The current French government has proposed, in the recent past, to track down migrants, both legal and illegal, through genetic testing.
This is a government which was one of the very first to propose a "three strikes and you are out" regulation to "fight" so-called Internet piracy. Even though it was repeatedly told this was an unpopular measure and one that was pretty much unfeasible technically.
This is a governement whose minister in charge of the "three strikes" law actually mentioned that Linux was not concerned by music or movie piracy because it had "high performance firewalls" [sic] such as "Open Office" [!!].
Coming from that government, nothing surprises me anymore. Like many politicians, all you need to know is that they are lying every time they open their mouths and that whatever they say they will do, they probably won't.
Somewhere in Moscow, a geek named Oleg Nikolaenko is hunched over a pile of computers in a dank and dark basement.
Suddenly, a knock on the door!
Cautiously, Oleg watches through the door peephole at a tall, muscular stranger, with shades on, dressed all in black leather, except for a "Google" patch on the left side of his jacket.
The stranger (with a strong Austrian accent): "Oleg Nikolaenko?"
Several days later, at a Google HQ conference in Mountain View:
- "Yes, our motto is, and still remains: 'Do not be Evil'... We made an exception this one time, but the project nicknamed 'Extreme Prejudice (beta)' has been officially disbanded and the blueprints destroyed. The persons responsible for the projects have been sacked. Any questions?"
- "Yes, Mr Brin, what is the *other* project Google wanted to discuss?"
- "Well, we are pleased to announce that the new Google Map now incorporates 'Satellite Friend Tracking' to know -- in real time -- where all your friends are, anywhere in the world!"
One of the best just got better - if you haven't tried NetBSD, please give it a spin, this OS is a treat!
Beyond the obvious (amazing portability), I have found NetBSD to be a very stable and light system, the kind that gets the job done efficiently, even on small configurations.
Upgrade to OpenBSD 4.7 to 4.8 is as simple as booting the machine on the CD, and selecting (U)pgrade instead of (I)nstall.
Make sure you make a backup of your/etc/ directory beforehand and you are good to go. The upgrade process should keep your configuration intact, but it never hurts to be a bit cautious.
I'll note that i have been upgrading the same machine from OpenBSD 3.9 all the way to 4.8 without major problems.
Unless you have a very good reason to, do not use ports: use (pre-compiled) packages. Upgrading packages is as simple as typing: 'pkg_add' with the correct options. See here for more details: http://openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#PkgUpdate
That's all there is to it. OpenBSD is a very simple operating system to use, and one that is a pleasure to upgrade and maintain.
Nor does an OpenBSD user excel on either Linux or Windows - they are three different worlds. You do not state, but imply, that someone that knows BSD knows those other systems. You either do so through intention (dishonesty) or through lack of thinking your argument out (ignorance), either one isn't particularly good.
I have three Linux machines (Slackware/Ubuntu) and one OpenBSD machine at home, all of them work very well. I also have two additional Windows machines at home, and I use one at work (sigh). I know all three systems pretty well. What's your point?
And, just to add an important precision: I administer Linux (Red Hat/SuSE), Solaris, AIX and HPUX machines at work. I know all of these systems pretty well.
The problem that the *BSD versions have for large acceptance is why? The big draw of it - security from the ground up - isn't really useful in most places.
Go ahead and tell that to the security engineers that audit the servers on a regular basis at work. Go ahead, I dare you. This is the best way to be out of a job pretty fscking quickly. OpenBSD is not perfect, but, when it comes to security, any serious person is going to consider it.
You need that at your firewall and router (usually one in the same for small to medium companies or a home network) and those are better handled by a hardware/software stack that is specifically designed for that.
In other words: trust us, we are from ______________ [insert big company name here]. No, thank you. I have been burned by vendors too many times.
Cisco solutions are a better combination of performance and costs. The OpenBSD box is never going to perform as well as the Cisco 28xx series and is no more secure so why go that way?
Mwa ha ha ha ha ha! Thanks, I needed the laugh.
Performance blows for general purpose hardware compared to specialized ones today.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. None.
Ten years ago they rocked, routers and firewalls on general purpose hardware was the the higher end of the market - today purchase a solution from Cisco if you really need it.
[More drivel follows]
A few points: A) If you are trying to worship at the altar of Cisco, please find some other place for it. Cisco's hardware is uninteresting and overly expensive for what it does. B) Even Cisco uses OpenSSH - which comes from OpenBSD. I really wonder why? C) Why buy an overpriced Cisco XXXX, when a simple PC with 4 network cards and OpenBSD can do the job for half the price and three times the performance?
Crawl back under your bridge, little troll, and try to learn a bit about the real world before tooting your Cisco horn.
This is DEBKA. Completely ridiculous website, riddled with disinfo.
Example:
Not only have their own attempts to defeat the invading worm failed, but they made matters worse: The malworm became more aggressive and returned to the attack on parts of the systems damaged in the initial attack.
'nuff said.
Of course, that does not mean Iran is not hit hard by Stuxnet - just that everything you read at this site should be taken with a big grain of salt.
What are they going to do to stop it? They'd have trouble outbidding Apple, and even bigger trouble moving to MIPS.
I think you may be wrong: add together Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony/Ericsson, HTC and countless other phone makers, all of them ARM clients, and you have a group that can probably outbid Apple easily.
Also, ARM itself probably would like to keep its independence from Apple, and could offer each of these companies preferred shares for, let's say 5% each of the company. This would be the best of both worlds for everyone involved: ARM stays independent, and the phone makers all have a stake in one of their most important suppliers... and keep it out of Apple's grubby hands.
Faced with that kind of alliance, it is hard to see how Apple could succeed. Then again, this is Slashdot, so feel free to take this with a bit of salt on top.
More likely: Apple wants to extend ARM in directions that the current ARM management is balking at.
ARM does not give a flying fsck what you do with its processors: it sells licenses to you, you do whatever you want to do with them.
Case in point: Texas Instruments markets OMAP processors, which are essentially an ARM core wrapped into a TI DSP.
If Apple wanted to 'extend' the ARM CPUs, they could exactly that (and what they probably have already done): buy an ARM license, design a new chip around it, and have someone else make the design for them in large quantities.
ARM does not have a monopoly on low-power chip. MIPS and many others are also in this game.
But, yes, ARM is the 900 pound Gorilla of mobile devices - which makes it very unlikely Apple will succeed. Too many companies use ARM chips to accept an Apple-controlled company.
Yeah, right. Here is MY OpenBSD upgrade guide: 1) insert CD, select (U)pgrade. 2) once upgrade is finished, enter, as root: "pkg_add -vvv -u -F upgrade" That's it. I have used this for at least the past 5 upgrades. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
Short answer: no, it's not possible to do that. It's not impossible, simply incredibly hard to do. Unless you happen to be very handy with a soldering iron and go dumpster-diving in the backyard of an HDD company (as many others have pointed out).
Longer answer: how about creating a 'virtual' hard drive? There are utilities out there that probably let you create (a) a virtual interface (let's say IDE) and (b) a virtual hard drive, attached to said interface. The next step, of course, is to hack these (VirtualBox?) in order to make them do whatever it is you want them to do. This being said, I strongly suspect it involves non-trivial virtual machine hacking and that it probably does not respond to whatever your needs are.
Other than this (very twisted) idea, sorry, bare metal writing has been disabled a long time ago, and for good reasons, too.
The question now becomes: will this generate more energy than it takes? And can it sustain power generation?
And, let's admit everything works: what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce? And of what type?
Don't give me the "it's fusion, so it's clean, duh" line: this machine is going to generate an enormous amount of energy and a lot of that will in the form of a "carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion" (BBC dixit) -- which means radiation, which also means neutrons. And neutrons are not really good for your health.
And will ITER be quickly refactored to take this into account? Will the EU combine HiPER (high-energy laser projects) and ITER? Will the USA share its latest discovery with its ITER partners?
I wanted to check your information, so I did more or less the same thing, but selecting components through a local vendor, and here is what I got:
- Intel D945GCLF2 Motherboard, with Atom processor = 72.70 Euros - Hitachi Desktar 320 Go SATA II = 33.40 Euros - Crucial 2x1 Go RAM = 38.75 Euros - Small form-factor case with 300W PSU = 53.47 Euros
Grand total = 249.14 Euros. Click here to view the whole thing. The whole thing includes shipping and VAT, so that's it.
No CD drive, since I have a CD burner on USB that I can use to install Linux (or whatever) on that PC. I only put 2 GB of RAM, since this is usually more than enough.
So, you are right: paying 350 Euros seems way over-priced. Most people who use Linux already know how to build a similar PC and those who don't use Linux only care about the price, anyway.
Yes, and they also hate the Americans. It could be the years of occupation and quasi-slavery (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti), it could be the recent embargo that the USA recommended the UN hold against Haiti, or the US unwavering support to Duvalier's "Papa Doc" bloody reign of terror, not to mention the plundering of Haiti by large American banks and corporations.
What's your point? My experience of Haitian people is that, while they are proud of kicking Napoleon's butt while still -- legally -- slaves, they don't "hate" the French, or the Americans. They are just tired of being treated like children or second-class human beings.
Treat an Haitian with respect, and you may find out he does not really 'hate' other people.
Am I the only one who finds the entire article strange?
Here is what it says about the hack itself:
Once inside of Stanford’s network, the unidentified hackers appear to have swiped the credentials from an internal network administrator, and soon had downloaded the user names and password hashes for more than 1,000 employees of Stanford Financial, Stanford Group, Stanford Trust, and Stanford International Bank Ltd.
Among the purloined files is a listing of what appear to be ownership and balance information for tens of thousands of customer accounts at Bank of Antigua. Each listing includes the account number, owner’s name, address, balance, and accrued interest.
So far, so good.
But here is where it becomes really strange:
It’s also unclear whether the hackers managed to steal any funds from the accounts listed in the recovered documents, or indeed whether the attackers ever had direct access to Bank of Antigua accounts. Still, a set of documents found with the account information suggest the perpetrators did a fairly thorough job mapping the internal networks connecting Stanford offices in Austin, Baton Rouge, Boca Raton, Boston, Denver, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Memphis, Miami, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Sugarland, and Washington, D.C.
What ??!!?? Or, even more clearly: WTF??
Are you trying to tell me that people sophisticated enough to get the credentials of a system administrators, info on hundreds of accounts, including passwords and so on and so forth have not transferred anything?
It's like, I have total access to hundreds of accounts, after cracking open your system security, but I did not take anything?
This thing stinks to high heaven. Either the Ponzi scheme had no money left in it, or I am willing to bet the hackers, whoever they are, have quietly siphoned a lot of money overseas.
Just remember that the recent HADOPI 'three strikes and you are out' law can -and will- be challenged in front of the French Constitutional Court, which will probably strike it down as un-constitutional and contrary to human rights.
Which is a big relief, at least for me (being French and all that).
Read the article: AFPA - the education agency - sued edu4 - a company working for this agency - because edu4 did not release the source code to its modified VNC software.
The court essentially said that AFPA was correct, that the GPL should have been upheld by edu4, and that the source code should be released by edu4 to its client, the AFPA.
Essentially, this is good news: as far as France is concerned, the GPL has been challenged, and upheld in court. Modifications done by a private company to a GPL software should therefore be available for all.
Slashdot Mirror
The current French government has proposed, in the recent past, to track down migrants, both legal and illegal, through genetic testing.
This is a government which was one of the very first to propose a "three strikes and you are out" regulation to "fight" so-called Internet piracy. Even though it was repeatedly told this was an unpopular measure and one that was pretty much unfeasible technically.
This is a governement whose minister in charge of the "three strikes" law actually mentioned that Linux was not concerned by music or movie piracy because it had "high performance firewalls" [sic] such as "Open Office" [!!].
Coming from that government, nothing surprises me anymore. Like many politicians, all you need to know is that they are lying every time they open their mouths and that whatever they say they will do, they probably won't.
Somewhere in Moscow, a geek named Oleg Nikolaenko is hunched over a pile of computers in a dank and dark basement.
Suddenly, a knock on the door!
Cautiously, Oleg watches through the door peephole at a tall, muscular stranger, with shades on, dressed all in black leather, except for a "Google" patch on the left side of his jacket.
The stranger (with a strong Austrian accent): "Oleg Nikolaenko?"
Several days later, at a Google HQ conference in Mountain View:
- "Yes, our motto is, and still remains: 'Do not be Evil'... We made an exception this one time, but the project nicknamed 'Extreme Prejudice (beta)' has been officially disbanded and the blueprints destroyed. The persons responsible for the projects have been sacked. Any questions?"
- "Yes, Mr Brin, what is the *other* project Google wanted to discuss?"
- "Well, we are pleased to announce that the new Google Map now incorporates 'Satellite Friend Tracking' to know -- in real time -- where all your friends are, anywhere in the world!"
One of the best just got better - if you haven't tried NetBSD, please give it a spin, this OS is a treat!
Beyond the obvious (amazing portability), I have found NetBSD to be a very stable and light system, the kind that gets the job done efficiently, even on small configurations.
Congratulations to the entire NetBSD team!
Upgrade to OpenBSD 4.7 to 4.8 is as simple as booting the machine on the CD, and selecting (U)pgrade instead of (I)nstall.
Make sure you make a backup of your /etc/ directory beforehand and you are good to go. The upgrade process should keep your configuration intact, but it never hurts to be a bit cautious.
I'll note that i have been upgrading the same machine from OpenBSD 3.9 all the way to 4.8 without major problems.
Unless you have a very good reason to, do not use ports: use (pre-compiled) packages. Upgrading packages is as simple as typing: 'pkg_add' with the correct options. See here for more details: http://openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#PkgUpdate
That's all there is to it. OpenBSD is a very simple operating system to use, and one that is a pleasure to upgrade and maintain.
Nice Troll. I'll bite.
Nor does an OpenBSD user excel on either Linux or Windows - they are three different worlds. You do not state, but imply, that someone that knows BSD knows those other systems. You either do so through intention (dishonesty) or through lack of thinking your argument out (ignorance), either one isn't particularly good.
I have three Linux machines (Slackware/Ubuntu) and one OpenBSD machine at home, all of them work very well. I also have two additional Windows machines at home, and I use one at work (sigh). I know all three systems pretty well. What's your point?
And, just to add an important precision: I administer Linux (Red Hat/SuSE), Solaris, AIX and HPUX machines at work. I know all of these systems pretty well.
The problem that the *BSD versions have for large acceptance is why? The big draw of it - security from the ground up - isn't really useful in most places.
Go ahead and tell that to the security engineers that audit the servers on a regular basis at work. Go ahead, I dare you. This is the best way to be out of a job pretty fscking quickly. OpenBSD is not perfect, but, when it comes to security, any serious person is going to consider it.
You need that at your firewall and router (usually one in the same for small to medium companies or a home network) and those are better handled by a hardware/software stack that is specifically designed for that.
In other words: trust us, we are from ______________ [insert big company name here]. No, thank you. I have been burned by vendors too many times.
Cisco solutions are a better combination of performance and costs. The OpenBSD box is never going to perform as well as the Cisco 28xx series and is no more secure so why go that way?
Mwa ha ha ha ha ha! Thanks, I needed the laugh.
Performance blows for general purpose hardware compared to specialized ones today.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. None.
Ten years ago they rocked, routers and firewalls on general purpose hardware was the the higher end of the market - today purchase a solution from Cisco if you really need it.
[More drivel follows]
A few points:
A) If you are trying to worship at the altar of Cisco, please find some other place for it. Cisco's hardware is uninteresting and overly expensive for what it does.
B) Even Cisco uses OpenSSH - which comes from OpenBSD. I really wonder why?
C) Why buy an overpriced Cisco XXXX, when a simple PC with 4 network cards and OpenBSD can do the job for half the price and three times the performance?
Crawl back under your bridge, little troll, and try to learn a bit about the real world before tooting your Cisco horn.
This is DEBKA. Completely ridiculous website, riddled with disinfo.
Example:
Not only have their own attempts to defeat the invading worm failed, but they made matters worse: The malworm became more aggressive and returned to the attack on parts of the systems damaged in the initial attack.
'nuff said.
Of course, that does not mean Iran is not hit hard by Stuxnet - just that everything you read at this site should be taken with a big grain of salt.
Learn a 'new' operating system and install OpenBSD/macppc on it.
Support should be outstanding, and you can rest knowing you have one heck of a secure G5.
And, contrary to what most people think, OpenBSD is great for a personal workstation. Just my US$0.02...
Man, and I was just getting used to 13.0 13.0-64... I should really read the ChnageLog more often!!
Great job Pat & crew, and here is to another great release of the best Linux distro ever!
Tell them to encrypt that, and use it only to check your email.
Since they don't know how to install encryption software properly, I doubt they know how to check which laptop connects to what anyway.
What are they going to do to stop it? They'd have trouble outbidding Apple, and even bigger trouble moving to MIPS.
I think you may be wrong: add together Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony/Ericsson, HTC and countless other phone makers, all of them ARM clients, and you have a group that can probably outbid Apple easily.
Also, ARM itself probably would like to keep its independence from Apple, and could offer each of these companies preferred shares for, let's say 5% each of the company. This would be the best of both worlds for everyone involved: ARM stays independent, and the phone makers all have a stake in one of their most important suppliers... and keep it out of Apple's grubby hands.
Faced with that kind of alliance, it is hard to see how Apple could succeed. Then again, this is Slashdot, so feel free to take this with a bit of salt on top.
More likely: Apple wants to extend ARM in directions that the current ARM management is balking at.
ARM does not give a flying fsck what you do with its processors: it sells licenses to you, you do whatever you want to do with them.
Case in point: Texas Instruments markets OMAP processors, which are essentially an ARM core wrapped into a TI DSP.
If Apple wanted to 'extend' the ARM CPUs, they could exactly that (and what they probably have already done): buy an ARM license, design a new chip around it, and have someone else make the design for them in large quantities.
ARM does not have a monopoly on low-power chip. MIPS and many others are also in this game.
But, yes, ARM is the 900 pound Gorilla of mobile devices - which makes it very unlikely Apple will succeed. Too many companies use ARM chips to accept an Apple-controlled company.
If you like Gentoo better than OpenBSD, all the more power to you.
But don't come and tell me that upgrading OpenBSD is a mess, because it is clearly not. It may be different from Gentoo, but it's not a mess.
And I strongly suspect it is much faster than upgrading Gentoo, but I haven't used Gentoo in a very long time, so I may be mistaken.
Yeah, right.
Here is MY OpenBSD upgrade guide:
1) insert CD, select (U)pgrade.
2) once upgrade is finished, enter, as root: "pkg_add -vvv -u -F upgrade"
That's it. I have used this for at least the past 5 upgrades.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
Short answer: no, it's not possible to do that. It's not impossible, simply incredibly hard to do. Unless you happen to be very handy with a soldering iron and go dumpster-diving in the backyard of an HDD company (as many others have pointed out).
Longer answer: how about creating a 'virtual' hard drive? There are utilities out there that probably let you create (a) a virtual interface (let's say IDE) and (b) a virtual hard drive, attached to said interface. The next step, of course, is to hack these (VirtualBox?) in order to make them do whatever it is you want them to do. This being said, I strongly suspect it involves non-trivial virtual machine hacking and that it probably does not respond to whatever your needs are.
Other than this (very twisted) idea, sorry, bare metal writing has been disabled a long time ago, and for good reasons, too.
OK, Fusion within 2010. Great.
The question now becomes: will this generate more energy than it takes? And can it sustain power generation?
And, let's admit everything works: what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce? And of what type?
Don't give me the "it's fusion, so it's clean, duh" line: this machine is going to generate an enormous amount of energy and a lot of that will in the form of a "carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion" (BBC dixit) -- which means radiation, which also means neutrons. And neutrons are not really good for your health.
And will ITER be quickly refactored to take this into account? Will the EU combine HiPER (high-energy laser projects) and ITER? Will the USA share its latest discovery with its ITER partners?
Questions, questions, questions...
Thanks for that information.
I wanted to check your information, so I did more or less the same thing, but selecting components through a local vendor, and here is what I got:
- Intel D945GCLF2 Motherboard, with Atom processor = 72.70 Euros
- Hitachi Desktar 320 Go SATA II = 33.40 Euros
- Crucial 2x1 Go RAM = 38.75 Euros
- Small form-factor case with 300W PSU = 53.47 Euros
Grand total = 249.14 Euros. Click here to view the whole thing. The whole thing includes shipping and VAT, so that's it.
No CD drive, since I have a CD burner on USB that I can use to install Linux (or whatever) on that PC. I only put 2 GB of RAM, since this is usually more than enough.
So, you are right: paying 350 Euros seems way over-priced. Most people who use Linux already know how to build a similar PC and those who don't use Linux only care about the price, anyway.
Mod parent up - AARL is doing great work.
Yes, and they also hate the Americans. It could be the years of occupation and quasi-slavery (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti), it could be the recent embargo that the USA recommended the UN hold against Haiti, or the US unwavering support to Duvalier's "Papa Doc" bloody reign of terror, not to mention the plundering of Haiti by large American banks and corporations.
What's your point? My experience of Haitian people is that, while they are proud of kicking Napoleon's butt while still -- legally -- slaves, they don't "hate" the French, or the Americans. They are just tired of being treated like children or second-class human beings.
Treat an Haitian with respect, and you may find out he does not really 'hate' other people.
Am I the only one who finds the entire article strange?
Here is what it says about the hack itself:
Once inside of Stanford’s network, the unidentified hackers appear to have swiped the credentials from an internal network administrator, and soon had downloaded the user names and password hashes for more than 1,000 employees of Stanford Financial, Stanford Group, Stanford Trust, and Stanford International Bank Ltd.
Among the purloined files is a listing of what appear to be ownership and balance information for tens of thousands of customer accounts at Bank of Antigua. Each listing includes the account number, owner’s name, address, balance, and accrued interest.
So far, so good.
But here is where it becomes really strange:
It’s also unclear whether the hackers managed to steal any funds from the accounts listed in the recovered documents, or indeed whether the attackers ever had direct access to Bank of Antigua accounts. Still, a set of documents found with the account information suggest the perpetrators did a fairly thorough job mapping the internal networks connecting Stanford offices in Austin, Baton Rouge, Boca Raton, Boston, Denver, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Memphis, Miami, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Sugarland, and Washington, D.C.
What ??!!?? Or, even more clearly: WTF??
Are you trying to tell me that people sophisticated enough to get the credentials of a system administrators, info on hundreds of accounts, including passwords and so on and so forth have not transferred anything?
It's like, I have total access to hundreds of accounts, after cracking open your system security, but I did not take anything?
This thing stinks to high heaven. Either the Ponzi scheme had no money left in it, or I am willing to bet the hackers, whoever they are, have quietly siphoned a lot of money overseas.
... Is the reason why the U.S.A. should pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now.
(Yes, I know I am going to be moderated as 'troll' for this. I don't care).
Ah, what the heck they said it much better than I ever would. The fake French accent only adds to the hilarity.
Very funny... NOT.
Just remember that the recent HADOPI 'three strikes and you are out' law can -and will- be challenged in front of the French Constitutional Court, which will probably strike it down as un-constitutional and contrary to human rights.
Which is a big relief, at least for me (being French and all that).
Read the article: AFPA - the education agency - sued edu4 - a company working for this agency - because edu4 did not release the source code to its modified VNC software.
The court essentially said that AFPA was correct, that the GPL should have been upheld by edu4, and that the source code should be released by edu4 to its client, the AFPA.
Essentially, this is good news: as far as France is concerned, the GPL has been challenged, and upheld in court. Modifications done by a private company to a GPL software should therefore be available for all.
And Arch Linux used to be Slackware derivative.
I rest my case, your honor.