The GPL is upstream-centric, the MIT license is downstream-centric. We happen to prioritize downstream more than upstream, since downstream is what really matters: the userbase, the community, the availability.
It is the GPL that is downstream-centric and MIT that is upstream-centric. The GPL was designed to ensure that the entire program, source code, and ability to use it, are available to the userbase and community. The MIT license is primarily about avoiding liability, so anybody upstream of the userbase has greater privileges than the community.
I wish them well, but it’s a hindrance when they get the community aspects so wrong.
My armchair solution to this problem is to reform rent control.
The new “affordable housing” rules are an interesting approach to rent control. For the new affordable housing projects, the rent is set at some low price, but only as long as the resident has an income within 2 times the limit to qualify for that rate. And I think the rates adjust over time to account for inflation. Once the resident’s income goes above the limit, then the unit’s rent goes to “market rate.” I heard about this in a presentation hosted by the city, and the city planner said the residents at that point typically have enough money that they want to move to another location, anyway. But this does not apply to pre-1979 properties.
One problem with the equity of rent control and Proposition 13 is that they are not indexed to the income of the resident. Your mother dies and leaves you a house, and you inherit her 1975 tax rate, even if you are a super-rich investment banker. You can’t do much to the property, though, because “new construction” will trigger a reassessment. So, the best thing for you is to rent it out as a low-density rent-controlled slum, and keep the fundamental supply/demand imbalance intact.
It would be good, both for tax revenue and for social justice, for the taxes and rent controls to take into account the resident’s ability to pay. But doing anything to those laws would draw out the NIMBYs like nothing else, and formulas that are too complicated would themselves be an unfair tax.
Well, I don’t think much about how to make MUNI better. I mostly ride bicycle everywhere. More bike lanes, and bike lanes that are separated by physical barriers against cars, would be good. Oh, how I hate dodging cars on Folsom, as they cross the bike lane to turn right or deliver something.
The Van Ness BRT is a decent start, but I would really prefer if they got fast vehicles that didn’t put out so much noise and soot. Preferably electric. They need more tunnels and more routes where mass transit is not delayed by car traffic. They could also run small buses during low-traffic times, instead of chugging those empty monsters across my window at midnight every night.
My major problem, in terms of user experience, is that I must budget 1 hour of time per transfer to get anywhere. When I’m going between residential neighborhoods, this frequently means I should budget 2 hours to reach my destination. The city is only about 10 miles across. It shouldn’t take 2 hours.
Homeowners will not be happy, because they've lost money in the deal.
That's always a problem in California. An elderly neighbor brawled me out for having dead petunias in the front yard, causing the value of her house to drop by $25,000 in a rising market. Never mind that she wasn't selling the house, where the realized value may differ significantly from the perceived value.
The home ownership that Redfin was highlighting is part of the problem with housing prices in San Francisco. Half a century ago, when the US government made private home ownership a national priority, it seemed nice to the citizens that housing prices go up faster than inflation. That makes home ownership a sound investment. But several decades of home values steadily ratcheting up, and house prices become so expensive that only super-rich and banks can own them. We’re seeing this first in San Francisco, but it could become a problem in the entire country.
I’m fine with a house’s price going up if there are improvements. My grandparents installed a flagstone driveway and extensive skylights and a bunch of other improvements that made their home nicer than when they bought it. My problem is with pouring money into a mortgage, simply because the next schmuck has to pour even more money into the mortgage.
Teachers can’t afford to own a house in San Francisco, but maybe they shouldn’t own. They should rent.
The city is surrounded on three sides by water and all available land is full or reserved for precious little parkland.
Not 100% true.
Well, it is true that almost all the land is actually in use, but not all of it is. There’s that giant field of asphalt next to the Giants’ stadium, and there are those abandoned warehouses next to the asphalt field, both currently in the planning process to be converted into modern housing and commerce. And there are a number of other run-down neighborhoods and unused government properties. But most of the land is in use.
The big problem is... the big buildings. There are almost none. Most of the land in the city is under-utilized. A couple generations ago, the voters and politicians enacted a variety of strict building limits, so most of the city are these little 2-storey single-family houses. In January, a couple researcher at UCLA showed that height limits cause enclaves of super-rich. We see it now in San Francisco.
We need to abolish these height limits and let the market decide the shape of the city. Also, MUNI sucks: We need more efficient mass transit in this city.
Why isn't this article entitled "Red Hat Linux executive tells the sheeple to quit buying Red Hat Linux - there are plenty of identical and cheaper alternatives available?"
No, it’s more like: Buy Red Hat. They employ the largest number of influential Linux hackers (Poettering, Sievers, Molnar, etc.), so you can be assured that open source stuff works best in a Red Hat distribution.
I strongly disagree with his recommendation for DNS. That’s because I want to spread DNSSEC.
The problem with services like Amazon Route 53 is they generate DNS records dynamically. That means they need the signing key to be online, on the DNS load balancer, and they don’t bother to do so. If you really need your DNS to be globally distributed (How many people actually look for your domain, anyway? How many times is the answer cached on Google public DNS already?), you should look into CloudFlare. CloudFlare uses a custom implementation of ECDSA to decrease the cost of DNSSEC signatures, making it practical to do online signatures and also very effective NSEC white lies.
The real problem with the WhatsApp affair is that it was even possible for the judge to shut it down. The Internet was invented as a decentralized system, and it would be extremely disruptive to shut it down for the whole country. But all these new technologies are designed for asymmetric computing, where the thing you have is only a terminal into someone else's computer.
Yeah, I know, there are technical reasons of battery life and network connectivity, why mobiles are not full peers on the Internet. Still, new applications should be designed so you can choose where it is hosted, even on your own home computer, not some centralized system that can be shut down.
The Republican Party in California is broken. Feinstein's reelection was so assured that they didn't bother to nominate a real candidate to run against her. And Boxer's most recent opponent was that horrible person, Carly Fiorina.
The real problem is binary partisanship, a natural outcome of the winner-takes-all voting system. When both parties agree on all the structural issues, the American voters have no real choice.
I voted against both Feinstein and Boxer. Feinstein rode in the success of Obama's reelection campaign against that horrible person, Mitt Romney, so much that the Republican Party didn't bother to nominate a real candidate to run against her. And Boxer easily defeated the challenge from that other horrible person, Carly Fiorina. In their most recent reelection campaigns, they each broke records for the most votes any senator has ever received, ever.
There aren't any turn-key devices that run OpenWRT out of the box. There are some Buffalo devices that run DD-WRT, but that's not the same thing at all. DD-WRT's approach to security and updates is even worse than some router manufacturers.
Also, I did buy a Buffalo router with DD-WRT and Atheros chipset (so it would have open-source drivers), expressly so I could wipe DD-WRT and install OpenWRT. What I discovered is that customizing a router means lots of research, which you have to do again and again when it's time to install updates. This is because you can't really fit a proper system on only 32MB of flash, running on 128MB of RAM, so you have to reflash the whole thing every time. And this is actually a large amount of memory; my Netgear router with the same chipset has 8MB of flash and 64MB of RAM.
If you don't customize your router, then upgrading it is much easier, but then it still doesn't have automatic security updates and all the fun features.
The Turris router has 4GB of flash and 1GB of RAM. This is immense. You don't need to play tricks with minimal overlays on top of compressed ROM filesystems. You can install and maintain the router like a normal system.
I also wonder what about this project makes it more attractive than picking up a $59 Asus router and throwing open-wrt on it.
All the Asus routers I've looked at use Broadcom SoCs, which means closed source drivers and pathetic performance in OpenWRT. Also, for $59, you're not getting 802.11ac, plenty of RAM and storage for other tasks, or even enough processing power to route more than double digit Mbps (except maybe with hardware acceleration and no security).
The problem Broadcom has in comparison with other SoC makers is they never open source their drivers except under extreme duress. The practical impact is that you can never fix problems in the firmware and you can never upgrade the kernel. It looks like they're building this thing on top of the Marvell Armada 385.
I don't know of any 802.11ac WiFi radios with open firmware, but the Qualcomm 9880 at least has an open driver. It looks like this Turris router will have Qualcomm radios.
tldr; You hipsters don’t appreciate the effort that went into good design. Hint: Flat Design is not an example of good design.
Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read
Nevermind many, show me a single person with normal vision that CANNOT read Apple fonts and I will save their life, because clearly they have a brain tumour and need treatment immediately.
Reductio ad absurdum. Norman and Tog did not say all of it was impossible to read. They said it was difficult or impossible, and it is true that it is difficult. Some of Apple’s advertising images even featured skinny white text on a white background. For all of computing history, we’ve had gradually increasing resolutions and easier to read fonts, and then suddenly, bam. Everybody is doing skinny white text on a purple gradient or something.
These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations
Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.
Great. So where is the science? Norman and Tog actually did studies. They got people who were not infatuated with their vision to test the interface and see if it worked. They watched how people used the device, and they iterated. Where are the studies showing that this new way is better? Who is more productive? And why is the easier to use way not the default?
The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.
Bad example. The mobile devices I know still have a type of scroll bar: The contacts app would be unusable otherwise.
On the web browser, there is no scroll bar. There might be a scroll indicator, but there’s nothing that I can grab. I just swipe, and swipe, and sometimes I give up and just not consume the content that I want. This is bad design in practice.
Also, I am not putting content all the way to the edge of the screen. I have like 200 ppi in that blank space. I can afford a few pixels to at least show a persistent indicator of where I am in the content. Not like when I was trying to find out what Apple Mail on MacOS X was doing, and the activity window had no indication that I could scroll down to see what the other connections were doing.
Sure, it’s easy to criticize. Making a good design would be a better proof. But it shouldn’t be so easy to just point at what they did in the past, and say, that was better for this reason. You shouldn’t have thrown that away.
Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
As long as it is feasible and SAFE for it "to stop and think about what to do" in these situations, that's fine. When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both sides in a construction zone and the lane changes and signs come suddenly, I don't think just stopping in the middle of the road seems like a good idea.
What are you talking about? If you are in a construction zone and the lane changes suddenly, I think you will find yourself in a traffic jam. For that matter, I don’t think you will be driving “60mph+” in a construction zone; I think you will already be in a traffic jam.
Do these groups communicate at all? I ask because I have the Buffalo WZR-1750DHPD router that comes with DD-WRT straight from the factory. Full open source, etc.
That's because DD-WRT is not "full open source, etc." It's open source Linux, but closed source device drivers. It comes from Linus's "pragmatic" desire for Linux to be used, with no interest in the political reasons for the GPL.
I don't know the process at OpenWRT exactly, but they tend to use open source drivers more than DD-WRT does. On the minus side, this means it supports much fewer devices. On the plus side, this means "supported" devices really are supported and have updates available to them, while DD-WRT is just throw a firmware at a device and never give it a feature or security update ever again even if there are open-source drivers for it.
In my opinion, OpenWRT is better than DD-WRT because OpenWRT is under pretty active development and has features that matter for making a better Internet.
DD-WRT is very difficult to compile, so in practice when a device comes out, you have one guy making a firmware stuffed with like 4 hotspots and 4 VPNs and 2 VoIP switches and DynDNS, or as many of those things as he can fit, and there’s no space for your own programs on the router. IPv6 is not a top priority at DD-WRT. And then nobody makes a new firmware for that device ever again, no matter how many security holes appear over the years.
In contrast, the latest OpenWRT comes with FQ-CoDel, IPv6, and DNSSEC. The default web-based administration these days is not bad, and the package system allows you to add interesting stuff, if your device has enough space. The Kconfig build system and the plain text configuration files make customization pretty easy.
The main downside is that OpenWRT is more picky about hardware. For DD-WRT, you have an ancient WRT54G, that’s fine, just install an equally ancient firmware. Ignore the problems; everybody else ignores the problems. Current releases of OpenWRT insist on a device that can run a modern kernel, with at least 4MB of flash and 32MB of RAM.
Right, that’s why I said, “develop” something better, and not just look into alternatives. If you want to leak secrets to journalists right now, or if you want to sign your distribution releases right now, then OpenPGP is the best alternative. If you want to communicate securely with family, probably S/MIME is better, because it’s way more compatible and less hassle to use. Already, security is bifurcated into incompatible solutions.
For practical use, probably the biggest improvement in people’s security has been Gmail. Sure, it’s entirely the plaything of the Borg, and vulnerable to the rubber stamp of FISA, but the actual connection to the server is protected by TLS, with pinned certificates in the major clients. I don’t remember who it was, but somebody said switching to Gmail has been the biggest improvement in actual email security, because they have good technology and a legal team that actually puts up a fight.
The biggest problem with OpenPGP is that it doesn’t protect the metadata. It has to be backwards-compatible with the existing mail system, and that mail system needs to be replaced. The most interesting alternative that I have noticed is Dark Mail, but that is only an incredibly complicated RFC right now.
No, rjh is correct. The problem with cryptography is that it is incredibly tricky. If you don’t do it just right, then you compromise your security. If you get it really wrong, then it’s as good as not having cryptography at all. GnuPG has to be complicated to be compatible with the design-by-committee OpenPGP standards, including its clunky manual key system.
rhj is probably also correct that OpenPGP gives the best security for email. My problem is that no security system is useful if nobody uses it. OpenPGP is used a lot for verifying that open source contributions come from particular developers, so their public communications can be authenticated. So far, so boring. It’s not used at all for communicating with friends and family. S/MIME at least has transparent key distribution, but that is not used by anybody, either.
The most interesting alternative to me is Dark Mail, but so far that is nothing but an incredibly complicated RFC. The proposed architecture looks interesting, though, so I want it to succeed.
The fundamental problem is that SMTP was not designed for security, and there's no provision to change over everybody at some point.
Also, privacy adds significant usability problems. You need to generate and copy your private key manually, instead of having your machines provision it among themselves. And privacy means webmail providers can't monetize the contents of your email, and you can't search through past emails efficiently.
Not necessary. Startcom, a company in Israel, is happy to generate and store a key that you can use to certify that you are you, for free. I think this also demonstrates the insane brokenness of the certificate authority system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's good that they choose a permissive license for their source code, but their reason for it, Why MIT? is just... someone is wrong on the Internet
The GPL is upstream-centric, the MIT license is downstream-centric. We happen to prioritize downstream more than upstream, since downstream is what really matters: the userbase, the community, the availability.
It is the GPL that is downstream-centric and MIT that is upstream-centric. The GPL was designed to ensure that the entire program, source code, and ability to use it, are available to the userbase and community. The MIT license is primarily about avoiding liability, so anybody upstream of the userbase has greater privileges than the community.
I wish them well, but it’s a hindrance when they get the community aspects so wrong.
My armchair solution to this problem is to reform rent control.
The new “affordable housing” rules are an interesting approach to rent control. For the new affordable housing projects, the rent is set at some low price, but only as long as the resident has an income within 2 times the limit to qualify for that rate. And I think the rates adjust over time to account for inflation. Once the resident’s income goes above the limit, then the unit’s rent goes to “market rate.” I heard about this in a presentation hosted by the city, and the city planner said the residents at that point typically have enough money that they want to move to another location, anyway. But this does not apply to pre-1979 properties.
One problem with the equity of rent control and Proposition 13 is that they are not indexed to the income of the resident. Your mother dies and leaves you a house, and you inherit her 1975 tax rate, even if you are a super-rich investment banker. You can’t do much to the property, though, because “new construction” will trigger a reassessment. So, the best thing for you is to rent it out as a low-density rent-controlled slum, and keep the fundamental supply/demand imbalance intact.
It would be good, both for tax revenue and for social justice, for the taxes and rent controls to take into account the resident’s ability to pay. But doing anything to those laws would draw out the NIMBYs like nothing else, and formulas that are too complicated would themselves be an unfair tax.
Well, I don’t think much about how to make MUNI better. I mostly ride bicycle everywhere. More bike lanes, and bike lanes that are separated by physical barriers against cars, would be good. Oh, how I hate dodging cars on Folsom, as they cross the bike lane to turn right or deliver something.
The Van Ness BRT is a decent start, but I would really prefer if they got fast vehicles that didn’t put out so much noise and soot. Preferably electric. They need more tunnels and more routes where mass transit is not delayed by car traffic. They could also run small buses during low-traffic times, instead of chugging those empty monsters across my window at midnight every night.
My major problem, in terms of user experience, is that I must budget 1 hour of time per transfer to get anywhere. When I’m going between residential neighborhoods, this frequently means I should budget 2 hours to reach my destination. The city is only about 10 miles across. It shouldn’t take 2 hours.
Homeowners will not be happy, because they've lost money in the deal.
That's always a problem in California. An elderly neighbor brawled me out for having dead petunias in the front yard, causing the value of her house to drop by $25,000 in a rising market. Never mind that she wasn't selling the house, where the realized value may differ significantly from the perceived value.
The home ownership that Redfin was highlighting is part of the problem with housing prices in San Francisco. Half a century ago, when the US government made private home ownership a national priority, it seemed nice to the citizens that housing prices go up faster than inflation. That makes home ownership a sound investment. But several decades of home values steadily ratcheting up, and house prices become so expensive that only super-rich and banks can own them. We’re seeing this first in San Francisco, but it could become a problem in the entire country.
I’m fine with a house’s price going up if there are improvements. My grandparents installed a flagstone driveway and extensive skylights and a bunch of other improvements that made their home nicer than when they bought it. My problem is with pouring money into a mortgage, simply because the next schmuck has to pour even more money into the mortgage.
Teachers can’t afford to own a house in San Francisco, but maybe they shouldn’t own. They should rent.
The city is surrounded on three sides by water and all available land is full or reserved for precious little parkland.
Not 100% true.
Well, it is true that almost all the land is actually in use, but not all of it is. There’s that giant field of asphalt next to the Giants’ stadium, and there are those abandoned warehouses next to the asphalt field, both currently in the planning process to be converted into modern housing and commerce. And there are a number of other run-down neighborhoods and unused government properties. But most of the land is in use.
The big problem is... the big buildings. There are almost none. Most of the land in the city is under-utilized. A couple generations ago, the voters and politicians enacted a variety of strict building limits, so most of the city are these little 2-storey single-family houses. In January, a couple researcher at UCLA showed that height limits cause enclaves of super-rich. We see it now in San Francisco.
We need to abolish these height limits and let the market decide the shape of the city. Also, MUNI sucks: We need more efficient mass transit in this city.
Why isn't this article entitled "Red Hat Linux executive tells the sheeple to quit buying Red Hat Linux - there are plenty of identical and cheaper alternatives available?"
No, it’s more like: Buy Red Hat. They employ the largest number of influential Linux hackers (Poettering, Sievers, Molnar, etc.), so you can be assured that open source stuff works best in a Red Hat distribution.
For a technology site, Slashdot is ridiculously behind the times.
UTF-8. IPv6. HTTPS. DNSSEC. DKIM and SPF. Perl 6. A favicon that doesn't look like pixel art.
I think it would do the editors some good to have working experience with the field that they cover.
I strongly disagree with his recommendation for DNS. That’s because I want to spread DNSSEC.
The problem with services like Amazon Route 53 is they generate DNS records dynamically. That means they need the signing key to be online, on the DNS load balancer, and they don’t bother to do so. If you really need your DNS to be globally distributed (How many people actually look for your domain, anyway? How many times is the answer cached on Google public DNS already?), you should look into CloudFlare. CloudFlare uses a custom implementation of ECDSA to decrease the cost of DNSSEC signatures, making it practical to do online signatures and also very effective NSEC white lies.
The real problem with the WhatsApp affair is that it was even possible for the judge to shut it down. The Internet was invented as a decentralized system, and it would be extremely disruptive to shut it down for the whole country. But all these new technologies are designed for asymmetric computing, where the thing you have is only a terminal into someone else's computer.
Yeah, I know, there are technical reasons of battery life and network connectivity, why mobiles are not full peers on the Internet. Still, new applications should be designed so you can choose where it is hosted, even on your own home computer, not some centralized system that can be shut down.
Slashdot wasn't always this bad. Many smart people seem to have absconded and thus the S/N ratio is much higher now.
You got S/N backwards. No wonder you're having problems with your circuit.
The Republican Party in California is broken. Feinstein's reelection was so assured that they didn't bother to nominate a real candidate to run against her. And Boxer's most recent opponent was that horrible person, Carly Fiorina. The real problem is binary partisanship, a natural outcome of the winner-takes-all voting system. When both parties agree on all the structural issues, the American voters have no real choice.
I voted against both Feinstein and Boxer. Feinstein rode in the success of Obama's reelection campaign against that horrible person, Mitt Romney, so much that the Republican Party didn't bother to nominate a real candidate to run against her. And Boxer easily defeated the challenge from that other horrible person, Carly Fiorina. In their most recent reelection campaigns, they each broke records for the most votes any senator has ever received, ever.
There aren't any turn-key devices that run OpenWRT out of the box. There are some Buffalo devices that run DD-WRT, but that's not the same thing at all. DD-WRT's approach to security and updates is even worse than some router manufacturers.
Also, I did buy a Buffalo router with DD-WRT and Atheros chipset (so it would have open-source drivers), expressly so I could wipe DD-WRT and install OpenWRT. What I discovered is that customizing a router means lots of research, which you have to do again and again when it's time to install updates. This is because you can't really fit a proper system on only 32MB of flash, running on 128MB of RAM, so you have to reflash the whole thing every time. And this is actually a large amount of memory; my Netgear router with the same chipset has 8MB of flash and 64MB of RAM.
If you don't customize your router, then upgrading it is much easier, but then it still doesn't have automatic security updates and all the fun features.
The Turris router has 4GB of flash and 1GB of RAM. This is immense. You don't need to play tricks with minimal overlays on top of compressed ROM filesystems. You can install and maintain the router like a normal system.
I also wonder what about this project makes it more attractive than picking up a $59 Asus router and throwing open-wrt on it.
All the Asus routers I've looked at use Broadcom SoCs, which means closed source drivers and pathetic performance in OpenWRT. Also, for $59, you're not getting 802.11ac, plenty of RAM and storage for other tasks, or even enough processing power to route more than double digit Mbps (except maybe with hardware acceleration and no security).
The problem Broadcom has in comparison with other SoC makers is they never open source their drivers except under extreme duress. The practical impact is that you can never fix problems in the firmware and you can never upgrade the kernel. It looks like they're building this thing on top of the Marvell Armada 385.
I don't know of any 802.11ac WiFi radios with open firmware, but the Qualcomm 9880 at least has an open driver. It looks like this Turris router will have Qualcomm radios.
tldr; You hipsters don’t appreciate the effort that went into good design. Hint: Flat Design is not an example of good design.
Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read
Nevermind many, show me a single person with normal vision that CANNOT read Apple fonts and I will save their life, because clearly they have a brain tumour and need treatment immediately.
Reductio ad absurdum. Norman and Tog did not say all of it was impossible to read. They said it was difficult or impossible, and it is true that it is difficult. Some of Apple’s advertising images even featured skinny white text on a white background. For all of computing history, we’ve had gradually increasing resolutions and easier to read fonts, and then suddenly, bam. Everybody is doing skinny white text on a purple gradient or something.
These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations
Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.
Great. So where is the science? Norman and Tog actually did studies. They got people who were not infatuated with their vision to test the interface and see if it worked. They watched how people used the device, and they iterated. Where are the studies showing that this new way is better? Who is more productive? And why is the easier to use way not the default?
The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.
Bad example. The mobile devices I know still have a type of scroll bar: The contacts app would be unusable otherwise.
On the web browser, there is no scroll bar. There might be a scroll indicator, but there’s nothing that I can grab. I just swipe, and swipe, and sometimes I give up and just not consume the content that I want. This is bad design in practice.
Also, I am not putting content all the way to the edge of the screen. I have like 200 ppi in that blank space. I can afford a few pixels to at least show a persistent indicator of where I am in the content. Not like when I was trying to find out what Apple Mail on MacOS X was doing, and the activity window had no indication that I could scroll down to see what the other connections were doing.
Sure, it’s easy to criticize. Making a good design would be a better proof. But it shouldn’t be so easy to just point at what they did in the past, and say, that was better for this reason. You shouldn’t have thrown that away.
Forget autonomous car development, Toyota is woefully behind in computer-controlled car development. Random relevant article: Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences.
Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
As long as it is feasible and SAFE for it "to stop and think about what to do" in these situations, that's fine. When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both sides in a construction zone and the lane changes and signs come suddenly, I don't think just stopping in the middle of the road seems like a good idea.
What are you talking about? If you are in a construction zone and the lane changes suddenly, I think you will find yourself in a traffic jam. For that matter, I don’t think you will be driving “60mph+” in a construction zone; I think you will already be in a traffic jam.
Do these groups communicate at all? I ask because I have the Buffalo WZR-1750DHPD router that comes with DD-WRT straight from the factory. Full open source, etc.
That's because DD-WRT is not "full open source, etc." It's open source Linux, but closed source device drivers. It comes from Linus's "pragmatic" desire for Linux to be used, with no interest in the political reasons for the GPL.
I don't know the process at OpenWRT exactly, but they tend to use open source drivers more than DD-WRT does. On the minus side, this means it supports much fewer devices. On the plus side, this means "supported" devices really are supported and have updates available to them, while DD-WRT is just throw a firmware at a device and never give it a feature or security update ever again even if there are open-source drivers for it.
In my opinion, OpenWRT is better than DD-WRT because OpenWRT is under pretty active development and has features that matter for making a better Internet.
DD-WRT is very difficult to compile, so in practice when a device comes out, you have one guy making a firmware stuffed with like 4 hotspots and 4 VPNs and 2 VoIP switches and DynDNS, or as many of those things as he can fit, and there’s no space for your own programs on the router. IPv6 is not a top priority at DD-WRT. And then nobody makes a new firmware for that device ever again, no matter how many security holes appear over the years.
In contrast, the latest OpenWRT comes with FQ-CoDel, IPv6, and DNSSEC. The default web-based administration these days is not bad, and the package system allows you to add interesting stuff, if your device has enough space. The Kconfig build system and the plain text configuration files make customization pretty easy.
The main downside is that OpenWRT is more picky about hardware. For DD-WRT, you have an ancient WRT54G, that’s fine, just install an equally ancient firmware. Ignore the problems; everybody else ignores the problems. Current releases of OpenWRT insist on a device that can run a modern kernel, with at least 4MB of flash and 32MB of RAM.
Right, that’s why I said, “develop” something better, and not just look into alternatives. If you want to leak secrets to journalists right now, or if you want to sign your distribution releases right now, then OpenPGP is the best alternative. If you want to communicate securely with family, probably S/MIME is better, because it’s way more compatible and less hassle to use. Already, security is bifurcated into incompatible solutions.
For practical use, probably the biggest improvement in people’s security has been Gmail. Sure, it’s entirely the plaything of the Borg, and vulnerable to the rubber stamp of FISA, but the actual connection to the server is protected by TLS, with pinned certificates in the major clients. I don’t remember who it was, but somebody said switching to Gmail has been the biggest improvement in actual email security, because they have good technology and a legal team that actually puts up a fight.
The biggest problem with OpenPGP is that it doesn’t protect the metadata. It has to be backwards-compatible with the existing mail system, and that mail system needs to be replaced. The most interesting alternative that I have noticed is Dark Mail, but that is only an incredibly complicated RFC right now.
No, rjh is correct. The problem with cryptography is that it is incredibly tricky. If you don’t do it just right, then you compromise your security. If you get it really wrong, then it’s as good as not having cryptography at all. GnuPG has to be complicated to be compatible with the design-by-committee OpenPGP standards, including its clunky manual key system.
rhj is probably also correct that OpenPGP gives the best security for email. My problem is that no security system is useful if nobody uses it. OpenPGP is used a lot for verifying that open source contributions come from particular developers, so their public communications can be authenticated. So far, so boring. It’s not used at all for communicating with friends and family. S/MIME at least has transparent key distribution, but that is not used by anybody, either.
The most interesting alternative to me is Dark Mail, but so far that is nothing but an incredibly complicated RFC. The proposed architecture looks interesting, though, so I want it to succeed.
The fundamental problem is that SMTP was not designed for security, and there's no provision to change over everybody at some point.
Also, privacy adds significant usability problems. You need to generate and copy your private key manually, instead of having your machines provision it among themselves. And privacy means webmail providers can't monetize the contents of your email, and you can't search through past emails efficiently.
Not necessary. Startcom, a company in Israel, is happy to generate and store a key that you can use to certify that you are you, for free. I think this also demonstrates the insane brokenness of the certificate authority system.
When activists like Moxie Marlinspike are calling for the end of PGP, it's probably time to look into alternatives.
PGP's problems are endemic to its design. It cannot be fixed, and increased adoption won't help.