As a side note, I don't use these email addresses for personal emails - I can hopefully trust that the people I personally send emails to are not, or are not going to become spammers.
Well, that is not a very secure assumption. Unless you know that all those people are not using an MUA/OS combination that is vulnerable to viruses or worms. Harvesting addresses is done that way nowadays...
Filtering spam generates way too many false positives. Challenge/Response schemes are IMHO much more effective. TMDA and similar programs can be configured with whitelists for your regular mail partners, auto-whitelists for everyone who confirms their e-mail identity, and, if necessary, with blacklists too.
permanent storage that wasn't a million times slower than anything else in the system.
Yes, it would be great. Have you tried to dd a disk image onto a CF card? They are solid state, yet they have awfully slow writing cycles, compared to good old HDDs.
Exactly. The kernel's crashed state will be preserved, so you won't be able to reboot cleanly. Some kind of checkpointing (like in database servers) would be useful here: just reboot to the last valid checkpoint. Of course, this requires a lot more WRAM though...
It actually happened to me last week. Luckily, I'm using a low-power net4801 FreeBSD router, postfix server... and an ADSL modem on a UPS. It's amazing how long those 30 minutes UPS last when operated that way! I was able to use a laptop to email the power company. Of course, a phone call would have been easier, but try to find it in the dark:-)
Yes, you're right. FCC regulations are state sponsored censorship and just as bad. If the political situation here remains the same, it's just a matter of time until we get more invasive FCC rules. The Communications Decency Act was declared unconsitutional by the Supreme Court. Well we be as lucky a few years down the road?
It looks like every society has its taboos.
I hope you are wrong.:-(
Me too. It would be great to see Europe help the US regain its liberties...:-)
Try to say 'f*ck' 'sh*t' and 'motherf*cker' on TV or even on slashdot and see how far you can get. How's that for free-speech?
You're confusing self-censorship or editing on a private basis with state sponsored global censorship.
Private censorship is normally dictated by market needs. A newspaper won't publish your rubbish, if they think that readers won't buy it. Sometimes, they won't because they belong to a political party opposing your views. That's all well and good, because it's not a real censorship. Nothing prevents you from taking your speech elsewhere and have it published there.
State sponsored censorship is something completely else. You can't (legally) escape the almighty Censorship Buro. If you have opinions that conflict with Government or society's point of view, you have absolutely no chance of putting them on the "market of ideas." It's not a matter of finding a newspaper or radio station to express yourself anymore. Saying something out of line would be illegal.
State censorship is a very bad thing, because it stiffles the competition of ideas. A society which needs legal censorship against some kind of speech is very immature; perhaps because it knows that it is vulnerable to it. It is understandable that countries like Germany have deep rooted fears w.r.t. nazi ideology; but please don't force everyone else in the world to be just as fearful.
It's actually a shame that discussions like these pop up so frequently nowadays. The censorship tendencies in Europe have traditionally always been stronger than in the US. Since 9/11, it's the other way around. Now we're quite paranoic and giving up all our civil liberties. And Europe is merely copying the bad example that we set. They need some years to catch up, but they'll eventually reach our standards of "Patriot Act" etc... Sad, but true.
When the fog of war dissolves, we'll have a lot of work ahead to revert what we've done to ourselves and other countries. Winning back our liberties won't be a peace of cake.
It's technically not possible to censor the Web. But that's not the point. It gives governments a lot of handles (sticks and brooms) to knock you off, if you express an opposing opinion. All it takes is one person to tell the authorities what you are saying in those hidden black market links and pronto, you're in jail.
This is not a technical discussion, it's a social problem. We ought to be very scared by those attempts to limit our civil liberties. We're already on a slippery slope, and it's spiraling downward at an ever increasing pace.
It all started oh so slowly. We don't like hate speech. It's damaging, inciting people to violence. So banning hate speech saves lives, right? So we banned hate speech on the Internet, and later, in all public places too. Thank God! No more ugly nazi propaganda, antisemitism, etc.. Looked good.
A few years down the road: Minispeech (Orwell's Ministry of Speech) monitors the Internet hunting offenders and bringing them to justice. Due to the large amount of communications going on, Minispeech needs to expand quite a lot. Currently, over 100,000 public servents work at Minispeech. Because Minispeech also needs to monitor public conversations, it needs to pay a lot of spies (a.k.a. offers rewards), so its budget is quite big and always strained.
Ten years later, the busybodies at Minispeech discovered new pattern in communications: People are still preaching hatred, but in cloaked or disguised form. This is unacceptable, because we all know that hate speech is BAD(tm). A new legislation passes Congress which bans indirect hate speech. Minispeech needs to expand even more to enforce this.
Here, the real problems started. People were increasingly facing harrassment from Minispeech, because they dared to express their dissatisfaction with some burocrat assh*le. Because burocrats are also protected by law, expressing dissatisfaction against them is hate speech. Well, not directly hate speech, but this insideous, cloaked, hidden form that is currently banned.
Advertising also changed quite a lot. It is now forbidden to compare your product with your competitors' because that would amount to hidden hate speech against them. [Incidentally, in Europe, comparative advertising is already forbidden]. A lot of prosecution happened there.
It is now very difficult to say "Hey buddy, your service is miserable!" because that is (disguised) hate speech. People are very careful now not to say anything dangerous, because Minispeech spies are everywhere.
I'm wondering why this is so. Does the Mac use special drives which are more capable than standard cdrom devices, or is it rather a better device driver?
If it's the driver (not the drive), nothing would prevent us from writing one for Linux. Heck, even for Windows, if absolutely necessary. Or am I completely mistaken here?
If you really need tiny kernels, you'll have to abandon
Linux and BSD altogether and switch to someting like the
L4KA::Pistachio
microkernel. Of course, you'll still need userland apps for
almost anything, like memory servers, file system servers,
device driver servers... That's an awful lot of stuff to
cut out of BSD or Linux codebase.
It's not about how small the kernel image gets, but how much RAM it typically uses. The net4801 is a rather powerful box with 128 MB RAM. You can easily fit a FreeBSD base system on a 512 MB CF card and operate without the need for swap. A stripped down kernel would take approx. 2.5 MB diskspace, but you can tune it down to nearly 800k if you really must. BTW, you can put a small Linux system on that box just the same. It just happens hat I used 5.2.1 because it supports PXE booting and network install out of the box.
Isn't it actually funny that the ports system is a pure userland framework that has nothing inherently FreeBSD-ish? It could just as well be adopted by Linux distros, but right now, only gentoo did it.
One of the best features of FreeBSD is in my experience the ease with which you can update the whole system with a simple cvsup and recompile. No need to go hunting for N utilities and libraries all over the Net, just to get the sources to a base system. It's in the CVS repo, ready to be grabbed.
The CVS repository is also a great resource if you are interested in the development history of the system. Not only the kernel, but the whole system. If Linux (as an OS, not only a kernel) had a unified CVS just like the BSDs right from the start, it would have been much easier to debunk TSG/SCO's myths and FUD.
they can still send mail through their provider's mail servers.
If you operate more than one domain, using your provider's mail server is not always an option. Especially if your ISP is one of those big providers, you won't be able to convince them to accept mail for N domains (N > 1). Unless you buy more account with them, or use one of those prepackaged 5, 10, whatever user domains per account.
If you want effective control, DNS blacklisting is not enough. If OTOH the NANOG operators configured their routers to block all IP-based traffic from these countries, legislation over there would change in a blink of an eye!
There's no technical reason why Apple, IBM et. al. have to stick
to XFree86. They can right now switch to X.org without any hassle
at all. The more they wait (and allow the codebase split to grow),
the harder a migration will be. Just switch now to X.org. This is
where the music is playing.
We actually review the code very closely. By using a mix of OpenBSD
and FreeBSD, we can also keep an eye on the diffs everytime we upgrade.
Only the original review was expensive, because we had to be very tough.
Once we were in diff mode, reviews aren't that hard.
Concerning firmware and hardware review, we obviously have to draw
a line. That is beyond our scope, unless we wanted to build and design
our own systems from scratch, an obvious impossibility.
You're right concerning small businesses. They don't have the time
or ressources to do it. Peer-review in the OSS community is generally
good enough for them, iff they regularly update and keep reading
bugtraq and similar lists closely.
From a security point of view, Windows is a nightmare. If you work in a sensitive environment, not having access to full source code for review is simply not acceptable. It is amazing how naive users and corps can be when they trust M$, and every 3rd party software vendor, when it comes to security!
BTW, you don't have to work for the NSA to have high security demands. Every R&D dept. in a major corporation has similar concerns, considering the huge amount of industrial espionage that is prevalent nowadays. OSS systems are no panacea (security is a huge field), but a very important brick in the [fire]wall.
Slashdot Mirror
From the people who brought you CAN SPAM!
As a side note, I don't use these email addresses for personal emails - I can hopefully trust that the people I personally send emails to are not, or are not going to become spammers.
Well, that is not a very secure assumption. Unless you know that all those people are not using an MUA/OS combination that is vulnerable to viruses or worms. Harvesting addresses is done that way nowadays...
Filtering spam generates way too many false positives. Challenge/Response schemes are IMHO much more effective. TMDA and similar programs can be configured with whitelists for your regular mail partners, auto-whitelists for everyone who confirms their e-mail identity, and, if necessary, with blacklists too.
Publish your addy on /. (or anywhere else), wait a few days, and have fun!
permanent storage that wasn't a million times slower than anything else in the system.
Yes, it would be great. Have you tried to dd a disk image onto a CF card? They are solid state, yet they have awfully slow writing cycles, compared to good old HDDs.
Exactly. The kernel's crashed state will be preserved, so you won't be able to reboot cleanly. Some kind of checkpointing (like in database servers) would be useful here: just reboot to the last valid checkpoint. Of course, this requires a lot more WRAM though...
It actually happened to me last week. Luckily, I'm using a low-power net4801 FreeBSD router, postfix server... and an ADSL modem on a UPS. It's amazing how long those 30 minutes UPS last when operated that way! I was able to use a laptop to email the power company. Of course, a phone call would have been easier, but try to find it in the dark :-)
Yes, you're right. FCC regulations are state sponsored censorship and just as bad. If the political situation here remains the same, it's just a matter of time until we get more invasive FCC rules. The Communications Decency Act was declared unconsitutional by the Supreme Court. Well we be as lucky a few years down the road?
It looks like every society has its taboos.
I hope you are wrong. :-(
Me too. It would be great to see Europe help the US regain its liberties... :-)
Try to say 'f*ck' 'sh*t' and 'motherf*cker' on TV or even on slashdot and see how far you can get. How's that for free-speech?
You're confusing self-censorship or editing on a private basis with state sponsored global censorship.
Private censorship is normally dictated by market needs. A newspaper won't publish your rubbish, if they think that readers won't buy it. Sometimes, they won't because they belong to a political party opposing your views. That's all well and good, because it's not a real censorship. Nothing prevents you from taking your speech elsewhere and have it published there.
State sponsored censorship is something completely else. You can't (legally) escape the almighty Censorship Buro. If you have opinions that conflict with Government or society's point of view, you have absolutely no chance of putting them on the "market of ideas." It's not a matter of finding a newspaper or radio station to express yourself anymore. Saying something out of line would be illegal.
State censorship is a very bad thing, because it stiffles the competition of ideas. A society which needs legal censorship against some kind of speech is very immature; perhaps because it knows that it is vulnerable to it. It is understandable that countries like Germany have deep rooted fears w.r.t. nazi ideology; but please don't force everyone else in the world to be just as fearful.
It's actually a shame that discussions like these pop up so frequently nowadays. The censorship tendencies in Europe have traditionally always been stronger than in the US. Since 9/11, it's the other way around. Now we're quite paranoic and giving up all our civil liberties. And Europe is merely copying the bad example that we set. They need some years to catch up, but they'll eventually reach our standards of "Patriot Act" etc... Sad, but true.
When the fog of war dissolves, we'll have a lot of work ahead to revert what we've done to ourselves and other countries. Winning back our liberties won't be a peace of cake.
It's technically not possible to censor the Web. But that's not the point. It gives governments a lot of handles (sticks and brooms) to knock you off, if you express an opposing opinion. All it takes is one person to tell the authorities what you are saying in those hidden black market links and pronto, you're in jail.
This is not a technical discussion, it's a social problem. We ought to be very scared by those attempts to limit our civil liberties. We're already on a slippery slope, and it's spiraling downward at an ever increasing pace.
It all started oh so slowly. We don't like hate speech. It's damaging, inciting people to violence. So banning hate speech saves lives, right? So we banned hate speech on the Internet, and later, in all public places too. Thank God! No more ugly nazi propaganda, antisemitism, etc.. Looked good.
A few years down the road: Minispeech (Orwell's Ministry of Speech) monitors the Internet hunting offenders and bringing them to justice. Due to the large amount of communications going on, Minispeech needs to expand quite a lot. Currently, over 100,000 public servents work at Minispeech. Because Minispeech also needs to monitor public conversations, it needs to pay a lot of spies (a.k.a. offers rewards), so its budget is quite big and always strained.
Ten years later, the busybodies at Minispeech discovered new pattern in communications: People are still preaching hatred, but in cloaked or disguised form. This is unacceptable, because we all know that hate speech is BAD(tm). A new legislation passes Congress which bans indirect hate speech. Minispeech needs to expand even more to enforce this.
Here, the real problems started. People were increasingly facing harrassment from Minispeech, because they dared to express their dissatisfaction with some burocrat assh*le. Because burocrats are also protected by law, expressing dissatisfaction against them is hate speech. Well, not directly hate speech, but this insideous, cloaked, hidden form that is currently banned.
Advertising also changed quite a lot. It is now forbidden to compare your product with your competitors' because that would amount to hidden hate speech against them. [Incidentally, in Europe, comparative advertising is already forbidden]. A lot of prosecution happened there.
It is now very difficult to say "Hey buddy, your service is miserable!" because that is (disguised) hate speech. People are very careful now not to say anything dangerous, because Minispeech spies are everywhere.
WELCOME TO THE NEW SOVIET UNION!
I have yet to see a disc that the Mac can't copy.
I'm wondering why this is so. Does the Mac use special drives which are more capable than standard cdrom devices, or is it rather a better device driver?
If it's the driver (not the drive), nothing would prevent us from writing one for Linux. Heck, even for Windows, if absolutely necessary. Or am I completely mistaken here?
If you really need tiny kernels, you'll have to abandon Linux and BSD altogether and switch to someting like the L4KA::Pistachio microkernel. Of course, you'll still need userland apps for almost anything, like memory servers, file system servers, device driver servers... That's an awful lot of stuff to cut out of BSD or Linux codebase.
It's not about how small the kernel image gets, but how much RAM it typically uses. The net4801 is a rather powerful box with 128 MB RAM. You can easily fit a FreeBSD base system on a 512 MB CF card and operate without the need for swap. A stripped down kernel would take approx. 2.5 MB diskspace, but you can tune it down to nearly 800k if you really must. BTW, you can put a small Linux system on that box just the same. It just happens hat I used 5.2.1 because it supports PXE booting and network install out of the box.
Isn't it actually funny that the ports system is a pure userland framework that has nothing inherently FreeBSD-ish? It could just as well be adopted by Linux distros, but right now, only gentoo did it.
One of the best features of FreeBSD is in my experience the ease with which you can update the whole system with a simple cvsup and recompile. No need to go hunting for N utilities and libraries all over the Net, just to get the sources to a base system. It's in the CVS repo, ready to be grabbed.
The CVS repository is also a great resource if you are interested in the development history of the system. Not only the kernel, but the whole system. If Linux (as an OS, not only a kernel) had a unified CVS just like the BSDs right from the start, it would have been much easier to debunk TSG/SCO's myths and FUD.
it uses a much more monolithic kernel than Linux, making it lose some flexibility
Wrong. FreeBSD uses KLD modules just as extensively as Linux.
You wouldn't really want to use FreeBSD for an embedded system
I'm using FreeBSD on Soekris net4801 boxes as router/postfix/imap/http/... low-power ADSL appliance.
they can still send mail through their provider's mail servers.
If you operate more than one domain, using your provider's mail server is not always an option. Especially if your ISP is one of those big providers, you won't be able to convince them to accept mail for N domains (N > 1). Unless you buy more account with them, or use one of those prepackaged 5, 10, whatever user domains per account.
If you want effective control, DNS blacklisting is not enough. If OTOH the NANOG operators configured their routers to block all IP-based traffic from these countries, legislation over there would change in a blink of an eye!
With TMDA, you can generate time-limited addys. Works pretty well.
There's no technical reason why Apple, IBM et. al. have to stick to XFree86. They can right now switch to X.org without any hassle at all. The more they wait (and allow the codebase split to grow), the harder a migration will be. Just switch now to X.org. This is where the music is playing.
Or they lost the only programmer who was able to read the source. The usual ratio 99% sales, 1% R&D applies here too.
We actually review the code very closely. By using a mix of OpenBSD and FreeBSD, we can also keep an eye on the diffs everytime we upgrade. Only the original review was expensive, because we had to be very tough. Once we were in diff mode, reviews aren't that hard.
Concerning firmware and hardware review, we obviously have to draw a line. That is beyond our scope, unless we wanted to build and design our own systems from scratch, an obvious impossibility.
You're right concerning small businesses. They don't have the time or ressources to do it. Peer-review in the OSS community is generally good enough for them, iff they regularly update and keep reading bugtraq and similar lists closely.
I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular
From a security point of view, Windows is a nightmare. If you work in a sensitive environment, not having access to full source code for review is simply not acceptable. It is amazing how naive users and corps can be when they trust M$, and every 3rd party software vendor, when it comes to security!
BTW, you don't have to work for the NSA to have high security demands. Every R&D dept. in a major corporation has similar concerns, considering the huge amount of industrial espionage that is prevalent nowadays. OSS systems are no panacea (security is a huge field), but a very important brick in the [fire]wall.
Check out gflightcontrol-0.01, then run the usual:
Of course, it requires gnome 2.6 and all deps. Planes will have to circle while everything emerges.
Oh, wait, it's already OSS! How are they managing to stay in business?!