1. Cryptonomicon-style, with a big coil embedded in the door frame of the room where the server was stored (question is, would that even work, without using an MRI as the coil)
I don't think that would work, even in 1999 when Neal Stephenson wrote the book. Some data would be recoverable: disks are very hard to completely destroy. Encrypted filesystems are the right way to do it, with the key only kept in memory.
I don't know why Stephenson's characters didn't think of that idea, since they worked for a PGP-style data security company. Nor do I understand why the adversaries used Van Eck phreaking to spy on Randy's laptop rather than just install a hardware keylogger, or why an EMP can destroy a CPU but not a hard disk controller. But hey, at least the ending was better than The Diamond Age.
Surely you jest. The Chinese secret police will not be giving civilians raw access to the data. It's surveillance, not equivalence. They are not going to share their information advantage.
Some people believe in a "Panopticon"-style world in which anyone may watch anyone else - the future of privacy. I've seen several posts on that topic here. But it's a utopian dream, as impractical as Communism. It is inevitable that the upper ranks of society will obtain privacy for themselves. You might be able to spy on your neighbours, but you won't be spying on the police, the President, or the local mob. Like Marxism, the idea looks good on paper, but will lead to total disaster whenever it is implemented.
Of course, I have to question why they're still using something as ancient as MUTT.
The thing I really *really* like about Mutt is that it uses Unix mailbox files. These are not just human-readable, they can also be manipulated using tools like 'cat'. I periodically archive my working mail files into a backup directory by just concatenating the working files onto the archive files of the same name. The resulting archive mail files are still fully usable with Mutt, even though some are 100Mb+ in size with mail going back to 1997. I could also use them with even older mail clients such as Pine, but that would be like using vi when you've got vim.
When I initially began using Linux, I used the Netscape email software, got fed up with it, and tried a few other mail clients. But none of them came close to the flexibility of Mutt. They all used their own mailbox formats, which could not be archived in the way I just described. I suspect that this is still true. I'm not going to trust Opera, Sylpheed, Thunderbird or Evolution with my mail, because (a) I doubt present-day mail files will still work reliably in 10 years time, (b) I can't easily migrate to another mail reader, and (c) I can't efficiently archive my email because the database files are not plain text.
Binary file comparison shows that they are using the 0.70 release executable and added a wrapper. Means they did not modify the sources, just for clarification.
I'm all for encryption, but it's not clear to me what an encrypted root file system would buy me. They wouldn't be able to tell what packages I had installed? I already mount root RO, so I'm sure there's nothing being written there in general operation, and I just don't see what appreciable security I'd gain by hiding the contents of that file system.
My reason for encrypting root is tamper-proofing. It is true that nothing on the root filesystem should be secret, but nevertheless an attacker could install a trojan there, e.g. by rebooting from a live CD. Encryption makes this effectively impossible - the attacker has to put the trojan in the boot loader, which is not on the hard disk.
But it is extra cost (setup time and CPU time) and it won't work so well with remote rebooting, so it may not be worth it in your application.
Yes, this type of modification appears to be required for Steam applications. It is something to do with copy protection. (It is surprising that more people haven't spotted this problem, especially as it goes right into two familiar Slashdot territories by pitting a DRM scheme against the legal strength of GPLv2.)
I am not going to buy the old id games (I have them on the original floppy disks!) but I have bought other little games from Steam and all of them have been modified to check in with Steam.exe to make sure you are authorised to play. That modification is also in Dosbox, and it's a GPL violation. It puts the Dosbox people in a very strong position, as I am sure that Valve do not want to release their copy protection code under the GPLv2. The Dosbox people can sue or ask for $$$ to release a non-free Dosbox. It is a good day to be a part of Dosbox.
I had wondered about this. This warrants further investigation.
Steam applications all include some copy protection code that involves communicating with the main Steam.exe program: this is most visible in games that weren't designed for Steam, such as Defcon or one of the Popcap games. Like them, Dosbox must have been modified to include this copy protection code.
This is right at the heart of this licence discussion and I am very glad someone has spotted it. Will Valve licence Dosbox under a non-free licence? Or will they release some of the source for Steam? Or will they ignore the issue and be sued by http://gpl-violations.org/ ? How wonderfully ironic that copy protection code should actually cause a copyright problem:).
I'm currently managing a transition to using only encrypted file systems, using loop-aes. As the parent says, one reason to use encrypted file systems is protection against burglars. The access keys for the data disappear as soon as the power is disconnected, so the burglar gets the hardware but no data. Thieves have to be unusually smart if they want to copy the plaintext - they'll have to trick you into revealing the key to them somehow.
But it doesn't just protect my data from burglars. It also enables me to return hard disks for warranty replacement without worrying that the manufacturer will be able to look through my files. I don't have to scrub my disks before sending them off. Disk scrubbing is never 100% effective, and might not even be possible if the controller has failed.
Loop-aes is now supported by Debian stable. I just needed to apt-get two packages, loop-aes-utils and loop-aes-modules-$KERNELVERSION. Through this, it is very easy to add non-root encrypted filesystems to your machine. An encrypted root filesystem is harder to arrange, but well worth having. There are HOWTO guides to help you set one up. The usual implementation requires you to enter a passphrase as your machine boots.
High-speed CPUs are all limited by a bottleneck - getting data on and off chip. Putting the Ethernet controllers on chip helps to offset this.
In the future, it is likely that all the wired buses in your motherboard will be replaced by an internal Ethernet-like network. We are already seeing a trend towards simpler and faster interconnects such as SATA. The next step is to use Ethernet-style connections for every chip-to-chip link, and within the chips themselves too. If this seems unlikely, consider that your PCs memory bus already is basically a network connection. The device at one end (CPU) is in a different clock domain to the device at the other (memory). Data is sent in packets (called bursts) to offset the latency of setting up a transfer.
I have thought about this too. I think that the idea is wonderfully optimistic, in a similar way to political ideologies like anarchism and communism which sound good on paper but simply cannot work in practice. In this case, it's because all of the information would not be available to everyone. Although everyone with an Internet connection might be able to use basic features (e.g. search for a person's current location), the most useful features would only be available to officials. Governments and businesses are not willing to give up their secrets, so there will be people and places that simply do not show up on the system. They'll be able to watch you, or anything you did since the accurate records began, but you won't be able to watch them or monitor for abuses of that information, because of national security.
But wait, it gets worse. The system makes it easy for citizens to spy on each other. Look at the current fascination with blogging. Everyone seems to want to be famous... but in order for people to listen to you, you have to have a story that people want to hear. What could be better than a DIY reality TV show about the neighbour you do not like, who visits sex shops or takes drugs or cheats on his wife? The surveillance system provides the footage, and you provide the commentary, and you'll be #1 on Youtube for sure. And he'll be in Gitmo with the rest of his kind.
And hang on, it's even worse than that. There is a need to restrict access to surveillance data, but unfortunately digital information is extremely easy to copy. Therefore, a draconian system of centrally managed digital restrictions will be needed to secure the information against unauthorised copying. Inevitably, this will include a system to allow viewing priveleges to be revoked. The result of this will be that even if you do get hold of surveillance data showing (for example) an abuse of political power, you won't be able to show it to anyone because it will be centrally disabled. Unless you can get a clear copy... but then, what sort of device are you going to play that on, when 99% of the population owns devices that only play Government approved media using Government-approved software and hardware?
I don't know if this really can be steered towards the right outcome. I simply don't trust the authorities and citizens of today or tomorrow with this level of power.
So has anyone compiled an application to make the battery last longer than 3/4 year
In my day, batteries would only last about 24 hours, and you had to recharge your phone every night! 3/4 of a year is luxury compared to what we had to put up with, before Steve Jobs came up with the brilliant idea of putting an OS on a phone and making it run using fairy dust and moonbeams.
Yeah, I hated it. I saw the first few episodes and I think that "Lame lame lame" is a good description. I can't remember exactly why I hated it so much. Perhaps it was the incorporation of computer terminology and ideas into stories and characters without any consideration for correctness? Or perhaps it was what would later become known as the "Jar-jar" effect, when something that could have been good was ruined by including elements that would only appeal to very young children. As a comparison, Tron handled some similar ideas in a much more abstract way and without any Jar-jar-style characters, and was therefore better. That's my perception of it at least.
Others are saying that it improved in a later series, but I don't regret not sticking with it. TV shows usually get worse over time.
So the "science" in that episode of Panorama was bogus scaremongering? Well, what a shock. But in the present political climate, I doubt the BBC will be reporting that the science in this other episode of Panorama was just as shaky, presenting only one sided coverage of an ongoing scientific debate. (For example, here is a list of some "off message" articles - notice the reputable journals that they have been published in.)
Communism isn't in and of it self evil, it is usually the totalitarian regime that enforces it.
But you can't have Communism without a totalitarian regime. As Marx realised, if ordinary people have a choice in the matter, they will prefer to take a bigger slice of the capitalist pie, rather than give up their "bourgeois freedoms" like the right to own property and choose their own occupations. So Communism has to be forced on people "for their own good", and the only type of government that can do that is a 1984/Stalin/Mao-style arrangement with regular purges of dissidents.
Despite Moore's law, etc., the cost of RSA operations on general purpose CPUs is very high. Not a problem on the client side, but on the server side, one hardware accelerator could save you thousands of general purpose CPUs.
But you are surely not in agreement with the principles of Sharia law? As in, everyone who doesn't believe in the correct magical superman is murdered by the State? You wouldn't want that in your own country, right?
Sharia law is evil in exactly the same sense that Communism and Nazism are evil. Exchange worship of a Stalin/Mao figure for a deity, and change a few economic policies, and you have exactly the same thing. People are required to think certain thoughts and adopt certain lifestyles, and punished by death if they do not. Any thinking person should be strongly opposed to such an idea. But then, all religions know how to brainwash people so that they cannot think critically about their own faith.
We criticise and challenge Christians about silly beliefs like Creationism, and Christians ignore us and go on believing what they want. Fine. We should criticise and challenge Muslims about their silly beliefs too. But (at least in my country) no-one dares to do that, because the Muslims won't just ignore it.
Skype is a closed network with a secret protocol. And Skype is scary. Who knows how many more security holes lurk under their many layers of obfuscation? You're taking quite a risk if you let Skype onto your network.
I'm not saying this in order to troll, I'm just trying to correct widespread misperceptions about Skype, characterised by the belief that it's in some way better than yet another phone company. If you can, use a SIP-based IP phone instead. There are lots of SIP programs to choose from, they interoperate, if you want to dial out onto the PSTN there is a choice of providers, and you can get GPLv2 source code for the client. Far better than Skype's closed network and closed source monoculture.
I am glad to hear that someone is working on a real solution to this problem, because many people do not even seem to be aware of it. XSELinux sounds like exactly what is needed. More information here.
Instead, trusted Web sites and extensions are given access to the full range of interactivity and control enjoyed by native applications today.
Yeah, I don't like the sound of this either. Seems like a two-level trust scheme: trusted websites have access to everything.
One of the design flaws in present day GUIs (including all the X11-based GUIs for Linux) is that one malicious application can compromise the entire GUI if it can open a window. This is true even if you take the sensible step of running untrusted applications as another user: you still have to give them access to your display, so (for example) a compromised Firefox can still act as a global keylogger even if it's running as nobody. There are ways to avoid this in X11 (using Xnest for example) but these are rarely used because they don't integrate well with other applications.
Is that design flaw now being extended to include web applications loaded from a possibly compromised remote server? Written in Javascript, which has proved notoriously hard to secure? Sounds nasty. Secure sandboxing should be built into every level of both the OS and GUI design so that nothing has to be "trusted".
Students often need to download copyrighted material to support their work. I wonder if Kansas U has considered the implications of their policy: if the RIAA can get you disconnected instantly for downloading an MP3, surely other publishers can do the same.
In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here or here. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited.
However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.
Another good example is "detective" from the interactive fiction scene, which was actually bad enough that someone made an MST3K version of it, where as you play, Tom Servo, Crow, etc, mock it along with you. (Ahh, the joys of a text based interface.)
"detective" alone is a counterexample to this article. Link - plays in frotz and other Infocom game interpreters.
Sounds like the Government is planning to implant a rootkit in every single computer or atleast leave a vulnerability/flaw in code (very easy to do with Vista since its so new) which will allow them to do so.
The "flaw" is already there - Windows Update. Microsoft will send out any code that the Government wants sending. Waronterror, freedomisntfree, thinkofthechildren, terroristsareeverywhere, reelecthitler, etcetera.
That aside, I have no idea why people rely on antivirus and antispyware software for security. The whole approach of such software is wrong - it's all about detecting things based on a blacklist, which only picks out known threats, when what you should be doing is preventing infection in the first place. The whole idea is snake oil. It costs you money and CPU time, and all you get in return is the illusion of extra security in the form of a program that has access to all your files. Just another vector for attack on your machine.
So this software will ignore corporate malware (e.g. Sony) and special Government spyware. Well, it's useless anyway.
The parent is right, if you care about keeping what you do secret, use Linux. Boot from a live Linux CD, don't mount your hard disk, and don't use any update services unless you know you can trust them. It's hard to infect read-only media with spyware, so you get security by design. Reboot at the end of your session, and all traces of whatever you did just disappear from RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Cryptonomicon-style, with a big coil embedded in the door frame of the room where the server was stored (question is, would that even work, without using an MRI as the coil)
I don't think that would work, even in 1999 when Neal Stephenson wrote the book. Some data would be recoverable: disks are very hard to completely destroy. Encrypted filesystems are the right way to do it, with the key only kept in memory.
I don't know why Stephenson's characters didn't think of that idea, since they worked for a PGP-style data security company. Nor do I understand why the adversaries used Van Eck phreaking to spy on Randy's laptop rather than just install a hardware keylogger, or why an EMP can destroy a CPU but not a hard disk controller. But hey, at least the ending was better than The Diamond Age.
No.
Superficially, Marx's ideas sound good, but, as I said, they are not.
Surely you jest. The Chinese secret police will not be giving civilians raw access to the data. It's surveillance, not equivalence. They are not going to share their information advantage.
Some people believe in a "Panopticon"-style world in which anyone may watch anyone else - the future of privacy. I've seen several posts on that topic here. But it's a utopian dream, as impractical as Communism. It is inevitable that the upper ranks of society will obtain privacy for themselves. You might be able to spy on your neighbours, but you won't be spying on the police, the President, or the local mob. Like Marxism, the idea looks good on paper, but will lead to total disaster whenever it is implemented.
Of course, I have to question why they're still using something as ancient as MUTT.
The thing I really *really* like about Mutt is that it uses Unix mailbox files. These are not just human-readable, they can also be manipulated using tools like 'cat'. I periodically archive my working mail files into a backup directory by just concatenating the working files onto the archive files of the same name. The resulting archive mail files are still fully usable with Mutt, even though some are 100Mb+ in size with mail going back to 1997. I could also use them with even older mail clients such as Pine, but that would be like using vi when you've got vim.
When I initially began using Linux, I used the Netscape email software, got fed up with it, and tried a few other mail clients. But none of them came close to the flexibility of Mutt. They all used their own mailbox formats, which could not be archived in the way I just described. I suspect that this is still true. I'm not going to trust Opera, Sylpheed, Thunderbird or Evolution with my mail, because (a) I doubt present-day mail files will still work reliably in 10 years time, (b) I can't easily migrate to another mail reader, and (c) I can't efficiently archive my email because the database files are not plain text.
That's why I like Mutt, anyway.
I'm all for encryption, but it's not clear to me what an encrypted root file system would buy me. They wouldn't be able to tell what packages I had installed? I already mount root RO, so I'm sure there's nothing being written there in general operation, and I just don't see what appreciable security I'd gain by hiding the contents of that file system.
My reason for encrypting root is tamper-proofing. It is true that nothing on the root filesystem should be secret, but nevertheless an attacker could install a trojan there, e.g. by rebooting from a live CD. Encryption makes this effectively impossible - the attacker has to put the trojan in the boot loader, which is not on the hard disk.
But it is extra cost (setup time and CPU time) and it won't work so well with remote rebooting, so it may not be worth it in your application.
Yes, this type of modification appears to be required for Steam applications. It is something to do with copy protection. (It is surprising that more people haven't spotted this problem, especially as it goes right into two familiar Slashdot territories by pitting a DRM scheme against the legal strength of GPLv2.)
I am not going to buy the old id games (I have them on the original floppy disks!) but I have bought other little games from Steam and all of them have been modified to check in with Steam.exe to make sure you are authorised to play. That modification is also in Dosbox, and it's a GPL violation. It puts the Dosbox people in a very strong position, as I am sure that Valve do not want to release their copy protection code under the GPLv2. The Dosbox people can sue or ask for $$$ to release a non-free Dosbox. It is a good day to be a part of Dosbox.
I had wondered about this. This warrants further investigation.
:).
Steam applications all include some copy protection code that involves communicating with the main Steam.exe program: this is most visible in games that weren't designed for Steam, such as Defcon or one of the Popcap games. Like them, Dosbox must have been modified to include this copy protection code.
This is right at the heart of this licence discussion and I am very glad someone has spotted it. Will Valve licence Dosbox under a non-free licence? Or will they release some of the source for Steam? Or will they ignore the issue and be sued by http://gpl-violations.org/ ? How wonderfully ironic that copy protection code should actually cause a copyright problem
I'm currently managing a transition to using only encrypted file systems, using loop-aes. As the parent says, one reason to use encrypted file systems is protection against burglars. The access keys for the data disappear as soon as the power is disconnected, so the burglar gets the hardware but no data. Thieves have to be unusually smart if they want to copy the plaintext - they'll have to trick you into revealing the key to them somehow.
But it doesn't just protect my data from burglars. It also enables me to return hard disks for warranty replacement without worrying that the manufacturer will be able to look through my files. I don't have to scrub my disks before sending them off. Disk scrubbing is never 100% effective, and might not even be possible if the controller has failed.
Loop-aes is now supported by Debian stable. I just needed to apt-get two packages, loop-aes-utils and loop-aes-modules-$KERNELVERSION. Through this, it is very easy to add non-root encrypted filesystems to your machine. An encrypted root filesystem is harder to arrange, but well worth having. There are HOWTO guides to help you set one up. The usual implementation requires you to enter a passphrase as your machine boots.
High-speed CPUs are all limited by a bottleneck - getting data on and off chip. Putting the Ethernet controllers on chip helps to offset this.
In the future, it is likely that all the wired buses in your motherboard will be replaced by an internal Ethernet-like network. We are already seeing a trend towards simpler and faster interconnects such as SATA. The next step is to use Ethernet-style connections for every chip-to-chip link, and within the chips themselves too. If this seems unlikely, consider that your PCs memory bus already is basically a network connection. The device at one end (CPU) is in a different clock domain to the device at the other (memory). Data is sent in packets (called bursts) to offset the latency of setting up a transfer.
Homeland Security are way ahead of you. Only a terrorist would object to being forced to run official spyware!
I have thought about this too. I think that the idea is wonderfully optimistic, in a similar way to political ideologies like anarchism and communism which sound good on paper but simply cannot work in practice. In this case, it's because all of the information would not be available to everyone. Although everyone with an Internet connection might be able to use basic features (e.g. search for a person's current location), the most useful features would only be available to officials. Governments and businesses are not willing to give up their secrets, so there will be people and places that simply do not show up on the system. They'll be able to watch you, or anything you did since the accurate records began, but you won't be able to watch them or monitor for abuses of that information, because of national security.
But wait, it gets worse. The system makes it easy for citizens to spy on each other. Look at the current fascination with blogging. Everyone seems to want to be famous... but in order for people to listen to you, you have to have a story that people want to hear. What could be better than a DIY reality TV show about the neighbour you do not like, who visits sex shops or takes drugs or cheats on his wife? The surveillance system provides the footage, and you provide the commentary, and you'll be #1 on Youtube for sure. And he'll be in Gitmo with the rest of his kind.
And hang on, it's even worse than that. There is a need to restrict access to surveillance data, but unfortunately digital information is extremely easy to copy. Therefore, a draconian system of centrally managed digital restrictions will be needed to secure the information against unauthorised copying. Inevitably, this will include a system to allow viewing priveleges to be revoked. The result of this will be that even if you do get hold of surveillance data showing (for example) an abuse of political power, you won't be able to show it to anyone because it will be centrally disabled. Unless you can get a clear copy... but then, what sort of device are you going to play that on, when 99% of the population owns devices that only play Government approved media using Government-approved software and hardware?
I don't know if this really can be steered towards the right outcome. I simply don't trust the authorities and citizens of today or tomorrow with this level of power.
So has anyone compiled an application to make the battery last longer than 3/4 year
In my day, batteries would only last about 24 hours, and you had to recharge your phone every night! 3/4 of a year is luxury compared to what we had to put up with, before Steve Jobs came up with the brilliant idea of putting an OS on a phone and making it run using fairy dust and moonbeams.
Yeah, I hated it. I saw the first few episodes and I think that "Lame lame lame" is a good description. I can't remember exactly why I hated it so much. Perhaps it was the incorporation of computer terminology and ideas into stories and characters without any consideration for correctness? Or perhaps it was what would later become known as the "Jar-jar" effect, when something that could have been good was ruined by including elements that would only appeal to very young children. As a comparison, Tron handled some similar ideas in a much more abstract way and without any Jar-jar-style characters, and was therefore better. That's my perception of it at least.
Others are saying that it improved in a later series, but I don't regret not sticking with it. TV shows usually get worse over time.
So the "science" in that episode of Panorama was bogus scaremongering? Well, what a shock. But in the present political climate, I doubt the BBC will be reporting that the science in this other episode of Panorama was just as shaky, presenting only one sided coverage of an ongoing scientific debate. (For example, here is a list of some "off message" articles - notice the reputable journals that they have been published in.)
Communism isn't in and of it self evil, it is usually the totalitarian regime that enforces it.
But you can't have Communism without a totalitarian regime. As Marx realised, if ordinary people have a choice in the matter, they will prefer to take a bigger slice of the capitalist pie, rather than give up their "bourgeois freedoms" like the right to own property and choose their own occupations. So Communism has to be forced on people "for their own good", and the only type of government that can do that is a 1984/Stalin/Mao-style arrangement with regular purges of dissidents.
Big sites do use hardware SSL crypto processors.
Despite Moore's law, etc., the cost of RSA operations on general purpose CPUs is very high. Not a problem on the client side, but on the server side, one hardware accelerator could save you thousands of general purpose CPUs.
But you are surely not in agreement with the principles of Sharia law? As in, everyone who doesn't believe in the correct magical superman is murdered by the State? You wouldn't want that in your own country, right?
Sharia law is evil in exactly the same sense that Communism and Nazism are evil. Exchange worship of a Stalin/Mao figure for a deity, and change a few economic policies, and you have exactly the same thing. People are required to think certain thoughts and adopt certain lifestyles, and punished by death if they do not. Any thinking person should be strongly opposed to such an idea. But then, all religions know how to brainwash people so that they cannot think critically about their own faith.
We criticise and challenge Christians about silly beliefs like Creationism, and Christians ignore us and go on believing what they want. Fine. We should criticise and challenge Muslims about their silly beliefs too. But (at least in my country) no-one dares to do that, because the Muslims won't just ignore it.
Skype is a closed network with a secret protocol. And Skype is scary. Who knows how many more security holes lurk under their many layers of obfuscation? You're taking quite a risk if you let Skype onto your network.
I'm not saying this in order to troll, I'm just trying to correct widespread misperceptions about Skype, characterised by the belief that it's in some way better than yet another phone company. If you can, use a SIP-based IP phone instead. There are lots of SIP programs to choose from, they interoperate, if you want to dial out onto the PSTN there is a choice of providers, and you can get GPLv2 source code for the client. Far better than Skype's closed network and closed source monoculture.
I am glad to hear that someone is working on a real solution to this problem, because many people do not even seem to be aware of it. XSELinux sounds like exactly what is needed. More information here.
I just included that so as to make it clear that this design flaw is not confined to Windows/OS X.
Instead, trusted Web sites and extensions are given access to the full range of interactivity and control enjoyed by native applications today.
Yeah, I don't like the sound of this either. Seems like a two-level trust scheme: trusted websites have access to everything.
One of the design flaws in present day GUIs (including all the X11-based GUIs for Linux) is that one malicious application can compromise the entire GUI if it can open a window. This is true even if you take the sensible step of running untrusted applications as another user: you still have to give them access to your display, so (for example) a compromised Firefox can still act as a global keylogger even if it's running as nobody. There are ways to avoid this in X11 (using Xnest for example) but these are rarely used because they don't integrate well with other applications.
Is that design flaw now being extended to include web applications loaded from a possibly compromised remote server? Written in Javascript, which has proved notoriously hard to secure? Sounds nasty. Secure sandboxing should be built into every level of both the OS and GUI design so that nothing has to be "trusted".
Students often need to download copyrighted material to support their work. I wonder if Kansas U has considered the implications of their policy: if the RIAA can get you disconnected instantly for downloading an MP3, surely other publishers can do the same.
In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here or here. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited.
However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.
Is this close to a situation where research is actively inhibited by greed?
"The content you requested is not part of your subscription, please pay $30 to download this 10 page article".
Another good example is "detective" from the interactive fiction scene, which was actually bad enough that someone made an MST3K version of it, where as you play, Tom Servo, Crow, etc, mock it along with you. (Ahh, the joys of a text based interface.)
"detective" alone is a counterexample to this article. Link - plays in frotz and other Infocom game interpreters.
Sounds like the Government is planning to implant a rootkit in every single computer or atleast leave a vulnerability/flaw in code (very easy to do with Vista since its so new) which will allow them to do so.
The "flaw" is already there - Windows Update. Microsoft will send out any code that the Government wants sending. Waronterror, freedomisntfree, thinkofthechildren, terroristsareeverywhere, reelecthitler, etcetera.
That aside, I have no idea why people rely on antivirus and antispyware software for security. The whole approach of such software is wrong - it's all about detecting things based on a blacklist, which only picks out known threats, when what you should be doing is preventing infection in the first place. The whole idea is snake oil. It costs you money and CPU time, and all you get in return is the illusion of extra security in the form of a program that has access to all your files. Just another vector for attack on your machine.
So this software will ignore corporate malware (e.g. Sony) and special Government spyware. Well, it's useless anyway.
The parent is right, if you care about keeping what you do secret, use Linux. Boot from a live Linux CD, don't mount your hard disk, and don't use any update services unless you know you can trust them. It's hard to infect read-only media with spyware, so you get security by design. Reboot at the end of your session, and all traces of whatever you did just disappear from RAM.