the facility OK for him to use for his purposes.
I actually understand it very well. Having more features is something that needs a _good_reason.
And your inability to see that reason means you probably need to travel outside your own country a bit more.
The clue to ASCII's fatal deficiency lies in the first letter of the acronym.
Dropping the restriction to ASCII comes with a large host of problems, including security and reliability related ones.
Time zones, daylight saving, currency, spelling TR and other locale problems also involve plenty of problems. that doesn't mean it's OK to ignore them in 2014.
Maybe you missed the news that the world's largest (or largest to be, depending on measure) is one that doesn't even use the latin alphabet. The nonsense that it was OK for URLs to be Latin only has already been fixed. There's no excuse for the restriction to exist anywhere.
ASCII only is like writing year numbers with two digits. A simplistic approach dating back to years when the computer capacity was very limited. And one that doesn't belong in the 21st century.
Unicode mangling is there because the alternative is worse, and led to shenanigans.
What utter nonsense. There is no excuse nor reason for changing non-US currency symbols and proper quote marks into meaningless sequences of characters. It's a bug, pure and simple. One that's stood about as long as heartbleed and shellshock.
It depends. Simply starting again from scratch using the same technology to solve the same problem in the same way - language and libraries - is a mistake exactly as you outline.
However, it might be that a new language or libraries give you features that limit bugs. Most obviously when moving from old software written in C, you might move to some language or library that bounds checks buffers.
It might also be that the best approach to the problem has changed from when old software was written. For example old software is usually ignorant of multiple cores and GPUs. A new approach which assumes parallelisation may be in order. I believe this is one of the motivations behind systemd.
If writing from scratch was always a bad idea, we would all still be using COBOL, Mosaic, VisiCalc and Wordstar. Or even earlier varieties of the genres.
It violates the Unix design philosophy. It's a kitchen sink approach that creates unnecessary complexity, unnecessary dependencies, will be harder to work with, and will be more buggy.
Sounds like EMACS. Who knew that violated the Unix design philosophy. Has anyone told RMS?
I'm done with Linux. Screwing around too much with stuff that doesn't need to be messed with is giving me headaches and sucking up more of my time that I can better spend on other pursuits.
Welcome to OSX. The OS people go to when they realise constantly fixing and customising computers isn't the point of having them.
Some people like to use software that is of a quality architecture and design, and not something that is little more than a security-challenged mash-up with very vocal protagonists.
Right. But those people abandoned Linux for OSX years ago.
Of course the flip side of this is that you are condemning non-English speakers to not being able to use the software. Why should English be a prerequisite for sysadmins? It's completely unjustified. English is not the world language.
Don't mistakenly think that Windows' broken localization applies to Linux.
It's a long time since I've seen any Unicode problems as a user in Windows or OSX. The only time I see them these days is in stuff pasted into slashdot comments. Wonder what's to blame for that? It's open source isn't it? I think SoylentNews has fixed it. Thought they've introduced other bugs in the process.
It's 2014. There should be no forgiveness for software that doesn't use Unicode correctly. With the supposed superiority of open source and the ability of any programmer to dive in and fix bugs how is this still a problem for Linux?
The only real issue with Linux at this point is that "it is not DOS". This is the same exact problem that MacOS has. This leads to less robust 3rd party support.
Somebody go save jeddidiah from the 1990s. He's stuck.
Systemd goes against the KISS principle that Linux and Unix have long followed. However, many would argue that Linux has become too complex for this principle to work when it comes to system management. For user space, it is becoming more of necessity.
Right. There's nothing simple about system configuration by editing script and other text files sprinkled in unpredictable directories around the file system. This is one of the primary reasons that most people that try desktop Linux reject it. And yet the religious doctrine of Unix, dating back to the 1970s, stops many enthusiasts from seeing it as a problem at all.
Slashdot Mirror
So, they have stolen/hacked the passwords for... public hotspots?
I guess the scenario is this: some cafes have their AP password protected. The password is either printed in a receipt or written on a board on the counter. Which means that customers have the password, but people in the vicinity who are not customers don't. Presumably they have to change the password each day.
Hotels sometimes have internet included in the price of the room, and use a similar system.
He's not a victim. He doesn't have any more right to someone else's free AP than the torrenter does.
The active word is free. It's a free network. If the network owner didn't want it to be free, it wouldn't be.
Assuming you were even correct, you will be very hard pressed to find a single public network owner be upset that someone took it upon themselves to clean up their network for them.
In the UK at least, the vast majority of public wifi hotspots are run by large network operators that have thousands of points. If they didn't want to allow bittorrent, they have the knowledge and facility to configure their hotspots to not allow it. Yet the only places I've found that do so are ones run by the state - in libraries and so forth. It's therefore perfectly obvious that the mainstream commercial providers are perfectly happy for people to use bittorrent.
Note that they DO enforce using Google in "safe" (censored) mode, so they can and do enforce other wishes about what the user can do.
This is a kid behaving behaving like a selfish jerk. And being a criminal.
Assuming that he got the owners permission
Very bad assumption. The owner of the AP is probably not there (as pointed out they're mostly big networks). And on the off chance that this is a single AP owned by a person who's on site, the chance of him understanding what this thing is is minimal. And how many people would even ask. It's a fig leaf of dishonesty, equal to the bittorrent users that claim to use the protocol for downloading legal content.
What I find particularly sad is people like you who would rather defend abusers and vilify good samaritans, instead of the other way around.
Using this program is not only not being a good samaritan, it's probably illegal, in the real use case of it not being used with the network owner's permission.
Just because someone isn't agreeing with your dubious opinion doesn't make them a troll.
This program isn't for his own network. It's to poison other people's public wifi hotspots for bittorrent traffic, so he gets to use the bandwidth for something else instead.
This program is not about banning bittorrent on his own network. For that he could just configure his own router. It's when he uses other people's public wifi, and being frustrated that it's slow, and so he breaks other people's bittorrent traffic by spoofing.
It's rather like jamming radio signals. Except that it leaves the facility OK for him to use for his purposes.
You shouldn't have to adapt yourself to the machine. The machine should adapt to you.
More importantly it should adapt to people who don't speak English at all. They cannot be excluded from the computing world in the 21st century.
I actually understand it very well. Having more features is something that needs a _good_reason.
And your inability to see that reason means you probably need to travel outside your own country a bit more.
The clue to ASCII's fatal deficiency lies in the first letter of the acronym.
Dropping the restriction to ASCII comes with a large host of problems, including security and reliability related ones.
Time zones, daylight saving, currency, spelling TR and other locale problems also involve plenty of problems. that doesn't mean it's OK to ignore them in 2014.
Maybe you missed the news that the world's largest (or largest to be, depending on measure) is one that doesn't even use the latin alphabet. The nonsense that it was OK for URLs to be Latin only has already been fixed. There's no excuse for the restriction to exist anywhere.
ASCII only is like writing year numbers with two digits. A simplistic approach dating back to years when the computer capacity was very limited. And one that doesn't belong in the 21st century.
I the acknowledgement of your mistake.
And note you keep on confirming the point of the article.
Unicode mangling is there because the alternative is worse, and led to shenanigans.
What utter nonsense. There is no excuse nor reason for changing non-US currency symbols and proper quote marks into meaningless sequences of characters. It's a bug, pure and simple. One that's stood about as long as heartbleed and shellshock.
I didn't say it, they're saying it themselves. Learn to fucking read, stupid!
Learn to comprehend. If Microsoft were to say "MS Word isn't just a Word Processor any more" they don't mean it isn't a Word Processor.
"Isn't just" != "Isn't".
"Isn't just ..." == "Is not only... plus more.
You just don't understand it. There no excuse for any software to be limited to ASCII, including CLIs.
It depends. Simply starting again from scratch using the same technology to solve the same problem in the same way - language and libraries - is a mistake exactly as you outline.
However, it might be that a new language or libraries give you features that limit bugs. Most obviously when moving from old software written in C, you might move to some language or library that bounds checks buffers.
It might also be that the best approach to the problem has changed from when old software was written. For example old software is usually ignorant of multiple cores and GPUs. A new approach which assumes parallelisation may be in order. I believe this is one of the motivations behind systemd.
If writing from scratch was always a bad idea, we would all still be using COBOL, Mosaic, VisiCalc and Wordstar. Or even earlier varieties of the genres.
Sorry to have proved you wrong that this is not an init system.
Of course it's an init system. Saying you've proved me wrong doesn't make it so.
"It's like religious fanaticism."
Yes it is.
Freak.
It violates the Unix design philosophy. It's a kitchen sink approach that creates unnecessary complexity, unnecessary dependencies, will be harder to work with, and will be more buggy.
Sounds like EMACS. Who knew that violated the Unix design philosophy. Has anyone told RMS?
I'm done with Linux. Screwing around too much with stuff that doesn't need to be messed with is giving me headaches and sucking up more of my time that I can better spend on other pursuits.
Welcome to OSX. The OS people go to when they realise constantly fixing and customising computers isn't the point of having them.
The only time I see people round here unable to use capital letters to make sentences, they are posting Linux positive stuff.
Some people like to use software that is of a quality architecture and design, and not something that is little more than a security-challenged mash-up with very vocal protagonists.
Right. But those people abandoned Linux for OSX years ago.
Of course the flip side of this is that you are condemning non-English speakers to not being able to use the software. Why should English be a prerequisite for sysadmins? It's completely unjustified. English is not the world language.
Don't mistakenly think that Windows' broken localization applies to Linux.
It's a long time since I've seen any Unicode problems as a user in Windows or OSX. The only time I see them these days is in stuff pasted into slashdot comments. Wonder what's to blame for that? It's open source isn't it? I think SoylentNews has fixed it. Thought they've introduced other bugs in the process.
It's 2014. There should be no forgiveness for software that doesn't use Unicode correctly. With the supposed superiority of open source and the ability of any programmer to dive in and fix bugs how is this still a problem for Linux?
by re-writing something that works you inevitably introduce new bugs.
As opposed to the long standing existing bugs in old components like BASH and OpenSSL. Who needs modern software coded with modern standards anyway?
The only real issue with Linux at this point is that "it is not DOS". This is the same exact problem that MacOS has. This leads to less robust 3rd party support.
Somebody go save jeddidiah from the 1990s. He's stuck.
And we're not just referring to the lack of unicode support, which isn't hugely important.
... for the minority of the world who are English language speakers. For most foreign language speakers it is.
Systemd goes against the KISS principle that Linux and Unix have long followed. However, many would argue that Linux has become too complex for this principle to work when it comes to system management. For user space, it is becoming more of necessity.
Right. There's nothing simple about system configuration by editing script and other text files sprinkled in unpredictable directories around the file system. This is one of the primary reasons that most people that try desktop Linux reject it. And yet the religious doctrine of Unix, dating back to the 1970s, stops many enthusiasts from seeing it as a problem at all.