I guess, it is meant to be something like reverse-steganography: the characters would be openly readable by humans, but would map 1:1 to a permutation of the codes. What I mean: suppose that what looks like "M" on the screen has the ASCII Code for "A", then the NSA scanners would read "A" and obtain a slightly unparseable text.
Of course, NSA could still apply basic kindergarten 101 cryptanalysis (e.g. by selecting characters according to their frequency and mapping them to EATOINSHRDLU...), but that would be more work. A simple grep(1) won't be enough and, more importantly, couldn't be done on current massively parallel silicone chips: they'd have to be reprogrammed. Sure, just a bump in the road for NSA, but it's a way to show dissent.
With UEFI-PCs being locked down to Microsoft's bootloader soon, FreeBSD will very likely move to one of the Microsoft-signed Linux bootloaders... and that will basically be shim/grub2 or something like that.
Happy Birthday FreeBSD! I've been around since the 1.x series, and I'm still using it on a day-to-day basis, both @home and @work (there, with thousands of FreeBSD servers).
Having said that, I'm not really happy about the status of Xen on FreeBSD. Sure, Xen/DomU is working, no complaints about it. But we're waiting for Xen/Dom0 support for quite some time now, basically to host various VMs on FreeBSD/ZFS clusters. Sadly, Xen/Dom0 support is nowhere to be seen.
NSAMail, the new e-mail service provided by the NSA, is totally secure and protects your privacy too! Remember, unlike with GMail, every message hosted on the NSAMail servers is automatically classified top secret. In fact, it would be so secret that no-one, not even the intended recipient, will be able to read it. Think about it, next time you select a new E-Mail provider: your communications are absolutely SECURE and totally protected with NSAMail. NEW!: Now also available to non US-Persons: you're more than welcome to use our FREE NSAMail service. If you need assistance, a human analyst^Woperator will help you out quickly: they know more about you than you do. Human operators are only available to non-US Persons or US Persons who use TOR.
BTW, this message was sent with TOR AND a anonomizing proxy.
Too bad you just linked your slashdot user account to that proxy and TOR ID... Better blacklist that proxy and reinitialize your TOR node ASAP. Just sayin'...
The execution was amteurish, but today's news proves that the principle is worth exlporing further.
We could force the NSA to monitor covert channels in spam (whether they do exist or not), so they may have to dedicate even more resources on hardware and electricity. The more they scan spams, looking for a message that may or may not be there, the less resources they have left to spy on ordinary citizens.
Not that slow today, provided you use the right microkernel. Look at L4Ka::Pistachio, for example, if you're looking for very fast context switching and message passing in registers without overhead. Now, if you talk Mach, then you're right.
Not that we really need yet another spreadsheet program, but if IBM doesn't intend to use this code base anymore, how about releasing its source code to the public?
Unfortunately the Supreme Court refused to take up the absurd statutory award that was put forward in the Jamie Thomas case despite overturning the much (smaller proportionally speaking) Exxon Valdez award.
If the SCOTUS thinks that those absurd statutory awards are okay, what's the use of lower courts deciding otherwise, even if it is a whole string of cases? Couldn't the rights holders simply refer to the SCOTUS decision as overriding any kind of lower jurisprudence to enforce their claims and claim carte blanche to destroy peoples' lives with the help of the judicial system?
IMHO, the whole system, where special interest groups and corporations with deep pockets can buy their own laws, laws that are then backed by the courts, is broken beyond repair and can't be fixed from within. Even decent judges like Otis Wright can't fix a problem that runs much deeper than this. Nonetheless, it is still a bright day to see a little bit of sanity light up here and there, even though I don't think it would be enough to stick.
Now that would explain why Germans had this "cash for clunkers" program where they mandated that EVERY committed car had to be physically destroyed, instead of being shipped to Africa, where it could still have worked 20+ years. This has always struck me as incredibly selfish and petty, like some young child which would destroy its used toys rather than give them to other children.
Sorry "artists" but you don't deserve 10 million for your "creation". You deserve, at BEST, 200k a year for your work.
People rarely get what they deserve. They usually get that what the market gives them, and they deserve that which makes them useful to others. Say, a pop singer gets some millions selling his songs, while medics who save lives get far, far less than that. What said singer and those medics deserve though is something quite different... but that can't be determined by any kinds of objective criteria.
While I agree that LLVM and Clang are superior, technologically and developer community-wise speaking, having multiple C++ compilers can actually improve client code quality. Right now, most OSS developers are using some GCC-isms in their code, knowingly or unknowingly, and when confronted with compiling that code with Clang, they realize just how far they left the C++ standard. Keeping more than one compiler implementation around and using them concurrently is always a good thing, IMHO.
Not really a visual language, but basically, you can seamlessly define localized wrappers around every LISP function, macro, and special form to obtain a fully-localized programming language. And yes, kids can learn programming with LISP.
Is it a physical thing? Is it an immaterial form? Is it a sequence of bits?
Mathematically, an MP3 file is nothing more than a BIG number. Nothing more, nothing less.
Think about this carefully. A couple of years ago, before someone invented the MP3 format, that very same number would have been nothing but a big number without any significance. It would have been uncopyrightable. In a couple of centuries, when the MP3 format would have become forgotten, that very same number would again become uncopyrightable, even with perpetual copyright, because it would have become meaningless (again).
The thing is, any modernized country in the world has the same access to this type of technology and could be proposing similarly oppressive actions... and yet most of them are not.
Well... actually they are. There's a world wide push for real-time scanning and deep packet inspection. Blame 9/11 or nonchalance and an apathetic populace for it, but that's the way it is.
None, actually. If you need privacy, end-to-end encryption as in PGP is your only recourse... and it won't protect you against traffic analysis (they know with whom you communicate, when and how often, even if they can't decrypt).
If you need something against traffic analysis as well, perhaps a an ip2p- or freenet-based darknet with enough family and friends as members would do? You can send e-mails on top of those networks just fine.
For a normal mail provider, sure, that's a good idea. For mail providers like Gmail that make money out of advertising, and thus (automatically) reading the mail of their users, it's not a viable alternative. Right now, Gmail tolerates the little group of users who use PGP/GnuPG, because that group is so small. But imagine that this groups grows above a certain threshold. What then?
A telecommuting, decentralized Congress would make life for all those "poor" lobbyists much more difficult. They'll have to travel to all kinds of weird States they never heard before to deliver their corruption^Wcampaign money to Congresspeople, instead of having them all in one nice place inside the Beltway. Won't anybody please think of the lobbyists?!
Slashdot Mirror
Add RequestPolicy to your arsenal (that's VERY effective), and maybe Ghostery.
Of course, NSA could still apply basic kindergarten 101 cryptanalysis (e.g. by selecting characters according to their frequency and mapping them to EATOINSHRDLU...), but that would be more work. A simple grep(1) won't be enough and, more importantly, couldn't be done on current massively parallel silicone chips: they'd have to be reprogrammed. Sure, just a bump in the road for NSA, but it's a way to show dissent.
With UEFI-PCs being locked down to Microsoft's bootloader soon, FreeBSD will very likely move to one of the Microsoft-signed Linux bootloaders... and that will basically be shim/grub2 or something like that.
Having said that, I'm not really happy about the status of Xen on FreeBSD. Sure, Xen/DomU is working, no complaints about it. But we're waiting for Xen/Dom0 support for quite some time now, basically to host various VMs on FreeBSD/ZFS clusters. Sadly, Xen/Dom0 support is nowhere to be seen.
I'm sure Dan Brown's Digital Fortress would be more to their gusto.
NSAMail, the new e-mail service provided by the NSA, is totally secure and protects your privacy too! Remember, unlike with GMail, every message hosted on the NSAMail servers is automatically classified top secret. In fact, it would be so secret that no-one, not even the intended recipient, will be able to read it. Think about it, next time you select a new E-Mail provider: your communications are absolutely SECURE and totally protected with NSAMail. NEW!: Now also available to non US-Persons: you're more than welcome to use our FREE NSAMail service. If you need assistance, a human analyst^Woperator will help you out quickly: they know more about you than you do. Human operators are only available to non-US Persons or US Persons who use TOR.
Too bad you just linked your slashdot user account to that proxy and TOR ID... Better blacklist that proxy and reinitialize your TOR node ASAP. Just sayin'...
We could force the NSA to monitor covert channels in spam (whether they do exist or not), so they may have to dedicate even more resources on hardware and electricity. The more they scan spams, looking for a message that may or may not be there, the less resources they have left to spy on ordinary citizens.
Careful then, doing so could grow some GMO weed...
Not that slow today, provided you use the right microkernel. Look at L4Ka::Pistachio, for example, if you're looking for very fast context switching and message passing in registers without overhead. Now, if you talk Mach, then you're right.
Not that we really need yet another spreadsheet program, but if IBM doesn't intend to use this code base anymore, how about releasing its source code to the public?
It would be interesting to find out how Syria is physically connected to the Internet, and who the operators on both sides actually are.
If the SCOTUS thinks that those absurd statutory awards are okay, what's the use of lower courts deciding otherwise, even if it is a whole string of cases? Couldn't the rights holders simply refer to the SCOTUS decision as overriding any kind of lower jurisprudence to enforce their claims and claim carte blanche to destroy peoples' lives with the help of the judicial system?
IMHO, the whole system, where special interest groups and corporations with deep pockets can buy their own laws, laws that are then backed by the courts, is broken beyond repair and can't be fixed from within. Even decent judges like Otis Wright can't fix a problem that runs much deeper than this. Nonetheless, it is still a bright day to see a little bit of sanity light up here and there, even though I don't think it would be enough to stick.
Now that would explain why Germans had this "cash for clunkers" program where they mandated that EVERY committed car had to be physically destroyed, instead of being shipped to Africa, where it could still have worked 20+ years. This has always struck me as incredibly selfish and petty, like some young child which would destroy its used toys rather than give them to other children.
People rarely get what they deserve. They usually get that what the market gives them, and they deserve that which makes them useful to others. Say, a pop singer gets some millions selling his songs, while medics who save lives get far, far less than that. What said singer and those medics deserve though is something quite different... but that can't be determined by any kinds of objective criteria.
While I agree that LLVM and Clang are superior, technologically and developer community-wise speaking, having multiple C++ compilers can actually improve client code quality. Right now, most OSS developers are using some GCC-isms in their code, knowingly or unknowingly, and when confronted with compiling that code with Clang, they realize just how far they left the C++ standard. Keeping more than one compiler implementation around and using them concurrently is always a good thing, IMHO.
Not really a visual language, but basically, you can seamlessly define localized wrappers around every LISP function, macro, and special form to obtain a fully-localized programming language. And yes, kids can learn programming with LISP.
I'm sure the poster meant "copyright maximalist", a.k.a. "copyright taliban", "copyright extremist", etc...
Intelligence agencies are seeking intelligence for some reason, you know...
Mathematically, an MP3 file is nothing more than a BIG number. Nothing more, nothing less.
Think about this carefully. A couple of years ago, before someone invented the MP3 format, that very same number would have been nothing but a big number without any significance. It would have been uncopyrightable. In a couple of centuries, when the MP3 format would have become forgotten, that very same number would again become uncopyrightable, even with perpetual copyright, because it would have become meaningless (again).
Well... actually they are. There's a world wide push for real-time scanning and deep packet inspection. Blame 9/11 or nonchalance and an apathetic populace for it, but that's the way it is.
None, actually. If you need privacy, end-to-end encryption as in PGP is your only recourse... and it won't protect you against traffic analysis (they know with whom you communicate, when and how often, even if they can't decrypt). If you need something against traffic analysis as well, perhaps a an ip2p- or freenet-based darknet with enough family and friends as members would do? You can send e-mails on top of those networks just fine.
Unless your letter contains a big monetary donation as well, it's likely to be /dev/null-ed, unread.
For a normal mail provider, sure, that's a good idea. For mail providers like Gmail that make money out of advertising, and thus (automatically) reading the mail of their users, it's not a viable alternative. Right now, Gmail tolerates the little group of users who use PGP/GnuPG, because that group is so small. But imagine that this groups grows above a certain threshold. What then?
A telecommuting, decentralized Congress would make life for all those "poor" lobbyists much more difficult. They'll have to travel to all kinds of weird States they never heard before to deliver their corruption^Wcampaign money to Congresspeople, instead of having them all in one nice place inside the Beltway. Won't anybody please think of the lobbyists?!