There is not just ''cruft'' in the code base: if I remember correctly, they removed thousands upon thousands of lines of code from OpenSSL - think VMS, Borland C, Windows 3.x, MS Visual C++ (etc) support.
And they tested the whole thing on the OpenBSD ports - so far, nothing has been broken.
Oh and FIPS support? Not gonna happen. Bob Beck has been very very clear on that subject. OpenBSD does not care too much about US government standard.
... And just about any form of meditation revolves about emptying your mind, focusing on your breathing and discarding thoughts (after examination) rather than dwell on them.
I just read this study as an example of how people are completely disconnected from their own inner life and addicted to constant stimulation. Seriously, an electric shock instead of enjoying a little bit of peace and quiet and a chance to gather yourself? What kind of total lack of self-control is that?
Everyone is fair game, everyone is a potential target. Everyone will be spied on, because terrorists! 9/11! Dirty bomb! Mushroom clouds! They hate our freedom!
I suspect YOU did not get THAT memo. Or maybe you are of the "I did not do anything wrong - so I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear from Big Brother" persuasion? Hmmm?
By the way, why are you reading Slashdot, citizen? Do you have your permit for that? And why talk to this terrorist suspect or that one?
The rest of your comment are more of the same drivel, so I will not even dignify it with a response.
The Stasi (East Germany Secret Police) used to be one of the most powerful intelligence service in the world. It is estimated they had hundreds of thousands of informants and it maintained files on millions of citizens of East Germany.
But the Berlin wall eventually fell, despite all its efforts and all its agents. I believe the same thing will happen in the US. When the times comes, the whole rotten house of cards will crash down to earth.
That's funny. It's almost as if some people just can't grok emacs while other can't grok vim.
I suspect you are right in this: maybe the first exposure is the one determinant factor. If you learn Emacs first (I remember trying it for the first time on my Amiga 500 - Lord, I am getting old) then you are going emacs all the way. If it's vi you learn first, then vim is the one you use. Almost philosophical.
Well, I was told to learn vi because... it's everywhere.
And, as I have said, while far from being a vim master, I really believe learning 20+ commands is enough to make you very productive under vim.
I have tried and tried and tried to ''get'' emacs, but I always give up after learning 5 or 6 Ctrl+something commands. Maybe I'll just give up one day and use vile, but vim is enough for my needs right now.
As the joke goes, "vi a veggie peeler knife, vim is a finely-honed, precision surgeon knife and emacs is a light saber. Most of the time, I cook, but, once in a while I need to fight hordes of battle droids."...
Vim is pretty much the standard vi/editor/$VISUAL on every Linux distribution I use. Emacs is usually an extra package. Therefore, vim is installed, while emacs is not.
Once you have mastered the basic commands of vi, and its mode dichotomy (edit/command) you can edit text in a very efficient manner. Not to mention the goodies of vim, such as "vim -d" or "vim -x". I am so used to vim that, these days, I find myself hitting the Escape key under Word or Firefox. And I still have a lot to learn!
Emacs, on the other hand, is a complex, jumbled mess, a crazy carpal-inducing kitchen sink of a program that requires you to master its twisted logic before you can actually benefit from all the lispy goodness hiding inside. In the meantime, if you master, let's say, about 20 commands under vim, you undertand that its power is in its own logic, so to speak. Vim is complex, but it seems to me much more predictable and logically organized than Emacs.
No, this is another case of the topic brinring out the stupid in Slashdot. Are you seriously suggesting that Golden Age comics have controversy about them similar to vi versus emacs or Windows versus Linux?
Did everyone take the original post, pick out the word "comics", and ignore the rest of it?
I'd like to commend ''BlackPignouf'' and ''Trepidity'' for the magnificence of their comments in this thread.
Seriously: Go back to these comments. Read them. Re-read them. Savor their perfect balance of snark, trolling and irony. This is simply superb - it almost brings tears to my eyes.
Ladies and gentlemen of/., this is why the Internet was created in the first place. That, and cute cat pictures, of course.
He was in Hong Kong, not in the "PRC". Document yourself instead of spouting nonsense.
And he knew the FSB was going to be interested in him, he was just hoping to leave Russia ASAP to go to South America. The Obama administration revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. Furthermore, I believe that most of what Snowden gave to Greenwald, the FSB/Russian intelligence knew already: NSA, like many other US agencies have had its share of moles.
Champagne is a French trademark that is valid and applicable everywhere in the world, not just in the USA.
It was trademarked because French Champagne producers were frankly, tired, of inferior, sometimes even really shitty products, being sold as ''Champagne''.
In other words, if you want to sell shitty bubbly wine, go ahead and produce/sell it, just don't call it Champagne. That, for once, is a reasonable application of Trademark/Intellectual Property.
There have been too many problems with existing crypto code so I've developed something better: goatsecret. Instead of relying on math, it relies on a frenchman's gaping asshole. Basically, the software breaks your message/file/whatever into small chunks and superimposes the data in the goatsecret image. Sure, it's not encrypted, but who is going to stare into the void just to get your data? No hacker/cracker/big business/three-letter-agency is that desperate.
... neither is the intended recipient of the data. That's the only flaw with your scheme I can think of.
This is not about a plastic guns, this is about a paradigm shift that is no less momentous than VHS and later MP3s.
I am not so sure about that. 3D printing has the potential to become a very important technology, but right now, printing cheap plastic trinkets is not what I would call game-changing. But that's just me: it just strikes me as a seemingly good idea - a little bit like flying cars - that can go both ways. It can be truly revolutionary (Crete your own factory in your garage! Let a thousand entrepreneurs bloom!) or it can be the kind of thing that never really lived up to its promise. Time will tell.
And another thing: whether the printed plastic gun really is unsafe or not, I believe it illustrates the risks of 3D-printing. In other words, if you really know what you are doing and printing to specs, using equivalent or better materials than the original creator, it's great. Or you can make a complete fool of yourself, and just print it, because, well, you can! And find yourself severely maimed - or worse - because you did not check the 3D file or whatnot.
On the other hand, the next time some idiot decides to rob a bank or convenience store with a printed plastic gun, the results could be highly amusing. I can see the TV announcements from here: "Another redneck gun-toting moron gets face full of lead and melted plastic. Film at 11".
As an aside: what's with Americans and their guns? Sheesh, people, grow up. You don't need a plastic-or-metal penis to be a real man. (And let the flame wars begin!)
tl;dr Science may be easy, but engineering is expensive and we all know how hard it is to get funding from governments if you don't know the special handshake.
Except, of course, they already got funding from NASA-JPL in the past - so you could argue they do know the "secret handshake" or whatnot.
I believe (after a bit more research) that they did not get Government or other fundings because their main scientist is really controversial. He may be a plasma specialist, but his cosmological ideas also run counter to traditional views & theories.
Make of that what you will - he may be right (on Fusion power, at least), but he should have taken a more back-seat role for the (non-crowdsourced) funding effort.
I am sorry, that sounds like a suspiciously "pie in the sky" project to me.
First of all, nuclear fusion is insanely difficult. OK, maybe not *that* difficult, more like: "Easiest way to get fusion is to get 1.99x10^30 Kg of hydrogen in one place" difficult.
Now, coming out of nowhere, we have people saying: "Give us US$ 1,000,000 and we will give you portable, safe fusion within 6 years!". Sure, people, what makes you think you can do better than, say ITER? New approach, yadda yadda yadda, sure, I have heard that one before. Whatever the "new approach" was, it did not work the first time, it probably won't work now. Insanely difficult problem, overconfidence of the new kid on the block, and all that
Second, the old "Fusion power is clean!" saw. No, it is not. Fusion generates insane temperature and neutron radiation. What makes you think you can put everything in a small container? What happens to all that energy dissipation? To the container and its surroundings? If you RTFA, these people are saying thay can generate up to 5MW in a containment chamber "small enough to fit in a garage"! Excuse me? No dangerous radiation, perfect containment in a completely secure, small package? Hmmm... The Engineering does not seem strong in this one.
Third argument against: EROEI. Sure, you can get fusion going in a very small spot. We know this, it has been done before, using several different technologies (See Z-Machine at Sandia National Lab, for instance). BUT... (a) how much power do you have to pump into these capacitors to even *create* fusion in the first place? (b) creating fusion can be done... but what about *sustaining* a fusion reaction? In other words, if it takes you 20MW of power to sustain 5MW of power generation, where is your EROEI? Oooops... There is none.
Final nail in the coffin: "We were financed by NASA-JPL". So what? NASA funds thousands of projects per year. JPL, probably hundreds. And don't get me started on the NSF or DARPA, (or whatever local equigvalent exist in your country), OK?They certainly fund some pretty weird things, just on the off-chance that XYZ wild theory could prove interesting. Or, even better, that XYZ wild theory will be conclusively disproved. That, in itself, does not mean anything. It certainly does not mean your project is headed by cool-headed, super-smart, seasoned engineers and scientists: just that your weird project received a bit of money from whatever popular government entity you could contact.
As a matter of fact, if your project was so smart and so innovative, *and* headed by cool-headed, super-smart, seasoned engineers and scientists, you probably would not have to ask for money on IndieGogo or other: smart money would flow, by the millions, into your coffers, again just on the off-chance that super-duper weird idea could prove to be the real, "fusion in a box" thing that could change the world. Seriously. And don't give me that conspiracy crap that big oil does not want you to be independent yadda yadda yadda: there is so much money floating around right now, looking for ROI, and so many (rich) people ready to tweak the nose of Govt (See: The Intercept) that a serious project like this would get funded 10 times over. WhatsApp sold for *billions* of dollars for Pete sake! What makes you think portable fusion reactors could not get funded? Get Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg on the phone!
All in all, this does not sound very serious. More like the romantic fantasy of the genius guy in a garage changing the world one micro-fusion reactor at a time. Sorry.
Fund this? Sure, why not. But I'll pass this one, thank you very much.
Interesting. Makes me wonder, what is they age of the feature?
Oldest reports of the Red Spot on Jupiter have been tentatively dated (roughly) to the late 1600s. It was studied by Cassini (the original astronomer, not the satellite of the same name). It's been studied extensively since the early 1800s. So we are talking about a storm raging on Jupiter that has been going on for 400+ years at least.
Think about this: that storm -- 3 times to size of the Earth at its biggest -- has been visible from the Earth for 400+ years. With winds hundreds of kilometers an hour running inside.
And now it's dying, and we may be witnesses to an amzing events in the coming years. Thinking about it gives me chills.
Only possibility is to home-build all your systems, using nothing but individual parts, bought from several different suppliers, preferably from factories not based in the U.S. or China. Difficult, but not impossible.
Finally, once machine has been built, install nothing but open-source software, such as Quagga or OpenBGPD, PfSense and FreeNAS, for instance, including auditing the code yourself.
And even then, you are not safe, since Vupen and other delightful guns-for-hire are busy selling NSA zero-day exploits for your favourite piece of gear. Are we having fun yet?
Oh, and NSA snooping not bothering you? Why? Nothing to hide? Meditate upon the old Niemoller saying: "First, they came for the socialist..." until it finally gets through you thick skull.
Slashdot Mirror
There is not just ''cruft'' in the code base: if I remember correctly, they removed thousands upon thousands of lines of code from OpenSSL - think VMS, Borland C, Windows 3.x, MS Visual C++ (etc) support.
And they tested the whole thing on the OpenBSD ports - so far, nothing has been broken.
Oh and FIPS support? Not gonna happen. Bob Beck has been very very clear on that subject. OpenBSD does not care too much about US government standard.
in 3....2.......1............
That was the goal from the vey beginning: make the code less horrible to get people involved and correct as much as possible.
So, yes, they will find more problems. They expect that.
Acetaminophen is illegal now??!! Please say it ain't so!!
I just read this study as an example of how people are completely disconnected from their own inner life and addicted to constant stimulation. Seriously, an electric shock instead of enjoying a little bit of peace and quiet and a chance to gather yourself? What kind of total lack of self-control is that?
There's no Berlin Wall in America.
... Yet. They are working on it, thank you very much. See here. Or here.
I think you didn't get the memo on the whole Berlin Wall metaphor.
Your poor attempt at sarcasm betrays (a) an overly sensitivity to criticism of your country, and (b) a complete misunderstanding of the issue at hand. There is no Berlin Wall because there is no escaping the NSA. They are spying on the entire world. You can move to Mexico - that makes you a suspect. You can move to Canada - that makes you a suspect. If you even talk to someone who may know someone who may have been in contact with a suspect, you will be caught in the dragnet.
Everyone is fair game, everyone is a potential target. Everyone will be spied on, because terrorists! 9/11! Dirty bomb! Mushroom clouds! They hate our freedom!
I suspect YOU did not get THAT memo. Or maybe you are of the "I did not do anything wrong - so I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear from Big Brother" persuasion? Hmmm?
By the way, why are you reading Slashdot, citizen? Do you have your permit for that? And why talk to this terrorist suspect or that one?
The rest of your comment are more of the same drivel, so I will not even dignify it with a response.
The Stasi (East Germany Secret Police) used to be one of the most powerful intelligence service in the world. It is estimated they had hundreds of thousands of informants and it maintained files on millions of citizens of East Germany.
But the Berlin wall eventually fell, despite all its efforts and all its agents. I believe the same thing will happen in the US. When the times comes, the whole rotten house of cards will crash down to earth.
Oh, and, NSA? Please go f**** yourself.
That's funny. It's almost as if some people just can't grok emacs while other can't grok vim.
I suspect you are right in this: maybe the first exposure is the one determinant factor. If you learn Emacs first (I remember trying it for the first time on my Amiga 500 - Lord, I am getting old) then you are going emacs all the way. If it's vi you learn first, then vim is the one you use. Almost philosophical.
Well, I was told to learn vi because... it's everywhere.
And, as I have said, while far from being a vim master, I really believe learning 20+ commands is enough to make you very productive under vim.
I have tried and tried and tried to ''get'' emacs, but I always give up after learning 5 or 6 Ctrl+something commands. Maybe I'll just give up one day and use vile, but vim is enough for my needs right now.
As the joke goes, "vi a veggie peeler knife, vim is a finely-honed, precision surgeon knife and emacs is a light saber. Most of the time, I cook, but, once in a while I need to fight hordes of battle droids."...
Here is my problem in the vim-vs-emacs debate:
Vim is pretty much the standard vi/editor/$VISUAL on every Linux distribution I use. Emacs is usually an extra package. Therefore, vim is installed, while emacs is not.
Once you have mastered the basic commands of vi, and its mode dichotomy (edit/command) you can edit text in a very efficient manner. Not to mention the goodies of vim, such as "vim -d" or "vim -x". I am so used to vim that, these days, I find myself hitting the Escape key under Word or Firefox. And I still have a lot to learn!
Emacs, on the other hand, is a complex, jumbled mess, a crazy carpal-inducing kitchen sink of a program that requires you to master its twisted logic before you can actually benefit from all the lispy goodness hiding inside. In the meantime, if you master, let's say, about 20 commands under vim, you undertand that its power is in its own logic, so to speak. Vim is complex, but it seems to me much more predictable and logically organized than Emacs.
These days it's mostly vim, Python, shell, Perl.
When I really have to do something ''serious'' in Python, I use the free version of PyCharm, with the vim plugin, of course.
Otherwise, it's nothing but straight vim all day, every day. If not vim, thel elvis. if not elvis, then straight vi or nvi.
No, this is another case of the topic brinring out the stupid in Slashdot. Are you seriously suggesting that Golden Age comics have controversy about them similar to vi versus emacs or Windows versus Linux?
Did everyone take the original post, pick out the word "comics", and ignore the rest of it?
You don't get out much, do you?
I'd like to commend ''BlackPignouf'' and ''Trepidity'' for the magnificence of their comments in this thread.
Seriously: Go back to these comments. Read them. Re-read them. Savor their perfect balance of snark, trolling and irony. This is simply superb - it almost brings tears to my eyes.
Ladies and gentlemen of /., this is why the Internet was created in the first place. That, and cute cat pictures, of course.
He was in Hong Kong, not in the "PRC". Document yourself instead of spouting nonsense.
And he knew the FSB was going to be interested in him, he was just hoping to leave Russia ASAP to go to South America. The Obama administration revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. Furthermore, I believe that most of what Snowden gave to Greenwald, the FSB/Russian intelligence knew already: NSA, like many other US agencies have had its share of moles.
Champagne is a French trademark that is valid and applicable everywhere in the world, not just in the USA.
It was trademarked because French Champagne producers were frankly, tired, of inferior, sometimes even really shitty products, being sold as ''Champagne''.
In other words, if you want to sell shitty bubbly wine, go ahead and produce/sell it, just don't call it Champagne. That, for once, is a reasonable application of Trademark/Intellectual Property.
There have been too many problems with existing crypto code so I've developed something better: goatsecret. Instead of relying on math, it relies on a frenchman's gaping asshole. Basically, the software breaks your message/file/whatever into small chunks and superimposes the data in the goatsecret image. Sure, it's not encrypted, but who is going to stare into the void just to get your data? No hacker/cracker/big business/three-letter-agency is that desperate.
... neither is the intended recipient of the data.
That's the only flaw with your scheme I can think of.
... Except if the recipient is French, of course!
(By the way, wasn't the goatse.cx guy American?)
This is not about a plastic guns, this is about a paradigm shift that is no less momentous than VHS and later MP3s.
I am not so sure about that. 3D printing has the potential to become a very important technology, but right now, printing cheap plastic trinkets is not what I would call game-changing. But that's just me: it just strikes me as a seemingly good idea - a little bit like flying cars - that can go both ways. It can be truly revolutionary (Crete your own factory in your garage! Let a thousand entrepreneurs bloom!) or it can be the kind of thing that never really lived up to its promise. Time will tell.
And another thing: whether the printed plastic gun really is unsafe or not, I believe it illustrates the risks of 3D-printing. In other words, if you really know what you are doing and printing to specs, using equivalent or better materials than the original creator, it's great. Or you can make a complete fool of yourself, and just print it, because, well, you can! And find yourself severely maimed - or worse - because you did not check the 3D file or whatnot.
On the other hand, the next time some idiot decides to rob a bank or convenience store with a printed plastic gun, the results could be highly amusing. I can see the TV announcements from here: "Another redneck gun-toting moron gets face full of lead and melted plastic. Film at 11".
As an aside: what's with Americans and their guns? Sheesh, people, grow up. You don't need a plastic-or-metal penis to be a real man. (And let the flame wars begin!)
You mean like this?
https://torrentz.eu/525245e5e3...
Or this?
https://torrentz.eu/156b69b864...
Or this?
https://torrentz.eu/4d75347442...
Or that one maybe?
https://torrentz.eu/e67f4ebb4c...
Hey, what do you know? They actually distribute some legal content! Amazing!
Yes, and they also have been taken down by a plasma physicist for complete nonsense: read this if you dare.
The title of this article says it all: "Why Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Results are Not Even Wrong; a Detailed Analysis." Ouch.
tl;dr Science may be easy, but engineering is expensive and we all know how hard it is to get funding from governments if you don't know the special handshake.
Except, of course, they already got funding from NASA-JPL in the past - so you could argue they do know the "secret handshake" or whatnot.
I believe (after a bit more research) that they did not get Government or other fundings because their main scientist is really controversial. He may be a plasma specialist, but his cosmological ideas also run counter to traditional views & theories.
Make of that what you will - he may be right (on Fusion power, at least), but he should have taken a more back-seat role for the (non-crowdsourced) funding effort.
I am sorry, that sounds like a suspiciously "pie in the sky" project to me.
First of all, nuclear fusion is insanely difficult. OK, maybe not *that* difficult, more like: "Easiest way to get fusion is to get 1.99x10^30 Kg of hydrogen in one place" difficult.
Now, coming out of nowhere, we have people saying: "Give us US$ 1,000,000 and we will give you portable, safe fusion within 6 years!". Sure, people, what makes you think you can do better than, say ITER? New approach, yadda yadda yadda, sure, I have heard that one before. Whatever the "new approach" was, it did not work the first time, it probably won't work now. Insanely difficult problem, overconfidence of the new kid on the block, and all that
Second, the old "Fusion power is clean!" saw. No, it is not. Fusion generates insane temperature and neutron radiation. What makes you think you can put everything in a small container? What happens to all that energy dissipation? To the container and its surroundings? If you RTFA, these people are saying thay can generate up to 5MW in a containment chamber "small enough to fit in a garage"! Excuse me? No dangerous radiation, perfect containment in a completely secure, small package? Hmmm... The Engineering does not seem strong in this one.
Third argument against: EROEI. Sure, you can get fusion going in a very small spot. We know this, it has been done before, using several different technologies (See Z-Machine at Sandia National Lab, for instance). BUT... (a) how much power do you have to pump into these capacitors to even *create* fusion in the first place? (b) creating fusion can be done... but what about *sustaining* a fusion reaction? In other words, if it takes you 20MW of power to sustain 5MW of power generation, where is your EROEI? Oooops... There is none.
Final nail in the coffin: "We were financed by NASA-JPL". So what? NASA funds thousands of projects per year. JPL, probably hundreds. And don't get me started on the NSF or DARPA, (or whatever local equigvalent exist in your country), OK?They certainly fund some pretty weird things, just on the off-chance that XYZ wild theory could prove interesting. Or, even better, that XYZ wild theory will be conclusively disproved. That, in itself, does not mean anything. It certainly does not mean your project is headed by cool-headed, super-smart, seasoned engineers and scientists: just that your weird project received a bit of money from whatever popular government entity you could contact.
As a matter of fact, if your project was so smart and so innovative, *and* headed by cool-headed, super-smart, seasoned engineers and scientists, you probably would not have to ask for money on IndieGogo or other: smart money would flow, by the millions, into your coffers, again just on the off-chance that super-duper weird idea could prove to be the real, "fusion in a box" thing that could change the world. Seriously. And don't give me that conspiracy crap that big oil does not want you to be independent yadda yadda yadda: there is so much money floating around right now, looking for ROI, and so many (rich) people ready to tweak the nose of Govt (See: The Intercept) that a serious project like this would get funded 10 times over. WhatsApp sold for *billions* of dollars for Pete sake! What makes you think portable fusion reactors could not get funded? Get Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg on the phone!
All in all, this does not sound very serious. More like the romantic fantasy of the genius guy in a garage changing the world one micro-fusion reactor at a time. Sorry.
Fund this? Sure, why not. But I'll pass this one, thank you very much.
Interesting. Makes me wonder, what is they age of the feature?
Oldest reports of the Red Spot on Jupiter have been tentatively dated (roughly) to the late 1600s. It was studied by Cassini (the original astronomer, not the satellite of the same name). It's been studied extensively since the early 1800s. So we are talking about a storm raging on Jupiter that has been going on for 400+ years at least.
Think about this: that storm -- 3 times to size of the Earth at its biggest -- has been visible from the Earth for 400+ years. With winds hundreds of kilometers an hour running inside.
And now it's dying, and we may be witnesses to an amzing events in the coming years. Thinking about it gives me chills.
Only possibility is to home-build all your systems, using nothing but individual parts, bought from several different suppliers, preferably from factories not based in the U.S. or China. Difficult, but not impossible.
Finally, once machine has been built, install nothing but open-source software, such as Quagga or OpenBGPD, PfSense and FreeNAS, for instance, including auditing the code yourself.
And even then, you are not safe, since Vupen and other delightful guns-for-hire are busy selling NSA zero-day exploits for your favourite piece of gear. Are we having fun yet?
Oh, and NSA snooping not bothering you? Why? Nothing to hide? Meditate upon the old Niemoller saying: "First, they came for the socialist..." until it finally gets through you thick skull.
Go Slack!
Hence, the old joke: "Actually, Emacs is a pretty decent operating system. Shame it does not have a good text editor, though".
It's not that clear cut: while Patrick Volkerding and the rest of the crew are clearly against systemd, they may be forced to adopt it in the future.