It is not difficult coming up with scenarios that support either side of this issue.
Calling mime-types useless is obviously wrong but equally wrong is thinking that they are the end all solution to this problem.
Remember not all servers serves out files put there by the same people that manages the server (files shared on a forum comes to mind). Unless the site owners want to restrict file types to a specific subset, then todays technology leaves no other option than using file suffixes also.
Also you should not trust what a web server tells you about a file blindly, god knows who manages that site and what they would like putting on your computer;-)
Both mime types and file suffixes should at best be taken as hints about how a client should handle a file.
IT DOES NOT MATTER one single iota that ogg is a container and not a codec, it is simply pointless unless your an engineer (a real geeky one at that).
He did not contend the fact that this is incorrect, only pointed out that to the majority of people (who ever heard about ogg) then:
ogg == audio codec == compressed audio.
The fact is, you should be über happy if most people makes this connection, even if it is technically imperfect.
It is a market awareness that is worth is weight in gold, don't squander it away by being a stereotypical geek that picks on technical issues that no one really cares about.
That it is wrong is completely pointless for most people and only confuses the issue. At least 90% of people associates content type with the file ending and.ogg files is associated by the public with audio files. Again this is not technically correct but the only ones really caring is other geeks.
It would be much better if xiph declared that only.ogg files containing audio should be called.ogg and came up with a new file ending and name for files with video (or audio & video) in them, perhaps.ogv or something.
You are technically correct but 'joe sixpack' wanting his 'mp3 player' to play ogg files does not care or even understand the difference.
To the majority of people mp3 is synonymous with audio files for portable devices, just like they think.avi and.mov is video files. They have no idea it is really codecs and containers. If you want people to question why their ipod does not play ogg files, you don't want to confuse the issue with fighting long lost battles over semantics.
This is just like the old battle about what being a hacker means. To much more than 90 percent of the population it means someone breaking into computer systems. Now you and me probably knows this was not the original meaning at all, but it does not matter because the 'wrong meaning' is by now so enforced by media that people only stares strangely at you if you try educating them.
Now if you want ogg, vorbis and theora to succeed as open standards used everywhere, it would be a much better strategy going with the flow and not against it.
That would still mean they would be willing to associate with all other finn's;-)
You should realize that in Finland (and the neighboring countries) every one has a cell phone, there is virtually no exception. Even small kids and street bums has cell phones (usually pre-paid ones since then you can at least receive calls for free).
I live in Norway, mostly the same story here although it happened in Finland a few years earlier because of Nokia I guess.
Almost all apartment buildings here have intercom's/buzzers that let you talk to people and open the front door from your apartment.
But guess what, in my apartment the intercom is connected to the cell network so when someone is at my door I get them on my cell phone. Great system, means I can answer my door if I am at home or not. Also saves on wiring I guess.
I realize I could have used a land line, but I have not had a land line for nearly 10 years now. Why bother paying for something I wont need and wont use. In fact most younger people I know does not have a land line.
Sure, everything I do online is public. And I don't mind the one I'm doing a transaction with acquiring exactly that information they get from the current and any previous transactions with the same company/organization. This is not a problem and very analogous to the grocery store salesperson knowing what I usually eat because I buy my food there everyday.
The problem starts when someone either starts tracking everything I do on the net (similar to someone stalking me in real life) or someone buys/sell tracking information from several independent sources to put together a complete behavioral profile of me (similar to hiring a PI to stalk me).
There is quite a big difference between many people each knowing a little bit about you and a few people knowing everything.
You may not care not having any privacy left but other people really do.
Thankfully we have very strict privacy laws where I live.
It looks like satire to me, but then again I usually give people the benefit of the doubt.
BTW, I posted a comment to the blog where I gave the whole thing away as satire. When I checked again later my comment was changed to whole heartedly support of the mad ravings.
Kind of explains why so few comments are negative...;-)
Either this is clever satire or these people have some serious problems they need to seek professional help for like delusional paranoia or something.
IANAP. But, hey some cases are quite obvious.
Actually, if I should have tried to expose the paranoid illusions of the current administration this is exactly the way I would have chosen (evil as I am;-) Pretend to support their case while at the same time make a mockery out of the whole thing.
Nothing is as deadly as if you can get people to laugh at your political opponents, politically it's pure poison.
The police may not believe you and will probably pester you quite hard to give up the keys to a hidden volume. But that does not matter one iota, since they bloody well have to prove it exist before they can get you convicted for not giving up any keys to it.
Of course we still assume this happens in a society where there are reasonable laws that governs what the police can do.
Truecrypt works perfectly without a hidden volume and I know people and organizations that uses it that way only.
Unused space at the end of a volume only proves that there is unused space at the end of a volume.
I don't think you quite understand the principles behind "hidden volumes" in Truecrypt.
The point is not that they don't know it is possible. The point is that it cannot be proven that there is a second encrypted volume within the first one.
This makes it plausible to deny that it exist at all. If store some sensitive information in the outer volume, like some very embarrassing but not illegal pornography you can make a claim that this was the sole purpose of the outer Truecrypt volume. The law enforcement agency will have a hard time getting a judge to order you hand over keys to a hidden volume they cannot prove exist.
Hidden volumes in Truecrypt got nothing at all to do with "security through obscurity", it's all about "plausible deniability". You can ask your friend in the police about that, if he has any experience with the security community at all he should be very well acquainted with this term.
Of course, if you admit or in other ways make it provable that there exist an inner volume then all bets are off;-)
This will probably work in societies like USA and UK where the police have to follow certain procedures. In countries like Burma or China where they will just torture you until you confesses or dies, I'm not so sure about the value of this scheme.
Problem is he claims to be right from a legal perspective (which he is not) and is quite adamant about it in his post. I actually agree quite a bit on the ethical side with him but that is another matter
Not quite that simple, if what is alleged is correct (he removed BSD license statements from the source in a patch). Then this is OK if this only affected source files containing work of his own.
If the same files contained work from others then the removal of the BSD statements is illegal and constitute copyright infringement, it does not matter one iota whether the files were dual licensed or not.
The BSD license allows relicensing under another license (any other license, even proprietary closed source), but only the derivative work would be under the new license and anyways the BSD license explicitly forbids you to remove the original copyright statements from the source code even if you relicense.
The problem is not the relicensing per see, but the removal of the original copyright statements.
Disclaimer: I have not read neither the patch nor the original source files so I have to take what you said about other authors, dual license and what the article claims at face value.
It appears (from above postings) that the one who submitted the patch is the same person that originally wrote the code in question.
If this is correct then there is no problem here at all and the article is totally meaningless.
An author is allowed by copyright law to relicense his work at any time, of course the versions distributed with the BSD license would still be valid to use. Effectively this means there now is two versions of this code with different licenses.
Excuse me but that is complete and utter bullshit. I feel the urgent need to educate you a bit;-)
About the only thing your right about is that they only had fission based nuclear weapons in 1945.
IANAP but this is usually thought in any high school physics curriculum.
Both fusion and fission bombs are nuclear weapons because they both employ nuclear principles to release their energies.
A fusion bomb works by the principle that two very light atomic nucleus (Hydrogen or Helium isotopes usually) fuses together. The combined new and larger atomic nucleus has a lower internal binding energy than the sum of the two original nucleus's had and this energy is released.
A fission bomb works by the opposite principle where a heavy atomic nucleus (Plutonium or another large atom) is split into two lighter nucleus's (and usually a few other particle components), this process also liberates some nuclear binding energy.
The release of nuclear binding energy with both fusion and fission is possible because the energy levels (binding energy per mass unit) is lowest in the mid range of the elementary table. So in effect both fusion and fission bombs are harnessing the same nuclear energy although the mechanism is a bit different.
Please note the use of the term 'nuclear weapon' for both fusion and fission based weapons.
What seems to be confusing you is that in the early days especially the media used the term atomic energy or atom bomb instead of the more precise term 'nuclear'. Nuclear is a better term to use since it is closer to and more descriptive of the physical process that actually take place (the splitting or fusing of atomic nucleuses).
It might also be confusing that fusion bombs are sometimes called thermonuclear weapons because of the extreme (thermonuclear) temperatures needed to start the fusion process. In fact a fission bomb is used to trigger the fusion bomb.
Seems obvious that single paragraph at last was lifted from Wikipedia or perhaps they where both copied from another source.
But you should really read the article better before you start trolling!
The link from Wikipedia relates to the claim that these two professors at St. Andrews that claims to have reversed the Casimir effect. This information did NOT originate at Wikipedia so there is no problem here. The wikipedia article (after the last changes) also explicitly mention that this is also just a claim.
Circular references is not uncommon but both the article on Wikipedia and the Telegraph contains novel information the other one does not, which suggest the Wikipedia link to the Telegraph article is perfectly reasonable.
And your still wrong, even if it was a 'Magic no clicks at all'(TM) process it is not whats needed to get a large market share.
It does not really matter how difficult it is to install it, because you see - ordinary USERS do not install their OS-software them self.
As other people has pointed out, by your standards even Microsoft Windows is not ready for the masses and if you have been around since the early days (80-90s) you would also know that easy installation was never how they got their large market share in the first place.
Easy dual boot is of course important enough but it is NOT a magic wand that will make Linux 'steal' market share from Windows.
That is NOT the reason Linux does not have a wider user base.
Have you tried partitioning the disk using the Windows installer? I think its easy (and so is the Ubuntu one) but I also know most users cannot handle it unless perhaps they just lets Windows format the whole drive, Ubuntu (and almost all other distros) can do that also, the hard part is knowing how to leave the another OS already installed unharmed, MS Windows is much worse than Ubuntu when it comes to that.
The REAL reason Linux does not have wide user base is because virtually every computer the last 15 years have been delivered with Windows PREINSTALLED, nothing can beat that for user friendliness.
Windows is obviously not easy enough to install compared to Ubuntu that this alone explains their market dominance, I cannot even start to count the number of times over the years I had to help friends, colleagues, family, friends of family etc to reinstall Windows and some of those people are what I would call moderately computer literate (but not geeks).
This is not a problem for Microsoft because the end user usually don't install the OS himself.
Of course there are many reasons to as why/how Microsoft reached their dominating market place but technical prominence or even 'ease of use' was never the most important ones, anyone who's been around a while remember how cumbersome their first products where. Still they practically 'conquered' the world with them.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not difficult coming up with scenarios that support either side of this issue.
;-)
Calling mime-types useless is obviously wrong but equally wrong is thinking that they are the end all solution to this problem.
Remember not all servers serves out files put there by the same people that manages the server (files shared on a forum comes to mind). Unless the site owners want to restrict file types to a specific subset, then todays technology leaves no other option than using file suffixes also.
Also you should not trust what a web server tells you about a file blindly, god knows who manages that site and what they would like putting on your computer
Both mime types and file suffixes should at best be taken as hints about how a client should handle a file.
You simply did not understand his point at all.
.ogg files is associated by the public with audio files. Again this is not technically correct but the only ones really caring is other geeks.
.ogg files containing audio should be called .ogg and came up with a new file ending and name for files with video (or audio & video) in them, perhaps .ogv or something.
.avi and .mov is video files. They have no idea it is really codecs and containers. If you want people to question why their ipod does not play ogg files, you don't want to confuse the issue with fighting long lost battles over semantics.
IT DOES NOT MATTER one single iota that ogg is a container and not a codec, it is simply pointless unless your an engineer (a real geeky one at that).
He did not contend the fact that this is incorrect, only pointed out that to the majority of people (who ever heard about ogg) then:
ogg == audio codec == compressed audio.
The fact is, you should be über happy if most people makes this connection, even if it is technically imperfect.
It is a market awareness that is worth is weight in gold, don't squander it away by being a stereotypical geek that picks on technical issues that no one really cares about.
That it is wrong is completely pointless for most people and only confuses the issue. At least 90% of people associates content type with the file ending and
It would be much better if xiph declared that only
You are technically correct but 'joe sixpack' wanting his 'mp3 player' to play ogg files does not care or even understand the difference.
To the majority of people mp3 is synonymous with audio files for portable devices, just like they think
This is just like the old battle about what being a hacker means. To much more than 90 percent of the population it means someone breaking into computer systems. Now you and me probably knows this was not the original meaning at all, but it does not matter because the 'wrong meaning' is by now so enforced by media that people only stares strangely at you if you try educating them.
Now if you want ogg, vorbis and theora to succeed as open standards used everywhere, it would be a much better strategy going with the flow and not against it.
Yes it is.
Open Standard != Free
That would still mean they would be willing to associate with all other finn's ;-)
You should realize that in Finland (and the neighboring countries) every one has a cell phone, there is virtually no exception. Even small kids and street bums has cell phones (usually pre-paid ones since then you can at least receive calls for free).
I live in Norway, mostly the same story here although it happened in Finland a few years earlier because of Nokia I guess.
Almost all apartment buildings here have intercom's/buzzers that let you talk to people and open the front door from your apartment.
But guess what, in my apartment the intercom is connected to the cell network so when someone is at my door I get them on my cell phone. Great system, means I can answer my door if I am at home or not. Also saves on wiring I guess.
I realize I could have used a land line, but I have not had a land line for nearly 10 years now. Why bother paying for something I wont need and wont use. In fact most younger people I know does not have a land line.
Which is because in most of the western world text message prices are insanely inflated.
Sure, everything I do online is public. And I don't mind the one I'm doing a transaction with acquiring exactly that information they get from the current and any previous transactions with the same company/organization. This is not a problem and very analogous to the grocery store salesperson knowing what I usually eat because I buy my food there everyday.
The problem starts when someone either starts tracking everything I do on the net (similar to someone stalking me in real life) or someone buys/sell tracking information from several independent sources to put together a complete behavioral profile of me (similar to hiring a PI to stalk me).
There is quite a big difference between many people each knowing a little bit about you and a few people knowing everything.
You may not care not having any privacy left but other people really do.
Thankfully we have very strict privacy laws where I live.
It looks like satire to me, but then again I usually give people the benefit of the doubt.
;-)
;-) Pretend to support their case while at the same time make a mockery out of the whole thing.
BTW, I posted a comment to the blog where I gave the whole thing away as satire. When I checked again later my comment was changed to whole heartedly support of the mad ravings.
Kind of explains why so few comments are negative...
Either this is clever satire or these people have some serious problems they need to seek professional help for like delusional paranoia or something.
IANAP. But, hey some cases are quite obvious.
Actually, if I should have tried to expose the paranoid illusions of the current administration this is exactly the way I would have chosen (evil as I am
Nothing is as deadly as if you can get people to laugh at your political opponents, politically it's pure poison.
The number of terrorists ever found by this database will closely match the number of WMD's found in Iraq.
Well written and thoughtful article? Hehe, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
:-)
Actually, this is excellent satire.
Gotten away with it? Nobody has gotten away with anything.
This only means there has to be a full trial before the matter is settled one way or the other.
Bzzt, wrong again ;-)
Web designer != Web developer
But sometimes the same person can do both jobs.
Don't they teach history in the US anymore?
Japan was NOT leveled during WW2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, but the country a a whole did not.
Hehe :)
Would make for a good incentive to crack the encryption in order to get to the next level of porn?
Hah, that is bullshit my friend ;-)
Possible != likely
The police may not believe you and will probably pester you quite hard to give up the keys to a hidden volume. But that does not matter one iota, since they bloody well have to prove it exist before they can get you convicted for not giving up any keys to it.
Of course we still assume this happens in a society where there are reasonable laws that governs what the police can do.
Truecrypt works perfectly without a hidden volume and I know people and organizations that uses it that way only.
Unused space at the end of a volume only proves that there is unused space at the end of a volume.
I don't think you quite understand the principles behind "hidden volumes" in Truecrypt.
;-)
The point is not that they don't know it is possible. The point is that it cannot be proven that there is a second encrypted volume within the first one.
This makes it plausible to deny that it exist at all. If store some sensitive information in the outer volume, like some very embarrassing but not illegal pornography you can make a claim that this was the sole purpose of the outer Truecrypt volume. The law enforcement agency will have a hard time getting a judge to order you hand over keys to a hidden volume they cannot prove exist.
Hidden volumes in Truecrypt got nothing at all to do with "security through obscurity", it's all about "plausible deniability". You can ask your friend in the police about that, if he has any experience with the security community at all he should be very well acquainted with this term.
Of course, if you admit or in other ways make it provable that there exist an inner volume then all bets are off
This will probably work in societies like USA and UK where the police have to follow certain procedures. In countries like Burma or China where they will just torture you until you confesses or dies, I'm not so sure about the value of this scheme.
Problem is he claims to be right from a legal perspective (which he is not) and is quite adamant about it in his post. I actually agree quite a bit on the ethical side with him but that is another matter
Moral != Law
Mr Theo seems to be a bit confused about this.
Not quite that simple, if what is alleged is correct (he removed BSD license statements from the source in a patch). Then this is OK if this only affected source files containing work of his own.
If the same files contained work from others then the removal of the BSD statements is illegal and constitute copyright infringement, it does not matter one iota whether the files were dual licensed or not.
The BSD license allows relicensing under another license (any other license, even proprietary closed source), but only the derivative work would be under the new license and anyways the BSD license explicitly forbids you to remove the original copyright statements from the source code even if you relicense.
The problem is not the relicensing per see, but the removal of the original copyright statements.
Disclaimer: I have not read neither the patch nor the original source files so I have to take what you said about other authors, dual license and what the article claims at face value.
That would make the answer a bit complicated but in most cases, yes all authors must agree.
c id=20396621 ).
Some previous posts suggested he was the only author (this for instance: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=282341&
If indeed there was other authors or it is a derivative work then he may not have the right to relicense.
It appears (from above postings) that the one who submitted the patch is the same person that originally wrote the code in question.
If this is correct then there is no problem here at all and the article is totally meaningless.
An author is allowed by copyright law to relicense his work at any time, of course the versions distributed with the BSD license would still be valid to use. Effectively this means there now is two versions of this code with different licenses.
Excuse me but that is complete and utter bullshit. I feel the urgent need to educate you a bit ;-)
About the only thing your right about is that they only had fission based nuclear weapons in 1945.
IANAP but this is usually thought in any high school physics curriculum.
Both fusion and fission bombs are nuclear weapons because they both employ nuclear principles to release their energies.
A fusion bomb works by the principle that two very light atomic nucleus (Hydrogen or Helium isotopes usually) fuses together. The combined new and larger atomic nucleus has a lower internal binding energy than the sum of the two original nucleus's had and this energy is released.
A fission bomb works by the opposite principle where a heavy atomic nucleus (Plutonium or another large atom) is split into two lighter nucleus's (and usually a few other particle components), this process also liberates some nuclear binding energy.
The release of nuclear binding energy with both fusion and fission is possible because the energy levels (binding energy per mass unit) is lowest in the mid range of the elementary table. So in effect both fusion and fission bombs are harnessing the same nuclear energy although the mechanism is a bit different.
You can read a more detailed explanation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon (follow the links to fusion and fission) or in any decent physics text book.
Please note the use of the term 'nuclear weapon' for both fusion and fission based weapons.
What seems to be confusing you is that in the early days especially the media used the term atomic energy or atom bomb instead of the more precise term 'nuclear'. Nuclear is a better term to use since it is closer to and more descriptive of the physical process that actually take place (the splitting or fusing of atomic nucleuses).
It might also be confusing that fusion bombs are sometimes called thermo nuclear weapons because of the extreme (thermonuclear) temperatures needed to start the fusion process. In fact a fission bomb is used to trigger the fusion bomb.
Seems obvious that single paragraph at last was lifted from Wikipedia or perhaps they where both copied from another source.
But you should really read the article better before you start trolling!
The link from Wikipedia relates to the claim that these two professors at St. Andrews that claims to have reversed the Casimir effect. This information did NOT originate at Wikipedia so there is no problem here. The wikipedia article (after the last changes) also explicitly mention that this is also just a claim.
Circular references is not uncommon but both the article on Wikipedia and the Telegraph contains novel information the other one does not, which suggest the Wikipedia link to the Telegraph article is perfectly reasonable.
Only works with live cats. The cost of feeding and care for the cats makes this uneconomical. ;-)
And your still wrong, even if it was a 'Magic no clicks at all'(TM) process it is not whats needed to get a large market share.
It does not really matter how difficult it is to install it, because you see - ordinary USERS do not install their OS-software them self.
As other people has pointed out, by your standards even Microsoft Windows is not ready for the masses and if you have been around since the early days (80-90s) you would also know that easy installation was never how they got their large market share in the first place.
Easy dual boot is of course important enough but it is NOT a magic wand that will make Linux 'steal' market share from Windows.
That is NOT the reason Linux does not have a wider user base.
Have you tried partitioning the disk using the Windows installer? I think its easy (and so is the Ubuntu one) but I also know most users cannot handle it unless perhaps they just lets Windows format the whole drive, Ubuntu (and almost all other distros) can do that also, the hard part is knowing how to leave the another OS already installed unharmed, MS Windows is much worse than Ubuntu when it comes to that.
The REAL reason Linux does not have wide user base is because virtually every computer the last 15 years have been delivered with Windows PREINSTALLED, nothing can beat that for user friendliness.
Windows is obviously not easy enough to install compared to Ubuntu that this alone explains their market dominance, I cannot even start to count the number of times over the years I had to help friends, colleagues, family, friends of family etc to reinstall Windows and some of those people are what I would call moderately computer literate (but not geeks).
This is not a problem for Microsoft because the end user usually don't install the OS himself.
Of course there are many reasons to as why/how Microsoft reached their dominating market place but technical prominence or even 'ease of use' was never the most important ones, anyone who's been around a while remember how cumbersome their first products where. Still they practically 'conquered' the world with them.
Me thinks that troll text is a bit dated now.
Perhaps time the trolling community here started writing some new material?