Not exactly. If the military is using a plane, they've had the high-rankingest of their own engineers go over the blueprints of that plane. While my GP post is true, keep also in mind that in the military, you are to explicitly trust your superiors' judgment. You may question it after the fact, but be prepared for some serious consequences if you're wrong.
Re:Is it really an infection if...
on
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Feh.
The slashdot post here is definately FUD. It gives the impression that IE7 happily installs all kinds of crap. In the article, however, the experimenter says multiple times that IE7 made doing this VERY DIFFICULT to do without noticing you're braking shit.
That's not to say some Typhoid User isn't perfectly capable of doing this anyways, but a Typhoid User should be encouraged very strongly to never ever log in as an admin, and charged through the nose for repair services.
Naw, not a chance. A given human is a developer. They know what technological resources are available to them for secure transmission. If they're not using it, it's their own damn fault.
Actually, the 'many eyes' paradigm is what brings about things like BugZilla.
OSS Devlopers like control over their code. Even if you see and fix a bug, they're most likely to go over your code and use it as an example of how to fix their code, rather than just patch it in verbatim.
"i plug in a USB wireless card and nothing happens, i plug in a USB printer, nothing happens, i plug in a USB stick nothing happens,"
First: true for most cases. Linux Wifi support IS horribly lacking, but blame it on the vendors; we have to reverse engineer every chip that comes out, or use the windows driver.
Second: Patently not true for modern distros. Lite distros, that don't feel like adding the CURL drivers in, maybe, but I believe I've had an issue with exactly one printer on my laptop.
Third: Unbelievably not true. Not only does Linux itself handle USB drives seamlessly, but most distros automount it, and KDE automagically recognizes it and asks you what you want to do with it. You must've been playing with a complete shit distro. Or you're just lying through your ass. Either way, I call FUD.
In a world with the internet, those people are able to do it, do it right, do it cheaply, and get both the word and the finished product out to the masses easily. This means that the amount of content without the need for copyright is growing exponentially - and while some of it sucks, a lot of it is very good.
Just look at the Creative Commons database.
Should copyright be abolished? Hells naw. Is it infected with "It's mine and mine forever" syndrome? Unfortunately, yes. Maybe copyright needed to be 95 years at some point. It doesn't now. It shouldn't even be past its original 14-28 year limit.
And, just so's you know, I don't believe it should be transferable, or be able to be owned by a non-individual (read: company). Though, my reasons for these are partially philosphical, and only partially based on policy physics.
The reason: if a group with enough cash to be an influencial lobbyist posesses a copyright, it is in their best interests to expand copyright until it's doing more harm than good, as we have seen in every major industrialized company.
Want proof of harm? Look at the popularity of illegal filesharing. It exists, continues to exist, and will exist for a very long time, because there is a demand for it - or more specifically, for content - stretching back as far as 95 years - that can be obtained by illegal sharing. The demand for old IP combined with profitability of old IP is not an incentive towards creativity; it's incentive for stagnancy. How many rereleases of "Snow White" has Disney spent time and money on, for example?
Remember that IP law is there to ensure continued creativity of the content and scientific industries. If it's doing something other than that, you can be assured that it's promoting economic inefficiency (money going where it's not needed, in this case).
If, on the other hand, after 14 years, copyrighted works are released into the public domain, illegal sharing no longer has the kind of demand it once had. It will still be the go-to source for anything older than 14 years, but people are happy to buy the more recent stuff; most people assume that if it comes from the source, it's of higher quality.
The other bit that gives me the non-transferrable and non-individual restrictions is artist compensation. Look at what the RIAA's member companies do to their artists, and tell me that RIAA ownership of copyright is even close to reasonable. The artists get a nickel, and the recording industry gets the lion's share. Spun the other way around, where the artist owns his work, the record company would be forced to properly compensate their artists, or the artists would walk, taking their entire library of content with them.
Actually, many people have formed these parties. They fail primarily because free-thinking people can't agree on most things.
Unfortunately, even if they could agree on something en masse, free-thinkers are highly outnumbered by sheep who'd rather just get on with their lives, and vote for whoever hasn't pissed them off this year.
"Or are we saying that the ISP subscriber is legally liable for anything that comes from their IP address?"
While that seems like a very simple and reasonable idea, the implications are enormous; for example, it gives a spammer a very useful loophole in the US.
Example: A spammer gets his repeater bundled in with some Very Stupid software (a smiley program, for example). Many non-EULA-reading humans download and run this. Later, they are arrested for spamming, under the 'Your IP, your responsibility' rule. They claim it's the spammer's fault, but the spammer points out that it was 'clearly' stated in the unread EULA, and gets away to spam another day.
A good wave of spam and ddos arrests could create a new public awareness about needing security on a home machine. I mean, these are people who obviously don't have enough invested in their data to take an interest in protecting it; perhaps the threat of jailtime would incentivize them to protect themselves.
I'm not saying it's a good idea: While I'm pretty sure about my computer's security, we all make mistakes. Meanwhile, a well-written bot doesn't degrade your system's performance enough for even a trained professional to notice on casual use. It would quickly become an unenforcable law.
Still, it's very interesting to see the - hey, I just noticed; Firefox 2.0 has spell checking everywhere you can type - cross-spectrum implications of policy change for a specific purpose.
If his scanner is well written, it's very likely that the specifications of 'common errors' should be available for audit. If not, this 'evaluation' is null data; we don't know what he's scanning for, and as such, we can't verify that his results are reproducable or balanced.
A few years ago I had a very nice SCSI to IDE adaptor. Plug a wide SCSI drive in one end, plug the IDE bus in the other, and a sweet little controller chip did the stuff in between. What was cool about it was that the controller chip was bus-agnostic; you could plug an IDE drive into a SCSI channel, too.
I wish I could remember who made it, but I think it was some place in taiwan (the documentation was certainly not in english, aside from the urls; thank god for worldlingo).
Aside from the implicit commercial assignation that comes with 'Brand Name', it has all the other qualities (a suite of different programs, all managed by the same organization - even if it is a loose one).
What I don't get is why they force individual consumers to activate.
Large companies are they're main business (as seen by who MS panders to), so they should be activating via an AES key pair on first boot in Vista server.
Vista professional should need the same, but with an administrators' license key pair; ie: you need to log in via your AD name. The AD server activates that copy of windows itself, using the key pair.
Vista home should need no activation. It's an inconvenience to the users least likely to know what to do if it fails.
The other Vista flavors... well, I don't know. I'm not particularly interested in Vista, mostly because of MS's stance on... virtually everything.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? Just exaggerating the stupid 'car==computer' metaphor that I totally failed to use in my post?
Feh. I hate trolls.
Hey, look. A spelling troll.
You bore me. Go away.
Not exactly. If the military is using a plane, they've had the high-rankingest of their own engineers go over the blueprints of that plane. While my GP post is true, keep also in mind that in the military, you are to explicitly trust your superiors' judgment. You may question it after the fact, but be prepared for some serious consequences if you're wrong.
Meanwhile, what is 'Jaam'?
Thing is, I'm not saying copyright *shouldn't* exist. I'm saying it lasts too long.
George W. Bush should be stuck up the ass with a hot poker as punishment for being a useless fucker.
Then impeach him.
There done. Where's the cops?
There is news here:
IE7 is more secure because he HAD to disable a whole bunch of shit to get it to do the dumb shit that IE6 did.
Just 'cos the summary's fud doesn't mean the article is.
*points* this guy didn't read the article!
Feh.
The slashdot post here is definately FUD. It gives the impression that IE7 happily installs all kinds of crap. In the article, however, the experimenter says multiple times that IE7 made doing this VERY DIFFICULT to do without noticing you're braking shit.
That's not to say some Typhoid User isn't perfectly capable of doing this anyways, but a Typhoid User should be encouraged very strongly to never ever log in as an admin, and charged through the nose for repair services.
The primary difference between proprietary and open source code: Open source actually calls it 'beta'.
Naw, not a chance. A given human is a developer. They know what technological resources are available to them for secure transmission. If they're not using it, it's their own damn fault.
"Never ever trust your fate to a black box when you are unaware of its contents" - the US Military.
Actually, the 'many eyes' paradigm is what brings about things like BugZilla.
OSS Devlopers like control over their code. Even if you see and fix a bug, they're most likely to go over your code and use it as an example of how to fix their code, rather than just patch it in verbatim.
"i plug in a USB wireless card and nothing happens, i plug in a USB printer, nothing happens, i plug in a USB stick nothing happens,"
First: true for most cases. Linux Wifi support IS horribly lacking, but blame it on the vendors; we have to reverse engineer every chip that comes out, or use the windows driver.
Second: Patently not true for modern distros. Lite distros, that don't feel like adding the CURL drivers in, maybe, but I believe I've had an issue with exactly one printer on my laptop.
Third: Unbelievably not true. Not only does Linux itself handle USB drives seamlessly, but most distros automount it, and KDE automagically recognizes it and asks you what you want to do with it. You must've been playing with a complete shit distro. Or you're just lying through your ass. Either way, I call FUD.
Reh. It's a dupe post. Every once in a while this one shows up.
You know, forget for a second that Synaptic has been around for a while, and is usually labeled 'Find new software' in most good distros.
Heh. I don't exactly feel all warm and fuzzy about that either.
I disagree.
Greed is the reason so much of past art exists.
But many people do it for the love of it.
In a world with the internet, those people are able to do it, do it right, do it cheaply, and get both the word and the finished product out to the masses easily. This means that the amount of content without the need for copyright is growing exponentially - and while some of it sucks, a lot of it is very good.
Just look at the Creative Commons database.
Should copyright be abolished? Hells naw. Is it infected with "It's mine and mine forever" syndrome? Unfortunately, yes. Maybe copyright needed to be 95 years at some point. It doesn't now. It shouldn't even be past its original 14-28 year limit.
And, just so's you know, I don't believe it should be transferable, or be able to be owned by a non-individual (read: company). Though, my reasons for these are partially philosphical, and only partially based on policy physics.
The reason: if a group with enough cash to be an influencial lobbyist posesses a copyright, it is in their best interests to expand copyright until it's doing more harm than good, as we have seen in every major industrialized company.
Want proof of harm? Look at the popularity of illegal filesharing. It exists, continues to exist, and will exist for a very long time, because there is a demand for it - or more specifically, for content - stretching back as far as 95 years - that can be obtained by illegal sharing. The demand for old IP combined with profitability of old IP is not an incentive towards creativity; it's incentive for stagnancy. How many rereleases of "Snow White" has Disney spent time and money on, for example?
Remember that IP law is there to ensure continued creativity of the content and scientific industries. If it's doing something other than that, you can be assured that it's promoting economic inefficiency (money going where it's not needed, in this case).
If, on the other hand, after 14 years, copyrighted works are released into the public domain, illegal sharing no longer has the kind of demand it once had. It will still be the go-to source for anything older than 14 years, but people are happy to buy the more recent stuff; most people assume that if it comes from the source, it's of higher quality.
The other bit that gives me the non-transferrable and non-individual restrictions is artist compensation. Look at what the RIAA's member companies do to their artists, and tell me that RIAA ownership of copyright is even close to reasonable. The artists get a nickel, and the recording industry gets the lion's share. Spun the other way around, where the artist owns his work, the record company would be forced to properly compensate their artists, or the artists would walk, taking their entire library of content with them.
Like I said, philosophical and policy based.
Actually, many people have formed these parties. They fail primarily because free-thinking people can't agree on most things.
Unfortunately, even if they could agree on something en masse, free-thinkers are highly outnumbered by sheep who'd rather just get on with their lives, and vote for whoever hasn't pissed them off this year.
"Or are we saying that the ISP subscriber is legally liable for anything that comes from their IP address?"
While that seems like a very simple and reasonable idea, the implications are enormous; for example, it gives a spammer a very useful loophole in the US.
Example: A spammer gets his repeater bundled in with some Very Stupid software (a smiley program, for example). Many non-EULA-reading humans download and run this. Later, they are arrested for spamming, under the 'Your IP, your responsibility' rule. They claim it's the spammer's fault, but the spammer points out that it was 'clearly' stated in the unread EULA, and gets away to spam another day.
A good wave of spam and ddos arrests could create a new public awareness about needing security on a home machine. I mean, these are people who obviously don't have enough invested in their data to take an interest in protecting it; perhaps the threat of jailtime would incentivize them to protect themselves.
I'm not saying it's a good idea: While I'm pretty sure about my computer's security, we all make mistakes. Meanwhile, a well-written bot doesn't degrade your system's performance enough for even a trained professional to notice on casual use. It would quickly become an unenforcable law.
Still, it's very interesting to see the - hey, I just noticed; Firefox 2.0 has spell checking everywhere you can type - cross-spectrum implications of policy change for a specific purpose.
If his scanner is well written, it's very likely that the specifications of 'common errors' should be available for audit. If not, this 'evaluation' is null data; we don't know what he's scanning for, and as such, we can't verify that his results are reproducable or balanced.
I call FUD, even if he's got good intentions.
'Professionals' have business ethics. This guy, apparently, doesn't.
Which, while true, is misleading.
A few years ago I had a very nice SCSI to IDE adaptor. Plug a wide SCSI drive in one end, plug the IDE bus in the other, and a sweet little controller chip did the stuff in between. What was cool about it was that the controller chip was bus-agnostic; you could plug an IDE drive into a SCSI channel, too.
I wish I could remember who made it, but I think it was some place in taiwan (the documentation was certainly not in english, aside from the urls; thank god for worldlingo).
Aside from the implicit commercial assignation that comes with 'Brand Name', it has all the other qualities (a suite of different programs, all managed by the same organization - even if it is a loose one).
What I don't get is why they force individual consumers to activate.
Large companies are they're main business (as seen by who MS panders to), so they should be activating via an AES key pair on first boot in Vista server.
Vista professional should need the same, but with an administrators' license key pair; ie: you need to log in via your AD name. The AD server activates that copy of windows itself, using the key pair.
Vista home should need no activation. It's an inconvenience to the users least likely to know what to do if it fails.
The other Vista flavors... well, I don't know. I'm not particularly interested in Vista, mostly because of MS's stance on... virtually everything.
The pronounciation of ASRAAM is fortuitously named for what it does to an enemy plane, both literally and coloquially.
Hehe.
It's a DVR.
It's a what?
A digital video recorder.
Oh, you mean like a TiVo?