This is probably old hat but, if you have both kate and kBear installed, you can give kate {which has excellent, customisable syntax highlighting of its own BTW.....} a filename like "kbearftp://user@myisp.co.uk/filename" and it will use kBear to make an FTP connection to myisp.co.uk, login as user, prompt you for a password {with a tick-box to remember the password in case the FTP session times out while you are busy editing the file}, and save the file as filename. Once this is done, you can treat the file just as though it was a local file. You can even bookmark ftp directories. It's the next best thing to being able to mount an entire ftp site.
IMHO kBear is ugly as sin..... I'd recommend gFTP every time if you want a pretty, graphical FTP client..... but this way, you don't have to use the GUI, only the API.
It produces horrible code. In its defence, it can't really help producing horrible code, because of its very nature. DreamWeaver is like a device with piano-keys that clips onto the neck of a guitar, and allows you to fret and strum the guitar strings by pressing piano keys.
There is no way to have a WYSIWYG HTML editor. HTML is by nature WYSINNWEOCG -- What You See Is Not Necessarily What Every Other Client Gets.
IMHO the best HTML editor for GNU/Linux is nano. But if I've got KDE desktop on, I quite like kate. Of course, I am biased and think WYSIWYG and GUIs are overrated anyway.
Here's a clue: you'll need an LM1881 sync separator, a 4053 bilateral switch {or preferably something with more bandwidth}, and either a PIC microcontroller or a stack of TTL chips. The 1881 has an output which tells you when the field starts, and another output which pulses on every line. You need to count off 20 or so lines {look at the picture signal with an oscilloscope to see where the real picture starts}, during which time you must output a dummy black level with artificial hsync pulses. {You can get a clean hsync output from the 1881; use this to turn on a transistor and pull the black level down to 0V. Your dummy black needs to be as close as possible to true black, otherwise the very top and bottom of the screen will be some shade of grey. But you'll have thought of that and wired in a potentiometer to adjust it}. Switch over to the unadulterated picture signal for about 270 lines. Then go back to your dummy black for the remaining {22.5 or thereabouts} lines of picture.
If you need adjustability, use a PIC with a decent number of I/O lines. Or try using an open-drain I/O line with a capacitor to 0V..... pull it low to discharge the capacitor; let it float, allowing the cap to charge through a pot; and time how long it takes to begin reading high. The paddle controller inputs on the Atari 2600 worked exactly like that.
Or, you can get a proper time base corrector from a professional video equipment supplier. It'll probably cost you more than buying a load of original videos, though.....:)
Load the PDF and take a look at page 22 {absolute page number 32 if you're using KPDF or similar non-spyware-infested readers}.
"A properly formatted SKB shall have exactly one nonce record. The nonce number X is used in the Variant Data calculation as described below. The nonce record will always precede the Calculate Variant Data Record and the Conditionally Calculate Variant Data Records in the SKB, although it may not immediately precede them."
Looks like they'll be tracking you if you try to watch kiddie porn then..... The table shows the "nonce number" X is 16 bytes long, which is an awful lot of suspects if you ask me.
Housebricks are pretty much the same size wherever you go, even in old buildings which predate the standard housebrick (215 x 102.5 x 65). Why? Because a housebrick is The Right Size For The Job: not too big to be manipulated with one hand, not so small that you need more of them per building.
Microsoft's software is a familiar environment that I can get stuff done fast in.
To you, maybe. To me, it's not familiar: I use Linux on desktop and servers at work, and I use Linux on laptop and desktop at home. I have occasionally brushed up against Windows, and find it next to impossible to get on with: I find the user interface clumsy and its habit of trying to second-guess me annoying. To someone who has never used a computer before, it's also not familiar.
I spend too much time configuring and playing with the system. Then I realize all the work I *could* have been getting done in that time:-)
Well, you could pay for someone to install a Linux distribution for you, and tweak it the way you wanted.....:)
Microsoft would well prefer that people were using pirated Windows rather than any non-Microsoft product -- not just GNU/Linux. Microsoft want you to use Word, not some povvy cheap £50 word processor from some independent vendor, even if the £50 one does all you need it to do. John Willy thinks that he will be better off with a £500 word processor than a £50 one -- and why save £450 by buying the £50 one, when you could save £500 and stick two fingers up to The Man at the same time by pirating the £500 one?!
That's where all the local independent software suppliers went. {Though, to be frank, if they were selling closed-source, I've not much sympathy for them.}
In my city, there was a bus route that was very very popular: it linked a busy council estate where almost nobody had a car with the centre of town. When the buses were deregulated, an upstart startup company began running competing buses on the same route, charging a lower fare. The "main" bus company responded by introducing more of their buses, cutting their fares, and accepting the competitor's return tickets. Eventually, every bus travelling up and down that main road was costing somebody money; and the competitor was pushed out of business before the established company. Today, no buses at all run on that route; and the local bus company is owned by a used car dealership.
As long as people are using Microsoft software, they are dependent upon Microsoft software; and if they aren't paying for it today, maybe they can be tapped for money tomorrow somehow. Either way, MS is prepared to swallow that cost..... piracy is not really hurting them. They have so much money that even if nobody ever bought another Microsoft product again, nobody at MS would go short.
The Open Source community is really in the best position to compete with Microsoft, because Open Source also has unlimited reserves. The capitalists are about to find out the hard way that other things beside money can have intrinsic value.....
The problems with the existing licences are that the GPL is too verbose, and the BSD licence might permit closed-source derivatives. Which is not to knock the BSD people: they do do a great job of keeping stuff free, but IMHO pledging to make a compatible open-source clone of any closed-source derivative that anyone makes of your work is making a rod for your own back -- it smacks of tidying up after other people. It's surely better to use the privileges afforded you under copyright law to make sure from the outset that nobody even attempts to create a closed derivative.
Of course, you could say fighting licence proliferation by creating new licences is a bit like shagging for virginity..... to which I would have to counter that The One True Licence has not been written yet, and this is just me taking a shot at that elusive target.
This program is copyright (c) 2005, AJS318 and will enter the Public Domain on 1 January 2005.
Above and beyond your statutory rights, permission is hereby granted {and you are encouraged} to copy and distribute this program in source or binary forms, with or without modification, subject to the following conditions:
Distributions in source code form must include this copyright and permission notice and disclaimer of warranty {or, at your discretion, notice of a warranty underwritten by you}.
Distributions in binary form must include this copyright and permission notice and disclaimer of warranty {or, at your discretion, notice of a warranty underwritten by you}; and an offer, valid in perpetuity, to supply on request the complete, machine-readable source code.
The names of the copyright holders may not be used to promote or endorse any product without written permission.
Translation of messages and documentation in the English-language version to other languages is permitted. However, this permission-to-translate clause must be replaced in the translated version by a clause forbidding any further translation.
THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S) IN GOOD FAITH BUT WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. THE USER ASSUMES SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF ANY USE OF THIS PROGRAM. IF YOU ARE IN DOUBT, SEEK ADVICE FROM A COMPETENT PROGRAMMER.
Regardless of military policy, the laws of physics are quite clear on the matter: two overwrites make it impossible to recover data and one makes it supremely difficult.
It's a weapons-versus-armour situation: either there is some weapon that no piece of armour can protect you against, or there isn't. It's impossible to have a weapon that can pierce absolutely any armour and armour that can withstand any weapon: the two are mutually exclusive.
Either there is a way to make a disk drive really unreadable, or there isn't. Now, The Authorities like to be able to keep secrets; but they don't want anybody else to be able to keep secrets from them.
What I'm alluding to is that at some level, The Authorities are almost certainly using a variety of unpleasant techniques -- torture, Extremely Strong Drugs and Mysterious Disappearance, for instance -- to recover information; but they also need to be able to deny that they are using such techniques. If someone is threatening to cook your dog and eat it in front of you, you'll probably tell them everything they want to know. And then they'll tell everyone else that they recovered the information from an old hard disk drive in a computer you sold to a friend a year or so ago. And Fido lives happily ever after.
Of course, for that to fly, you would first have to cultivate the impression in the mind of the General Public {who are typically ignorant about science} that data saved on a hard disk is there forever, and can be recovered at any time. Hence, overkill in disposal of used drives. Hell, by their logic, you would have to demolish any building in which a conversation about classified matters had taken place!
Then, of course, there's the situation where someone has 200GB of "Interesting Material" on a hard disk, gets a tip-off that someone is interested; and, using a few keystrokes on the BIOS setup screen, wipes it factory-fresh before The Authorities come around. A brand-new-looking hard drive is somewhat less useful as circumstantial evidence than the mangled remains of a hard drive and a neighbour reporting angle-grinder sounds. I somehow can't imagine the News of the World-reading General Public accepting this sort of thing, either.
What it takes to securely delete data, so that it can never be recovered, is.....
Exactly two overwrite cycles.
Almost every computer ever built has used magnetic memory of one description or another to some greater or lesser extent. If magnetic memory really had a fourth dimension, there would be evidence for two phenomena. Firstly, accidental reads of "past" data would be be cited as a cause of misreads. Secondly, the phenomenon would have been commercially exploited. Although we think disk drives are cheap today, there have been times in the past when it would have been economically prudent to cram in a bit of extra storage, almost whatever it took.
Human memory is not overwritten in the same way as machine memory: it's four-dimensional, meaning that events are stored with a timestamp and can be recalled at any time in future. Machine memory is three-dimensional -- unless you deliberately try to make it act four-dimensionally, by storing all updates in their own right.
The nearest thing to four-dimensionality in magnetic memory is that you can sometimes discern a vague difference between a "1" written over a "1" and a "1" written over a "0", and you can sometimes discern a vague difference between a "0" written over a "1" and a "0". written over a "0". That's a natural phenomenon due to the hysteresis of magnetic media. The difference is hard to see because in digital recording, you are only concerned about two states; once the material has been magnetised to saturation, you are by definition outside of the hysteresis loop. Even near saturation, you are working away from the broadest part of the loop, and so the result you get will be subject to tolerance.
Note also that the reading head of a disk drive is connected to an amplifier which is designed to saturate. The drive really doesn't know the difference. To be able to discern this information in practice, you would have to perform some serious mods on the drive.
Don't pay any attention to the Guttmann report -- it's long out of date and has since been discredited, though it keeps popping up again and again. There are very few people in the world who could actually carry out the procedures talked about there for recovering overwritten data, and there are easier techniques anyway {find someone who knows that information and threaten them, their family and/or pets with torture.....}
Think of data being stored using pennies on a revolving, felt-topped table, with heads for ones and tails for zeros. Maybe the pennies will leave a weak impression in the felt, but it's not certain. If you turn them all tails-up, then all the data that was stored by the pattern of heads and tails is lost, and all the impressions on the table felt will become impressions of heads; if you then turn all the pennies heads-up, then all the impressions will be tails.
It ought to be almost trivially simple for motherboard manufacturers to build in a BIOS option to erase a hard drive. However, I've not found one on any machine newer that the Amstrad MegaPC; that had a Quadtel BIOS which incorporated a "drive test" function, which just happened to leave the drive in a known state, i.e. it erased it. I'm guessing that there are some political reasons for not doing so.
People might think "what does this do?", use it, lose data and blame the motherboard manufacturer. Also, it might -- if it were supremely poorly implemented -- be used by a particularly nasty breed of malware.
People who have data that The Authorities want, and that they don't want The Authorities to have, might find it too easy to put that data out of reach of The Authorities.
Hard drive manufacturers sell more new drives if people are needlessly destroying new ones.
Data Recovery firms don't want there being something out there that they re
This is possibly a brilliant attempt by Microsoft to discredit Open Source software. Any attempt to use technology to solve a social problem is doomed to fail from the word go: this software will not work. Yet by making it Open Source, Microsoft have ensured that the whole Open Source movement -- and not Microsoft and their business practices -- will be called into question when the venture inevitably fails.
Child pornography is not a technological problem. It is a social problem and can only be dealt with on a social front.
And, frankly, I don't give a flying toss about people looking at pictures. If some sicko wants to get his filthy little rocks off, I'd far, far rather he did so into a box of Kleenex than with any kid of mine. {Plus, he would then be safely out of commission for a few hours.} It's just a picture, for crying out loud -- the damage {if there was any damage -- many fairly innocuous pictures of kids in the bath, or on the beach, nowadays would be considered "child porn"} is long since done. The suffering does not increase every time someone looks at a picture.
Taking the pictures is a different matter..... now, if people actually are abusing children, that should be punished. {Bathtime and holiday snaps, which do not involve abuse, shouldn't.} As should attempting to emulate in real life certain things seen in pictures. But those things already are illegal. And most child abuse is perpetrated by a family member or friend, not by random strangers.
But in these times, the New Dark Ages, child pornography has become the new witchcraft. And there isn't going to be any kind of rational debate anytime soon.
Not trying to troll, but say I wrote some software {which I have} and licenced it for distribution in source code form only {which it is} -- does that mean it is not properly Open Source?
Would it make a difference if the software was written in an interpreted language {which it is} and thus did not have a compiled binary form?
The US Constitution was written a long time ago. In those days, if you wanted a private conversation, you could just go off into the woods somewhere, prod the undergrowth with a stick to make sure nobody was hiding in a bush, and have your private conversation. There were no such things as video cameras, tape recorders or computers, and no reason to suppose such things would ever be invented. The right to privacy was obvious, and that's why it was taken for granted.
I was thinking about "cheaper than free" software -- a Linux distro that turned your broadband-equipped computer into a cluster node while idle -- a couple of years ago. All that computing power going to waste..... But I couldn't find a way to build a business model around it -- it was just too hit-and-miss for any task I could think of. What data is there that can be batch-processed in a completely non-time-critical fashion, and is so non-security-critical that it can potentially be shown to thousands of strangers?
You could encrypt everything {and that would go some way to prevent tampering with the returned results}; but then, if you're going to process encrypted input and return encrypted results, that will eat a lot of your processing power. It's a bit like putting a V8 engine through a three-speed automatic transmission..... in the end, it won't really do anything an old transverse four and man-tran can't, apart from drink fuel and leave you wondering why you bothered.
There is a possibility of "inter-cycling" in certain, limited settings {using corporate desktop machines which typically have only a few gigs of apps and data for RAID-like backups of servers springs immediately to mind}. But outside of these circumstances, switching off when not in use and recycling when done with are the best ways of avoiding waste. There is often plenty of life in a used machine if it doesn't have to run a bloated graphical desktop environment and numerous accessories {wanted and otherwise}. And at least used PCs are something you can store up till you have enough of them to do the task you want to do..... remote CPU time and bandwidth are only available for fleeting moments.
No: it's not a Linux-like OS that runs on a PPC platform, but rather a PPC emulator that runs on an AMD/Intel platform. Very, very, v e r y s l o w l y.
You're right, though; you can run Linux on a PPC. Linus does. You can also run FreeBSD on a PPC..... Apple do.....
The real question being asked here is, "Who are you going to call when the vendor goes tits up?" In the absolute worst case, even recovering your data will require at least one competent programmer armed with the application source code.
What if, as the FUDsters would have us believe is likely, MySQL AB were to cease trading tomorrow? OK, we know it's not going to happen, MySQL is the most popular database server and not much is about to change that. But even if it did, you would still have the source code to the application -- any competent programmer could maintain it for you, or rescue your data and migrate it to another server. Knowledge of the source code would be invaluable in designing a migration path. You would not get security fixes from MySQL; but the chances are that you would have been running a fairly up-to-date version up until then. It's also possible that another entity could just take over the task of maintaining the software, lock, stock and barrel. The very nature of Open Source guarantees that customers lose nothing -- ever.
When a closed-source software vendor goes tits up, it's bye-bye to customer support and -- occasionally, in a very few, very rare, but very destructive cases -- bye-bye to your data. There is still no established procedure to expedite the transfer of orphaned "intellectual property" to the Public Domain. Just because a company no longer exists, and therefore can't be harmed by any action on your part, is no longer any guarantee that you won't be sued. Some greaseball could buy the mortal remains of the deceased company, claim that that purchase included IP rights, and sue.
If there is any kind of software that is of questionable fitness for its intended purpose, it is the proprietary, closed-source kind.
To a needle on the record, there is only forward/backward and up/down. There is no in/out when you're in the groove.
Topologically speaking, there is also side-to-side.
The pick-up head has inertia due to the mass of a hefty ceramic magnet and several hundred turns of copper wire. There's a counterweight balancing it so that there is only a couple of grammes' weight bearing down on the record, but it has a hell of a lot of inertia compared to the steel shank of the stylus, which is attached to a very flexible coupling. So when the groove pulls the needle to the left, the needle moves left but doesn't take the whole pick-up head with it; the magnetic flux lines change and induce a current in the coils. The preamplifier has a relatively high input impedance, so the needle isn't actually doing much work generating electricity. Otherwise it would feel stiffer.
Side-to-side motion is the sum of left and right signals. Up-and-down motion is the difference. By using four coils, not two, and pulling cunning stunts with the wiring, you can create a sum and difference of the sum and difference signals without resorting to op-amps. Which, of course, gives you {more or less} the original signals.....
I think that councils should only be allowed to impose car parking and road usage charges on motorists if they can prove that there exists a satisfactory standard of public transportation within their jurisdiction, and similarly workplaces should not be allowed to charge employees for car parking unless they can prove that they are fully accessible by public transport {if at all}. Too often, the motorist is seen as a cash cow to be milked, under the colour of "protecting the environment". How does squeezing money out of the working classes -- who typically drive cars with engines under 1.5 litres, and have no viable alternative to doing so -- protect the environment? Especially when there are certain people driving around in three and four litre monsters. Why isn't biomass fuel more widely available? And why is it taxed at the same rate as fossil fuel, when the tax is ostensibly there because of CO2 emissions, which you don't get with biomass because growing it takes out as much CO2 as burning it gives out?
Borrow someone else's phone and ring it! I surely can't possibly be the only person in the world none of whose friends ever have any credit on their phones.....
From the POV of a data recovery company, it suits them to claim that data can be recovered from a hard disc following overwriting. It enhances their credibility. Due to the way Windows overwrites deleted files last of all, there is a good chance that an earlier version may still be kicking around somewhere {and if not, well, there's always the small print}.
From the POV of the likes of MI5, it suits them to claim that data can be recovered from a hard disc following multiple overwrites. It gives them plausible deniability for whatever techniques they might really be using to recover that data {techniques probably not involving the drive so much as its owner, family and pets.....}
From the POV of a bureaucratic government, it suits them that someone else is advocating physical destruction of used hard disc drives. It makes the people who pay their wages feel a little less annoyed at such a blatant waste of taxpayers' money.
From the POV of a hard disc manufacturer, it suits them to advocate physical destruction of used drives. They sell more new ones.
From the POV of a disc drive's reading head, a zero that used to be a one is indistinguible from a zero that always was a zero, and a one that used to be a zero is indistinguible from a one that has always been a one.
If the encryption algorithm is published for all to see, then the only secret is in the keys -- and it's the users' responsibility how carefully they are handled. In fact, if different keys are used for encryption and decryption, and it is sufficiently difficult {if not mathematically impossible} to determine one key by analysing the other, then it's quite safe to give everyone a copy of your encrypting key -- as long as you're damn careful to keep hold of the one and only copy of your decrypting key. If you tried to encrypt a message with your decrypting key, then anyone with your encrypting key would be able to decrypt it -- but they would also be sure it had come from you, because no-one else has a copy of your decrypting key.
If you rely on keeping the encryption algorithm itself secret as well, then your users can never be certain that the system is secure, because the algorithm might be discovered, and it might be possible for someone to decrypt a message without the key -- except your users don't know for certain, because you won't show them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably old hat but, if you have both kate and kBear installed, you can give kate {which has excellent, customisable syntax highlighting of its own BTW .....} a filename like "kbearftp://user@myisp.co.uk/filename" and it will use kBear to make an FTP connection to myisp.co.uk, login as user, prompt you for a password {with a tick-box to remember the password in case the FTP session times out while you are busy editing the file}, and save the file as filename. Once this is done, you can treat the file just as though it was a local file. You can even bookmark ftp directories. It's the next best thing to being able to mount an entire ftp site.
..... I'd recommend gFTP every time if you want a pretty, graphical FTP client ..... but this way, you don't have to use the GUI, only the API.
IMHO kBear is ugly as sin
I have two words for you. Konqueror and Kghostview.
Why would you want to see DreamWeaver on Linux?
It produces horrible code. In its defence, it can't really help producing horrible code, because of its very nature. DreamWeaver is like a device with piano-keys that clips onto the neck of a guitar, and allows you to fret and strum the guitar strings by pressing piano keys.
There is no way to have a WYSIWYG HTML editor. HTML is by nature WYSINNWEOCG -- What You See Is Not Necessarily What Every Other Client Gets.
IMHO the best HTML editor for GNU/Linux is nano. But if I've got KDE desktop on, I quite like kate. Of course, I am biased and think WYSIWYG and GUIs are overrated anyway.
Here's a clue: you'll need an LM1881 sync separator, a 4053 bilateral switch {or preferably something with more bandwidth}, and either a PIC microcontroller or a stack of TTL chips. The 1881 has an output which tells you when the field starts, and another output which pulses on every line. You need to count off 20 or so lines {look at the picture signal with an oscilloscope to see where the real picture starts}, during which time you must output a dummy black level with artificial hsync pulses. {You can get a clean hsync output from the 1881; use this to turn on a transistor and pull the black level down to 0V. Your dummy black needs to be as close as possible to true black, otherwise the very top and bottom of the screen will be some shade of grey. But you'll have thought of that and wired in a potentiometer to adjust it}. Switch over to the unadulterated picture signal for about 270 lines. Then go back to your dummy black for the remaining {22.5 or thereabouts} lines of picture.
..... pull it low to discharge the capacitor; let it float, allowing the cap to charge through a pot; and time how long it takes to begin reading high. The paddle controller inputs on the Atari 2600 worked exactly like that.
..... :)
If you need adjustability, use a PIC with a decent number of I/O lines. Or try using an open-drain I/O line with a capacitor to 0V
Or, you can get a proper time base corrector from a professional video equipment supplier. It'll probably cost you more than buying a load of original videos, though
Load the PDF and take a look at page 22 {absolute page number 32 if you're using KPDF or similar non-spyware-infested readers}.
..... The table shows the "nonce number" X is 16 bytes long, which is an awful lot of suspects if you ask me.
"A properly formatted SKB shall have exactly one nonce record. The nonce number X is used in the Variant Data calculation as described below. The nonce record will always precede the Calculate Variant Data Record and the Conditionally Calculate Variant Data Records in the SKB, although it may not immediately precede them."
Looks like they'll be tracking you if you try to watch kiddie porn then
Housebricks are pretty much the same size wherever you go, even in old buildings which predate the standard housebrick (215 x 102.5 x 65). Why? Because a housebrick is The Right Size For The Job: not too big to be manipulated with one hand, not so small that you need more of them per building.
Microsoft would well prefer that people were using pirated Windows rather than any non-Microsoft product -- not just GNU/Linux. Microsoft want you to use Word, not some povvy cheap £50 word processor from some independent vendor, even if the £50 one does all you need it to do. John Willy thinks that he will be better off with a £500 word processor than a £50 one -- and why save £450 by buying the £50 one, when you could save £500 and stick two fingers up to The Man at the same time by pirating the £500 one?!
..... piracy is not really hurting them. They have so much money that even if nobody ever bought another Microsoft product again, nobody at MS would go short.
.....
That's where all the local independent software suppliers went. {Though, to be frank, if they were selling closed-source, I've not much sympathy for them.}
In my city, there was a bus route that was very very popular: it linked a busy council estate where almost nobody had a car with the centre of town. When the buses were deregulated, an upstart startup company began running competing buses on the same route, charging a lower fare. The "main" bus company responded by introducing more of their buses, cutting their fares, and accepting the competitor's return tickets. Eventually, every bus travelling up and down that main road was costing somebody money; and the competitor was pushed out of business before the established company. Today, no buses at all run on that route; and the local bus company is owned by a used car dealership.
As long as people are using Microsoft software, they are dependent upon Microsoft software; and if they aren't paying for it today, maybe they can be tapped for money tomorrow somehow. Either way, MS is prepared to swallow that cost
The Open Source community is really in the best position to compete with Microsoft, because Open Source also has unlimited reserves. The capitalists are about to find out the hard way that other things beside money can have intrinsic value
The problems with the existing licences are that the GPL is too verbose, and the BSD licence might permit closed-source derivatives. Which is not to knock the BSD people: they do do a great job of keeping stuff free, but IMHO pledging to make a compatible open-source clone of any closed-source derivative that anyone makes of your work is making a rod for your own back -- it smacks of tidying up after other people. It's surely better to use the privileges afforded you under copyright law to make sure from the outset that nobody even attempts to create a closed derivative.
..... to which I would have to counter that The One True Licence has not been written yet, and this is just me taking a shot at that elusive target.
Of course, you could say fighting licence proliferation by creating new licences is a bit like shagging for virginity
This program is copyright (c) 2005, AJS318 and will enter the Public Domain on 1 January 2005.
Above and beyond your statutory rights, permission is hereby granted {and you are encouraged} to copy and distribute this program in source or binary forms, with or without modification, subject to the following conditions:
- Distributions in source code form must include this copyright and permission notice and disclaimer of warranty {or, at your discretion, notice of a warranty underwritten by you}.
- Distributions in binary form must include this copyright and permission notice and disclaimer of warranty {or, at your discretion, notice of a warranty underwritten by you}; and an offer, valid in perpetuity, to supply on request the complete, machine-readable source code.
- The names of the copyright holders may not be used to promote or endorse any product without written permission.
- Translation of messages and documentation in the English-language version to other languages is permitted. However, this permission-to-translate clause must be replaced in the translated version by a clause forbidding any further translation.
THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S) IN GOOD FAITH BUT WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. THE USER ASSUMES SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF ANY USE OF THIS PROGRAM. IF YOU ARE IN DOUBT, SEEK ADVICE FROM A COMPETENT PROGRAMMER.Regardless of military policy, the laws of physics are quite clear on the matter: two overwrites make it impossible to recover data and one makes it supremely difficult.
It's a weapons-versus-armour situation: either there is some weapon that no piece of armour can protect you against, or there isn't. It's impossible to have a weapon that can pierce absolutely any armour and armour that can withstand any weapon: the two are mutually exclusive.
Either there is a way to make a disk drive really unreadable, or there isn't. Now, The Authorities like to be able to keep secrets; but they don't want anybody else to be able to keep secrets from them.
What I'm alluding to is that at some level, The Authorities are almost certainly using a variety of unpleasant techniques -- torture, Extremely Strong Drugs and Mysterious Disappearance, for instance -- to recover information; but they also need to be able to deny that they are using such techniques. If someone is threatening to cook your dog and eat it in front of you, you'll probably tell them everything they want to know. And then they'll tell everyone else that they recovered the information from an old hard disk drive in a computer you sold to a friend a year or so ago. And Fido lives happily ever after.
Of course, for that to fly, you would first have to cultivate the impression in the mind of the General Public {who are typically ignorant about science} that data saved on a hard disk is there forever, and can be recovered at any time. Hence, overkill in disposal of used drives. Hell, by their logic, you would have to demolish any building in which a conversation about classified matters had taken place!
Then, of course, there's the situation where someone has 200GB of "Interesting Material" on a hard disk, gets a tip-off that someone is interested; and, using a few keystrokes on the BIOS setup screen, wipes it factory-fresh before The Authorities come around. A brand-new-looking hard drive is somewhat less useful as circumstantial evidence than the mangled remains of a hard drive and a neighbour reporting angle-grinder sounds. I somehow can't imagine the News of the World-reading General Public accepting this sort of thing, either.
What it takes to securely delete data, so that it can never be recovered, is
Exactly two overwrite cycles.
Almost every computer ever built has used magnetic memory of one description or another to some greater or lesser extent. If magnetic memory really had a fourth dimension, there would be evidence for two phenomena. Firstly, accidental reads of "past" data would be be cited as a cause of misreads. Secondly, the phenomenon would have been commercially exploited. Although we think disk drives are cheap today, there have been times in the past when it would have been economically prudent to cram in a bit of extra storage, almost whatever it took.
Human memory is not overwritten in the same way as machine memory: it's four-dimensional, meaning that events are stored with a timestamp and can be recalled at any time in future. Machine memory is three-dimensional -- unless you deliberately try to make it act four-dimensionally, by storing all updates in their own right.
The nearest thing to four-dimensionality in magnetic memory is that you can sometimes discern a vague difference between a "1" written over a "1" and a "1" written over a "0", and you can sometimes discern a vague difference between a "0" written over a "1" and a "0". written over a "0". That's a natural phenomenon due to the hysteresis of magnetic media. The difference is hard to see because in digital recording, you are only concerned about two states; once the material has been magnetised to saturation, you are by definition outside of the hysteresis loop. Even near saturation, you are working away from the broadest part of the loop, and so the result you get will be subject to tolerance.
Note also that the reading head of a disk drive is connected to an amplifier which is designed to saturate. The drive really doesn't know the difference. To be able to discern this information in practice, you would have to perform some serious mods on the drive.
Don't pay any attention to the Guttmann report -- it's long out of date and has since been discredited, though it keeps popping up again and again. There are very few people in the world who could actually carry out the procedures talked about there for recovering overwritten data, and there are easier techniques anyway {find someone who knows that information and threaten them, their family and/or pets with torture
Think of data being stored using pennies on a revolving, felt-topped table, with heads for ones and tails for zeros. Maybe the pennies will leave a weak impression in the felt, but it's not certain. If you turn them all tails-up, then all the data that was stored by the pattern of heads and tails is lost, and all the impressions on the table felt will become impressions of heads; if you then turn all the pennies heads-up, then all the impressions will be tails.
It ought to be almost trivially simple for motherboard manufacturers to build in a BIOS option to erase a hard drive. However, I've not found one on any machine newer that the Amstrad MegaPC; that had a Quadtel BIOS which incorporated a "drive test" function, which just happened to leave the drive in a known state, i.e. it erased it. I'm guessing that there are some political reasons for not doing so.
This is possibly a brilliant attempt by Microsoft to discredit Open Source software. Any attempt to use technology to solve a social problem is doomed to fail from the word go: this software will not work. Yet by making it Open Source, Microsoft have ensured that the whole Open Source movement -- and not Microsoft and their business practices -- will be called into question when the venture inevitably fails.
Child pornography is not a technological problem. It is a social problem and can only be dealt with on a social front.
..... now, if people actually are abusing children, that should be punished. {Bathtime and holiday snaps, which do not involve abuse, shouldn't.} As should attempting to emulate in real life certain things seen in pictures. But those things already are illegal. And most child abuse is perpetrated by a family member or friend, not by random strangers.
And, frankly, I don't give a flying toss about people looking at pictures. If some sicko wants to get his filthy little rocks off, I'd far, far rather he did so into a box of Kleenex than with any kid of mine. {Plus, he would then be safely out of commission for a few hours.} It's just a picture, for crying out loud -- the damage {if there was any damage -- many fairly innocuous pictures of kids in the bath, or on the beach, nowadays would be considered "child porn"} is long since done. The suffering does not increase every time someone looks at a picture.
Taking the pictures is a different matter
But in these times, the New Dark Ages, child pornography has become the new witchcraft. And there isn't going to be any kind of rational debate anytime soon.
Not trying to troll, but say I wrote some software {which I have} and licenced it for distribution in source code form only {which it is} -- does that mean it is not properly Open Source?
Would it make a difference if the software was written in an interpreted language {which it is} and thus did not have a compiled binary form?
The US Constitution was written a long time ago. In those days, if you wanted a private conversation, you could just go off into the woods somewhere, prod the undergrowth with a stick to make sure nobody was hiding in a bush, and have your private conversation. There were no such things as video cameras, tape recorders or computers, and no reason to suppose such things would ever be invented. The right to privacy was obvious, and that's why it was taken for granted.
I was thinking about "cheaper than free" software -- a Linux distro that turned your broadband-equipped computer into a cluster node while idle -- a couple of years ago. All that computing power going to waste ..... But I couldn't find a way to build a business model around it -- it was just too hit-and-miss for any task I could think of. What data is there that can be batch-processed in a completely non-time-critical fashion, and is so non-security-critical that it can potentially be shown to thousands of strangers?
..... in the end, it won't really do anything an old transverse four and man-tran can't, apart from drink fuel and leave you wondering why you bothered.
..... remote CPU time and bandwidth are only available for fleeting moments.
You could encrypt everything {and that would go some way to prevent tampering with the returned results}; but then, if you're going to process encrypted input and return encrypted results, that will eat a lot of your processing power. It's a bit like putting a V8 engine through a three-speed automatic transmission
There is a possibility of "inter-cycling" in certain, limited settings {using corporate desktop machines which typically have only a few gigs of apps and data for RAID-like backups of servers springs immediately to mind}. But outside of these circumstances, switching off when not in use and recycling when done with are the best ways of avoiding waste. There is often plenty of life in a used machine if it doesn't have to run a bloated graphical desktop environment and numerous accessories {wanted and otherwise}. And at least used PCs are something you can store up till you have enough of them to do the task you want to do
No: it's not a Linux-like OS that runs on a PPC platform, but rather a PPC emulator that runs on an AMD/Intel platform. Very, very, v e r y s l o w l y.
..... Apple do .....
You're right, though; you can run Linux on a PPC. Linus does. You can also run FreeBSD on a PPC
The real question being asked here is, "Who are you going to call when the vendor goes tits up?" In the absolute worst case, even recovering your data will require at least one competent programmer armed with the application source code.
What if, as the FUDsters would have us believe is likely, MySQL AB were to cease trading tomorrow? OK, we know it's not going to happen, MySQL is the most popular database server and not much is about to change that. But even if it did, you would still have the source code to the application -- any competent programmer could maintain it for you, or rescue your data and migrate it to another server. Knowledge of the source code would be invaluable in designing a migration path. You would not get security fixes from MySQL; but the chances are that you would have been running a fairly up-to-date version up until then. It's also possible that another entity could just take over the task of maintaining the software, lock, stock and barrel. The very nature of Open Source guarantees that customers lose nothing -- ever.
When a closed-source software vendor goes tits up, it's bye-bye to customer support and -- occasionally, in a very few, very rare, but very destructive cases -- bye-bye to your data. There is still no established procedure to expedite the transfer of orphaned "intellectual property" to the Public Domain. Just because a company no longer exists, and therefore can't be harmed by any action on your part, is no longer any guarantee that you won't be sued. Some greaseball could buy the mortal remains of the deceased company, claim that that purchase included IP rights, and sue.
If there is any kind of software that is of questionable fitness for its intended purpose, it is the proprietary, closed-source kind.
The pick-up head has inertia due to the mass of a hefty ceramic magnet and several hundred turns of copper wire. There's a counterweight balancing it so that there is only a couple of grammes' weight bearing down on the record, but it has a hell of a lot of inertia compared to the steel shank of the stylus, which is attached to a very flexible coupling. So when the groove pulls the needle to the left, the needle moves left but doesn't take the whole pick-up head with it; the magnetic flux lines change and induce a current in the coils. The preamplifier has a relatively high input impedance, so the needle isn't actually doing much work generating electricity. Otherwise it would feel stiffer.
Side-to-side motion is the sum of left and right signals. Up-and-down motion is the difference. By using four coils, not two, and pulling cunning stunts with the wiring, you can create a sum and difference of the sum and difference signals without resorting to op-amps. Which, of course, gives you {more or less} the original signals
I think that councils should only be allowed to impose car parking and road usage charges on motorists if they can prove that there exists a satisfactory standard of public transportation within their jurisdiction, and similarly workplaces should not be allowed to charge employees for car parking unless they can prove that they are fully accessible by public transport {if at all}. Too often, the motorist is seen as a cash cow to be milked, under the colour of "protecting the environment". How does squeezing money out of the working classes -- who typically drive cars with engines under 1.5 litres, and have no viable alternative to doing so -- protect the environment? Especially when there are certain people driving around in three and four litre monsters. Why isn't biomass fuel more widely available? And why is it taxed at the same rate as fossil fuel, when the tax is ostensibly there because of CO2 emissions, which you don't get with biomass because growing it takes out as much CO2 as burning it gives out?
Borrow someone else's phone and ring it! I surely can't possibly be the only person in the world none of whose friends ever have any credit on their phones .....
I would expect a service called "Ride Finder" would get many visits from lonely Britons .....
From the POV of a data recovery company, it suits them to claim that data can be recovered from a hard disc following overwriting. It enhances their credibility. Due to the way Windows overwrites deleted files last of all, there is a good chance that an earlier version may still be kicking around somewhere {and if not, well, there's always the small print}.
.....}
From the POV of the likes of MI5, it suits them to claim that data can be recovered from a hard disc following multiple overwrites. It gives them plausible deniability for whatever techniques they might really be using to recover that data {techniques probably not involving the drive so much as its owner, family and pets
From the POV of a bureaucratic government, it suits them that someone else is advocating physical destruction of used hard disc drives. It makes the people who pay their wages feel a little less annoyed at such a blatant waste of taxpayers' money.
From the POV of a hard disc manufacturer, it suits them to advocate physical destruction of used drives. They sell more new ones.
From the POV of a disc drive's reading head, a zero that used to be a one is indistinguible from a zero that always was a zero, and a one that used to be a zero is indistinguible from a one that has always been a one.
You miss the point.
If the encryption algorithm is published for all to see, then the only secret is in the keys -- and it's the users' responsibility how carefully they are handled. In fact, if different keys are used for encryption and decryption, and it is sufficiently difficult {if not mathematically impossible} to determine one key by analysing the other, then it's quite safe to give everyone a copy of your encrypting key -- as long as you're damn careful to keep hold of the one and only copy of your decrypting key. If you tried to encrypt a message with your decrypting key, then anyone with your encrypting key would be able to decrypt it -- but they would also be sure it had come from you, because no-one else has a copy of your decrypting key.
If you rely on keeping the encryption algorithm itself secret as well, then your users can never be certain that the system is secure, because the algorithm might be discovered, and it might be possible for someone to decrypt a message without the key -- except your users don't know for certain, because you won't show them.