With that low slashdot ID, I suspect your age is starting to weigh heavily on you, requiring month long naps now and then, like a modern day Rip Van Winkle.
Everything the Paranoid warners have been warning us about for the last 5 or 10 years with regard to government surveillance, privacy, invasions, wiretapping, etc have proven true. The warners are being taken very seriously these days.
Yet every warning is followed by posts such as yours declaring how silly they are. The best friend of creeping government are those decrying the slippery slope analogy, while outright poo-pooing the idea and offering free sheets of aluminum foil.
What wakes you from your slumber this time, with such a snort of derision?
While your were napping this nifty thing called Google came along. Try it out. Its pretty cool. Google the three words: ban rc planes and you will find that there have been suggestions and actual local bans showing up since 2003.
With the price of ammo these days $200 worth is a day of skeet shooting, and $50 worth of gunpowder wouldn't suffice to reload that day's fired shells.
You can own all the guns you want, but soon you won't be able to buy ammo.
Or a third possibility, they wanted to lay the ground work for licensing and restricting remote controlled planes, because that is technology they would like to limit to government agencies in the future. What better way to introduce the concept than laying it at the door of terrorism. The model RC plane enthusiasts will bitch, but if you paint them with a broad brush early enough you can blunt any criticism.
Perhaps. I haven't run the AMD proprietary drivers for a while. When I did, I seem to recall a large binary always running.
Running the community Radeon drivers now, and I have the radeon driver (900k+) sitting in memory all the time. Clearly a significant part of the card's work is done in main memory.
In 4 to 5 months I'll be replacing my laptop and I would LOVE to have better graphics performance but the stability and power saving of my intel's integrated & merely adequate GPU's will probably be the deciding factor. Of course by then AMD is going to have to compete with Haswell too...
The thing is, on new machines, your chip set will probably still be able to run proprietary drivers. The opensource drivers for AMD generally apply only to the older chips sets.
I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software. Same code, just different home.
If that was what was being discussed it wouldn't be an issue.
If your closed source firmware actually ran on the card that would be fine. Load it once on boot and it can only run in the Video card's GPUs, and interaction between it and the OS are somewhat more controllable.
But take for example the Radeon driver (the so called open source one). It takes almost a meg of main memory. The closed source one takes even more memory. Its running all the time that your system is up.
Clearly its not just firmware we are talking about here.
The entire point of firmware being upgradable is that it is... well... upgradable. Not only that, but different versions of firmware may be required for different versions of software. This way it is much easier to ensure compatibility, because the driver has the firmware baked into it.
If it were firmware, I would be in agreement.
The objection to binary blobs, that are simply loaded into the device as firmware is sort of short sighted, in that it punishes vendors that actually plan in a method of upgrading their products with new firmware.
But by and large, that isn't the issue here. Far to many of these blobs are loaded loaded into main memory and run as a process under the operating system, free to do just about anything.
If blobs were ONLY firmware, they could run ONLY on the device, and could be loaded once at installation time. Very few fall into this category. (Some wifi chips do load this way upon every boot).
You can not even use it for relaying messages for a third party, that's what phones are for
There are exceptions:
Messages may be transmitted on behalf of unlicensed individuals, at the discretion of the amateur station licensee. These messages are referred to as third party communications. The FCCs rules permit an amateur station to transmit messages for a third party to any other amateur station within the jurisdiction of the United States. Amateur stations in the United States may transmit third party communications to amateur stations outside the United States under certain circumstances.
. Amateur radio is designed to be self policing. If somebody starts sending commercial / illegal / inappropriate transmissions, other radio ops are supposed to help figure out where the transmission is coming from and cooperate with the FCC in finding the miscreant.
Also I believe several treaties address this issue, and the open-ness of ham transmissions are the only reason people can talk to hams in other countries. Even during the height of cold war suspicions and distrust, you could talk to hams in the former USSR, as long as you talked about nothing at all, or radios or fishing or what ever.
That's not to say every conversation about fishing was really about fish.
Once you allow encryption, this presents a problem for other hams in other countries, they may be banned from talking to you even on unencrypted transmissions.
But seriously, when you have the NSA reading everyone's email, and mere use of PGP encrypted mail gets you on a watch list, I just can't see the same government enabling encrypted transmission by hams.
I keep seeing people say this, and I have to wonder if you and they have any idea what WHOIS does. It tells someone who owns an IP block, it doesn't say who is using it.
Shucks, and all this time I was laboring under the delusion you could type in
whois slashdot.org and find out who administers that site, where they can be reached, who hosts them and a bunch of various goodies.
If i was getting paid each time you wanted to find out who was attacking you, I might be tempted to make sure you were attacked more often... Just sayin...
The Internet was built so fast that governments had no idea what was happening or what it would become.
Of course back then, governments didn't seem to care what people did, and didn't need to control everything. Not likely the internet would be allowed to be built at all today, certainly not one that crossed borders.
I'm fine with whois, even though it has been steadily degraded by private registrations recently.
I'm not convinced there is any realistic reason this information needs to be private, although I might feel differently if i lived somewhere else in the world where angry armed mods drag you from your home for expressing a view point. On the flip side of that, simply knowing that your information is available tends to induce better behavior on the Web.
But by and large, I think people should be able to know who owns a site, or who is fronting for the owner. It helps a great deal when trying to track down and report abuse.
Police would only need a suspicion that some authorized duplicate keys were being used in a crime or series of crimes. They look around for one of these key Kiosks, and notice that the store has surveillance cams, as all 7/11 stores do. They notice that Store surveillance cams can see people come in and get a key. Kiosk stores your fingerprint. Police, on fishing expedition, get a warrant for all fingerprints recorded by the machine within X time period. They fingerprint match the sequence to the surveillance. Now every person who went there is fingerprinted, and maybe they got a good enough photo for facial recognition. Pay by credit card? Fine, they will get a warrant for that too. Game. Set. Match.
So even if you aren't the thief, just another customer, your data gets handed over along with the data from the burger.
(Left unsaid is whether the Kiosk has a camera. I'm betting it does, just because its so cheap to do so).
I just got done with a garage sale and almost none of my (cheaply priced!) books sold, lots fewer than when I had a garage sale about five years ago.
I'd suppose more people who actually read are transitioning to e-readers. This might also account in general for why there are fewer visitors to B&N stores.
Exactly. Its not the nook that is killing B&N, its the pointless clinging to expensive stores in high-rent districts.
Too many people bemoan the loss of book stores, more as a cultural icon than for any real need. But for me, the availability of just about every book in print (as well as zillions no longer in print) at my finger tips is a godsend. Not having to store all those books is a second benefit.
Perhaps that is why you can't even give away books these days. The used book stores are piled high with inventory that just sit there and molder away.
I get that its a digital good, which can be wiped out with by any random power failure. But easy come, easy go, and easy come right back again.
I use Calibre to manage all my ebooks, store my library on two free services (thanks DropBox and Yandex). I bought two books just this morning that are going directly to my Calibre bookshelf. (DRM going straight to bit bucket).
The reason is because if it doesn't use your name or physical location or similar then you have to remember some kind of login that you'll probably never use again,
Or, you could actually RTFA: (You had time to type all that you could have read the article in less time)
KeyMe employs high-level encryption and doesn’t store addresses or any other data that can match the key information with a location. Logging into your account requires fingerprint authentication.
KeyMe employs high-level encryption and doesn’t store addresses or any other data that can match the key information with a location. Logging into your account requires fingerprint authentication.
Wait, What? Fingerprint?
Well how long before that database draws a subpoena? And do we know there isn't a camera in the KeyMe kiosks?
Slashdot Mirror
With that low slashdot ID, I suspect your age is starting to weigh heavily on you, requiring month long naps now and then, like a modern day Rip Van Winkle.
Everything the Paranoid warners have been warning us about for the last 5 or 10 years with regard to government
surveillance, privacy, invasions, wiretapping, etc have proven true. The warners are being taken very seriously these days.
Yet every warning is followed by posts such as yours declaring how silly they are. The best friend of creeping government are those decrying the slippery slope analogy, while outright poo-pooing the idea and offering free sheets of aluminum foil.
What wakes you from your slumber this time, with such a snort of derision?
While your were napping this nifty thing called Google came along. Try it out. Its pretty cool. Google the three words: ban rc planes and you will find that there have been suggestions and actual local bans showing up since 2003.
With the price of ammo these days $200 worth is a day of skeet shooting, and $50 worth of gunpowder wouldn't suffice to reload that day's fired shells.
You can own all the guns you want, but soon you won't be able to buy ammo.
Basically, one of two things happened:
Or a third possibility, they wanted to lay the ground work for licensing and restricting remote controlled planes, because that is technology they would like to limit to government agencies in the future. What better way to introduce the concept than laying it at the door of terrorism. The model RC plane enthusiasts will bitch, but if you paint them with a broad brush early enough you can blunt any criticism.
Perhaps. I haven't run the AMD proprietary drivers for a while.
When I did, I seem to recall a large binary always running.
Running the community Radeon drivers now, and I have the radeon driver (900k+) sitting in memory all the time.
Clearly a significant part of the card's work is done in main memory.
In 4 to 5 months I'll be replacing my laptop and I would LOVE to have better graphics performance but the stability and power saving of my intel's integrated & merely adequate GPU's will probably be the deciding factor. Of course by then AMD is going to have to compete with Haswell too...
The thing is, on new machines, your chip set will probably still be able to run proprietary drivers.
The opensource drivers for AMD generally apply only to the older chips sets.
I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software. Same code, just different home.
If that was what was being discussed it wouldn't be an issue.
If your closed source firmware actually ran on the card that would be fine. Load it once on boot and
it can only run in the Video card's GPUs, and interaction between it and the OS are somewhat
more controllable.
But take for example the Radeon driver (the so called open source one). It takes almost a meg of
main memory. The closed source one takes even more memory. Its running all the time that
your system is up.
Clearly its not just firmware we are talking about here.
The entire point of firmware being upgradable is that it is... well... upgradable. Not only that, but different versions of firmware may be required for different versions of software. This way it is much easier to ensure compatibility, because the driver has the firmware baked into it.
If it were firmware, I would be in agreement.
The objection to binary blobs, that are simply loaded into the device as firmware is sort of short sighted,
in that it punishes vendors that actually plan in a method of upgrading their products with new firmware.
But by and large, that isn't the issue here.
Far to many of these blobs are loaded loaded into main memory and run as a process under the operating system,
free to do just about anything.
If blobs were ONLY firmware, they could run ONLY on the device, and could be loaded once at installation time.
Very few fall into this category. (Some wifi chips do load this way upon every boot).
Far too many remain running in main memory.
How could you be nervous about AMD? They're in every single next generation console system.
Maybe Peek at their financials?
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD+Key+Statistics
You can not even use it for relaying messages for a third party, that's what phones are for
There are exceptions:
Messages may be transmitted on behalf of unlicensed individuals, at the discretion of the amateur station licensee. These messages are referred to as third party communications. The FCCs rules permit an amateur station to transmit messages for a third party to any other amateur station within the jurisdiction of the United States. Amateur stations in the United States may transmit third party communications to amateur stations outside the United States under certain circumstances.
http://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/services/amateur.html
Also there is NTS, which has been around for a long time. Third party messages are its whole focus.
. Amateur radio is designed to be self policing. If somebody starts sending commercial / illegal / inappropriate transmissions, other radio ops are supposed to help figure out where the transmission is coming from and cooperate with the FCC in finding the miscreant.
Also I believe several treaties address this issue, and the open-ness of ham transmissions are the only reason people can talk to hams in other countries. Even during the height of cold war suspicions and distrust, you could talk to hams in the former USSR, as long as you talked about nothing at all, or radios or fishing or what ever.
That's not to say every conversation about fishing was really about fish.
Once you allow encryption, this presents a problem for other hams in other countries, they may be banned from talking to you even on unencrypted transmissions.
But seriously, when you have the NSA reading everyone's email, and mere use of PGP encrypted mail gets you on a watch list, I just can't see the same government enabling encrypted transmission by hams.
I keep seeing people say this, and I have to wonder if you and they have any idea what WHOIS does. It tells someone who owns an IP block, it doesn't say who is using it.
Shucks, and all this time I was laboring under the delusion you could type in
whois slashdot.org
and find out who administers that site, where they can be reached, who hosts them and a bunch of various goodies.
If i was getting paid each time you wanted to find out who was attacking you, I might be tempted to make sure you were attacked more often... Just sayin...
Insightful.
The Internet was built so fast that governments had no idea what was happening or what it would become.
Of course back then, governments didn't seem to care what people did, and didn't need to control everything.
Not likely the internet would be allowed to be built at all today, certainly not one that crossed borders.
If you have to have permission, you will certainly pay a fee, ig for no other reason than to pay the wages of the permission issuers.
Although I agree with you, I can't help but noticing the irony of posting that opinion as an AC.
And yet the net survives.
I'm fine with whois, even though it has been steadily degraded by private registrations recently.
I'm not convinced there is any realistic reason this information needs to be private, although I might feel differently if i lived somewhere else in the world where angry armed mods drag you from your home for expressing a view point. On the flip side of that, simply knowing that your information is available tends to induce better behavior on the Web.
But by and large, I think people should be able to know who owns a site, or who is fronting for the owner. It helps a great deal when trying to track down and report abuse.
I rather suspect mine is not a popular view.
That's my biggest concern as well. Enjoy it while you can.
Police would only need a suspicion that some authorized duplicate keys were being used in a crime or series of crimes.
They look around for one of these key Kiosks, and notice that the store has surveillance cams, as all 7/11 stores do.
They notice that Store surveillance cams can see people come in and get a key.
Kiosk stores your fingerprint.
Police, on fishing expedition, get a warrant for all fingerprints recorded by the machine within X time period.
They fingerprint match the sequence to the surveillance.
Now every person who went there is fingerprinted, and maybe they got a good enough photo for facial recognition.
Pay by credit card? Fine, they will get a warrant for that too. Game. Set. Match.
So even if you aren't the thief, just another customer, your data gets handed over along with the data
from the burger.
(Left unsaid is whether the Kiosk has a camera. I'm betting it does, just because its so cheap to do so).
I just got done with a garage sale and almost none of my (cheaply priced!) books sold, lots fewer than when I had a garage sale about five years ago.
I'd suppose more people who actually read are transitioning to e-readers. This might also account in general for why there are fewer visitors to B&N stores.
Exactly. Its not the nook that is killing B&N, its the pointless clinging to expensive stores in high-rent districts.
Too many people bemoan the loss of book stores, more as a cultural icon than for any real need.
But for me, the availability of just about every book in print (as well as zillions no longer in print) at my finger tips is a godsend.
Not having to store all those books is a second benefit.
Perhaps that is why you can't even give away books these days. The used book stores are piled high with inventory that just sit there and molder away.
I get that its a digital good, which can be wiped out with by any random power failure. But easy come, easy go, and easy come right back again.
I use Calibre to manage all my ebooks, store my library on two free services (thanks DropBox and Yandex). I bought two books just this morning
that are going directly to my Calibre bookshelf. (DRM going straight to bit bucket).
I buy way more books since Nook than Pre Nook.
Now we can't even trust the babysitter to grab a Slurpee down the street...
Well, you never could anyway. A clay impression can be made without even leaving the apartment.
And yet the work just fine for the intended purpose.
If people want in, no amount of tumblers will prevent it.
The reason is because if it doesn't use your name or physical location or similar then you have to remember some kind of login that you'll probably never use again,
Or, you could actually RTFA: (You had time to type all that you could have read the article in less time)
KeyMe employs high-level encryption and doesn’t store addresses or any other data that can match the key information with a location. Logging into your account requires fingerprint authentication.
But If you know where someone lives and that they have used the system, all it takes is a fingerprint.
I'm sure you could find a dozens sites on the web describing how to make a slip-on fingerprint from
finger print image.
Just to help out...
KeyMe employs high-level encryption and doesn’t store addresses or any other data that can match the key information with a location. Logging into your account requires fingerprint authentication.
Wait, What? Fingerprint?
Well how long before that database draws a subpoena?
And do we know there isn't a camera in the KeyMe kiosks?