Yet, free Unix variants continue to have security flaws in their kernels and user mode applications.
But as long as they don't kldload/insmod closed proprietary blobs (nVidia et al.) into the kernel, and keep a very tight policy of open ports + auditing of the code (OpenBSD, TrustedBSD, SE-Linux come to mind), they should be as safe as it gets. Sure, they need good sysadmins too: that's not something for your average Linux home user (though some of them are very smart w.r.t. security).
If Assange is killed tomorrow, everyone will think the U.S. did it. At this point, being visibly public is probably safer for Assange.
If he is killed tomorrow, not everyone will think the U.S. did it: it could just as well have been other governments who are embarrassed too by the leaks. Let's not forget it: Assange has made a lot of enemies, very powerful enemies with the full resources of governments. Unless he's a Bin Laden who could escape detection and assassination, he's essentially dead man walking by now. And another point is: as long as WL didn't release the whole dump, the risk for Assange is even greater now, as some -- not very bright -- governments may decide to set an example by killing him, in order to deter others in his group to release the rest. If at all, Julian would be safer, if he had released all documents at once, IMHO. His piecewise release policy is putting him at risk.
Actually, this probably isn't a DDoS at all, but simply people repeatedly checking the site for new cables. If they had released a lot more cables in a batch (say a couple of thousands or more), people would look less frequently while digesting what they've got. So, this increase in traffic may very well be self-inflicted by their painfully slow release policy.
...is making the USA's government look desperate and pathetic.
And what if the US Government wasn't the source of the DDoS? After all, other governments are exposed too, and could very well want to DDoS Wikileaks, just like Obama's administration, right? And let's not forget, the US government could easily yank the wikileaks domain from the ORG registry (not that it would matter, of course!), so why going the trouble to DDoS them and look like the fools they are anyway?
Turns out, there's more animosity between Sunni (Arab countries) and Shia (Iran) than they like to admit.
Wrong. The Iranian danger, as perceived in Arab countries, is not that they're Shia (they couldn't care less), it's that they are actively spreading revolutionary Islam(ism), therefore destabilizing the Arab governments from within. That's one of the reasons why e.g. Morocco severed its diplomatic ties with Iran: Iran tried to topple the Monarchy there by spreading and encouraging Islamism and islamist anti-royalist groups.
If your ISP blocks DNS queries or redirects (hijacks) them to their own servers, it could be pretty trivial to punch through their defenses with a trivial DNS-over-HTTP proxy. Who said alternate roots MUST provide DNS over port 53/udp only? They could provide an HTTP (port 80) service as well, for those behind firewalls.
...if this is confirmed and continues to happen frequently, I don't think it will be long before we see alternative DNS services appearing.
Aren't alt roots exactly that? I'm sure that with increasing meddling of Governments in the public (ICANN-based) DNS, those alt roots will get increasingly popular... and rightly so, despite RFC 2826.
What these government actions will cause is a distributed, unkillable replacement for DNS...
We already have that! There's no need to replace DNS per se, just switch to an alternate root, with servers maintained outside the sphere of the US-Copyright cartel. The ONLY power that ICANN has, is consensus among all Internet users: everyone and their dog are ultimately using their root servers. Just switch to an alternate root, and ICANN + US-Government are suddenly out of the loop.
Nope. Copyright shouldn't exist at all. It started with 17 years since work creation in the US, and it got subsequently extended up until (today) 95 years after the death of the author... edging towards perpetual copyright. Actually, I'd suspect that any kind of temporarily granted monopoly will eventually get extended in time, repeatedly, just like Copyright, because the monopoly beneficiaries will always have deeper pockets to buy legislators than the general public could ever dream to have. Granting the monopoly in the first place was the start of the slippery slope.
It becomes impossible to enforce it against everyone, but it becomes perfectly possible to enforce it against just those people someone in power doesn't like.
Which is exactly its purpose: a rubber law to be used against dissidents, if need be. We've had that in the East Block for well over half a century -- same old, same old...
By restricting the free flow of information, these cartels have created an artificial scarcity.
Just nitpicking, but it was the (corrupt) lawmakers who created an artificial scarcity by enacting Copyright laws, and we, the People, who were too lazy and careless to let those lawmakers off the hook by voting them again and again in office, instead of hanging them high up a tree for their bad laws. We're all collectively responsible for the mess we're in today.
IMHO, good lawyers are those who win more cases than bad lawyers. Of course, hiring a good lawyer (by that metric) isn't so easy, because where are the "lawyer benchmarks"? I've yet to see a law firm advertising going like this:
"65,032 cases handled: 65% won, 30% settled out of court, 5% cases lost".
Freedom is NOT won by finding loopholes around laws but by fighting bad laws.
Freedom is won by being rich enough to afford buying legislators left and right, and having them make custom laws, tailored to your needs. That's real freedom.
A negative fine should be applied, i.e. the file sharer should be rewarded. 1/ for making backup copies using his/her resources, thus contributing to save culture: that's a contribution to save culture for later generations, by distributing it as widely as possible... which is especially true for rare and unpopular files. 2/ for benevolently making files available to people who would otherwise not be able to afford them: this is a kind of community service: think 3rd world countries where text books are not available at all or prohibitively expensive. Oh, and while we're at it: 3/ the so called "rights holders" should also pay the file sharer some money, because file sharers are contributing to marketing campaigns, helping some obscure artists and creators to fame.
In most countries, when a company is liquidated, the various assets (including so called intellectual property assets) are being sold to the highest bidder. Imagine some crucial Unix-y stuff by SUN being bought by MSFT, SCO etc...!
Slashdot Mirror
But as long as they don't kldload/insmod closed proprietary blobs (nVidia et al.) into the kernel, and keep a very tight policy of open ports + auditing of the code (OpenBSD, TrustedBSD, SE-Linux come to mind), they should be as safe as it gets. Sure, they need good sysadmins too: that's not something for your average Linux home user (though some of them are very smart w.r.t. security).
If he is killed tomorrow, not everyone will think the U.S. did it: it could just as well have been other governments who are embarrassed too by the leaks. Let's not forget it: Assange has made a lot of enemies, very powerful enemies with the full resources of governments. Unless he's a Bin Laden who could escape detection and assassination, he's essentially dead man walking by now. And another point is: as long as WL didn't release the whole dump, the risk for Assange is even greater now, as some -- not very bright -- governments may decide to set an example by killing him, in order to deter others in his group to release the rest. If at all, Julian would be safer, if he had released all documents at once, IMHO. His piecewise release policy is putting him at risk.
Actually, this probably isn't a DDoS at all, but simply people repeatedly checking the site for new cables. If they had released a lot more cables in a batch (say a couple of thousands or more), people would look less frequently while digesting what they've got. So, this increase in traffic may very well be self-inflicted by their painfully slow release policy.
And what if the US Government wasn't the source of the DDoS? After all, other governments are exposed too, and could very well want to DDoS Wikileaks, just like Obama's administration, right? And let's not forget, the US government could easily yank the wikileaks domain from the ORG registry (not that it would matter, of course!), so why going the trouble to DDoS them and look like the fools they are anyway?
Wrong. The Iranian danger, as perceived in Arab countries, is not that they're Shia (they couldn't care less), it's that they are actively spreading revolutionary Islam(ism), therefore destabilizing the Arab governments from within. That's one of the reasons why e.g. Morocco severed its diplomatic ties with Iran: Iran tried to topple the Monarchy there by spreading and encouraging Islamism and islamist anti-royalist groups.
We techies are not the only ones to be entitled to semi-rudely RTFM newbies...
If your ISP blocks DNS queries or redirects (hijacks) them to their own servers, it could be pretty trivial to punch through their defenses with a trivial DNS-over-HTTP proxy. Who said alternate roots MUST provide DNS over port 53/udp only? They could provide an HTTP (port 80) service as well, for those behind firewalls.
Aren't alt roots exactly that? I'm sure that with increasing meddling of Governments in the public (ICANN-based) DNS, those alt roots will get increasingly popular... and rightly so, despite RFC 2826.
We already have that! There's no need to replace DNS per se, just switch to an alternate root, with servers maintained outside the sphere of the US-Copyright cartel. The ONLY power that ICANN has, is consensus among all Internet users: everyone and their dog are ultimately using their root servers. Just switch to an alternate root, and ICANN + US-Government are suddenly out of the loop.
Nope. Copyright shouldn't exist at all. It started with 17 years since work creation in the US, and it got subsequently extended up until (today) 95 years after the death of the author... edging towards perpetual copyright. Actually, I'd suspect that any kind of temporarily granted monopoly will eventually get extended in time, repeatedly, just like Copyright, because the monopoly beneficiaries will always have deeper pockets to buy legislators than the general public could ever dream to have. Granting the monopoly in the first place was the start of the slippery slope.
Which is exactly its purpose: a rubber law to be used against dissidents, if need be. We've had that in the East Block for well over half a century -- same old, same old...
Unless they're on an OS that isn't supported by freaking Adobe.
Just nitpicking, but it was the (corrupt) lawmakers who created an artificial scarcity by enacting Copyright laws, and we, the People, who were too lazy and careless to let those lawmakers off the hook by voting them again and again in office, instead of hanging them high up a tree for their bad laws. We're all collectively responsible for the mess we're in today.
Especially when poor Janus will get hit not by one, but by two lawsuits at a time...
Or isn't the idea rather to educate people to get smarter and not be caught (i.e. to use more obfuscation methods)?
IMHO, good lawyers are those who win more cases than bad lawyers. Of course, hiring a good lawyer (by that metric) isn't so easy, because where are the "lawyer benchmarks"? I've yet to see a law firm advertising going like this: "65,032 cases handled: 65% won, 30% settled out of court, 5% cases lost".
Freedom is won by being rich enough to afford buying legislators left and right, and having them make custom laws, tailored to your needs. That's real freedom.
Because they are governments. Tell me one government which isn't, and I'll move to that country instantly.
A negative fine should be applied, i.e. the file sharer should be rewarded. 1/ for making backup copies using his/her resources, thus contributing to save culture: that's a contribution to save culture for later generations, by distributing it as widely as possible... which is especially true for rare and unpopular files. 2/ for benevolently making files available to people who would otherwise not be able to afford them: this is a kind of community service: think 3rd world countries where text books are not available at all or prohibitively expensive. Oh, and while we're at it: 3/ the so called "rights holders" should also pay the file sharer some money, because file sharers are contributing to marketing campaigns, helping some obscure artists and creators to fame.
There are some esoteric non-English based programming languages out there. Just imagine the fun porting this and similar OSS programs!
We've tried this before with GRUB, but it didn't really take off for a multitude of reasons.
In most countries, when a company is liquidated, the various assets (including so called intellectual property assets) are being sold to the highest bidder. Imagine some crucial Unix-y stuff by SUN being bought by MSFT, SCO etc...!
Or rather, if he finds another bike, he won't be able to decrypt it by XORing it with the previous bike he stole...
What mobile phone isn't a computer and doesn't use encryption to connect to a base station? So not mobile phone either...
Killing a satellite in orbit only increases dramatically the amount of space junk, causing immense problems for everyone else.