While we're at it: Congress helps terrorism too, by legalizing spam. Is there anything better than a constant flow of junk, to defeat NSA's traffic analysis?
Next time Darl will be talking to the President about how spammers use that damned Linux to spread their stuff. With tightly controlled UNIX(tm) (or Windows(tm)), spammers would be tracked down with spyware. With open code, Gov't doesn't stand a chance...
SCO is about to sue its own attorneys, because their firm uses Linux-based software.
"We cannot sit idly by and let our lawyers steal source code from us. Therefore, SCO is suing the law firm representing them, as they have apparently infringed upon use of SCO's UNIX source code. We decided, oh, their total legal fees would be about right."
Visiting a site is giving them implicit permission to bother you with their ads
or whatever they're throwing at you.
In fact, it's your browser that requests the stuff you don't want
to see. If you don't like the ads, configure your browser not to load them
in the first place. Just because some browsers can't be configured properly
doesn't mean that "they" (the websites) are forcing you to download things. Just switch
browsers!
Please don't get me wrong here. I hate ads just like everybody else.
I use w3m (or lynx...) whenever
I can, and I do avoid flash sites completely. If the content providers
don't care for me as non-flash user, why should I trust them to provide
accurate information or good service?
Personally, I think maglev trains could change the way we travel today.
Maglev is a technology whose time has yet to come. Remember these quotes?
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and walked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
SCO will expand its licensing program to all european foreign dictionaries in the near future.
A quick seach shows that the english version of/usr/share/dict/words alone already contains
1613 words, which illegally include the SCO trademark. Examples are diSCO(tm)mfort,
diSCO(tm)mmodity, MoSCO(tm)w.
SCO, in the attempt to protect its trademark, and the legitimate interests of its stock
owners, will sue
everyone who uses any of these words without permission.
Right now, the legal department of SCO is reviewing european word lists, and is expecting
to find a huge amount of diSCO(tm)ompliance to the trademark and IP laws.
What if the "random" words were actually a hidden communications
channel?
One known method of defeating traffic analysis is to
send a continuous stream of junk from random locations to random
destinations, and, at the right moment, insert the real payload
into the random stream.
The constant stream of spam, esp. when combined with this
seemingly random gibberish set of words, is a great way to hide real communication
from traffic analysis.
If the NSA were to effectively do
traffic analysis on a worldwide scale, they will have to monitor
an enormous amount of spam, and this could even amount to a
DDoS of their surveilliance software.
So, Mr. Ashcroft: Spammers are (helping) terrorists!
Wouldn't it be time to change your CAN spam law to a CANNOT spam law
(just to be sure) and start prosecuting those criminal enemy
combatants?
And who knows? Napster-NG (new generation) could be also build on top
of that great anti-traffic-analysis spam network. RIAA sheriffs, are you
there?
If you're using IP-to-IP VoIP instead, the FBI will just use Carnivore.
VoIP traffic will have to be end-to-end encrypted. There are many ciphers to choose from (OpenSSL being one possible library).
But, VoIP traffic may have some very predictable pattern in it, which could subject it to cryptanalysis. Even when session keys get renegotiated every now and then, I wouldn't completely rely on this.
People who are interested in keeping things secret, will have to avoid (encrypted) VoIP completely, and revert back to plain old text. If they are really paranoid, they could even use one-time pads, like, say, pairs of CDRs or DVDs full of truly random bits. Such a one-time pad would also last much longer without VoIP!
If you're using crypto, the FBI will just break into your house/office and backdoor your computer.
Exactly! Crypto is just one possible technical measure to make it harder for the feds to eavesdrop things on a wide scale. If you're on their radar, you have much bigger problems than encryption alone.
And don't forget traffic analysis! Even with securely encrypted channels, the feds will still know that A is communicating with B. They'll also know when they are communicating, how often and how much they exchange. Correlating this with other informations can help their investigations.
"They're out there, to get us! Let's lock up the doors, shut down the blinds,
and crawl under our beds..."BREAKING NEWS! A family father, who was suffering
from paranoia, was found dead under his own bed this afternoon. According to
the coroner, the cause of death was a snake bite from a cobra that was lying
under the vicitim's bed.
Terrorists do no necessarily have to come from abroad to harm us.
They won't generally use fake IDs, because they don't care!
You can only catch known criminals at the border, but so can
the police at the other side.
Most terrorists are first-time criminals, a.k.a. they didn't show
up on the radar before.
Terrorists with money (like Bin Laden) could easily pay local
criminals to do the dirty job for them.
Trying to protect ourselves from terrorism by closing borders is
illusive. All we're achieving here is to sacrifice our own civil
liberties for a little feeling of security.
"He who gives up essential liberty for a little
temporary security deserves neither liberty nor
security." (Benjamin Franklin).
We're actually doing the terrorists a favor by willingly giving
up our liberty. That's exactly what they wanted: to transform our
open society into a police state. It's sad, but true.
The Hurd is a microkernel-based kernel. The principles behind
it are very much different from well-understood monolithic designs
a la Linux or *BSD.
The Hurd currently runs on top of Mach. There is a Debian
Hurd distribution that you can try out, if you wish. Currently,
the Hurd is being redesigned and in the process of being ported
to L4. See l4-hurd page.
More importantly is this: the Hurd project was not (yet?)
able to attract enough kernel gurus, 'cause most of them
are fiddling with Linux. Should Linux become illegal (I'm
sure it won't, please don't get me wrong here), a lot of those
talented Linux hackers would probably turn their attention
to Hurd (or the l4-hurd project), and this project will pick
up steam very rapidly.
There's no reason to panic(9), should the current Linux
implementation be declared illegal in a US court:
Linux itself is only the kernel of a Unix-like operating system.
It can be easily replaced with a clean-room implementation, that is
absolutely unencumbered (provided that SCO's claims were justified,
which will have to be shown in court).
Alternative Unix-like kernels are per se easy to
develop in a very short time-span. That's also the reason why
Unix has been ported to so many architectures in the past!
Besides, if Linus Torvalds was able to do it
as a CS student (later with the help of a great community),
so will others. There's no deep black magic in
a kernel, that can't be re-invented. Besides, a lot of Linux codebase
is unencumbered, and can be reused. We could perhaps even go back to
2.2.x and redo the parts that may be problematic.
It's really about interfaces, not about kernel internals.
A Unix-like kernel provides a POSIX interface to userland programs
through a standardized C library (among others). As long as a
kernel provides this interface, programs will run unmodified.
Remember: POSIX interfaces are standardized, which also
means that it is legal to write against this specification. SCO can't
win a suit by claiming that a POSIX kernel is using "their" interfaces! It
is only illegal to use their copyright-protected specific implementation.
Oh, yeah, nearly all Linux programs run on BSD, even without
the need to recompile anything. Even if Linux kernels were to be
declared illegal, we'd still have a fully legal replacement "kernel"
for our favorite applications. Of course, SCO (backed by you-known-who)
will try to attack BSD next (as already announced), but that would
open a can of worms that is much worse than the current anti-Linux
stance they're adopting! It's very unlikely to happen, and their
chances to win are even smaller. But even here, the same principles
apply: there's nothing that can't be replaced.
But this is only theoretical. It is most likely that a judge
will require that some code be purged from the Linux kernel;
code that can be really easily hacked up in a few hours or days.
DONT'T PANIC! (The Hitchhiker's Guide to/. Linux-Users)
Would we complain because someone doesn't want us to enter their homes? No, of course!
Why? Because it's private property, and we aren't entitled to enter without the owner's
permission. Mr. Ralsky and other spammers invade our systems, eating up disk space,
network resources and time to throw away the amount of spam that made it through the
filters. And they're complaining that it's not fair to put a fence 'round our systems?
Wow, that's amazing!
"What about sending mails to people who opt-in, not opt-out?" Well, that's exactly
what EU anti-spam laws are all about. The US could have had such an opt-in law if it
had better legislators. Sadly, marketers are way too influencial in Washington, so
the CAN-SPAM law is exactly this: You CAN spam, until someone's fed up and unsubscribes.
But, hey, if they unsub, and you won't stop spamming them (you could even retaliate
by sending 10 times more spam to them), they won't be able to sue spammers privately.
Isn't that a GREAT pro SPAM law?
Just remember: Every country always gets the government it deserves.
It's up to us, voters, to take appropriate steps if we want better laws.
Because we were not able to lobby Congress for tougher anti SPAM laws doesn't
give us the right to wine about it now. It's entirely our fault that we failed.
But we're geeks, ain't we? We'll have to come up with a technical solution to
a social problem (once again). I'm confident that the people in some IETF
working group are planning a new generation E-Mail system that would be much
more resilient to Mr. Ralsky's and other attacks. Of course, such system would
change the way we use E-Mail today, but that's the way it is: The more thieves
on the roads, the higher the fences and the more security guards. *Sigh*
it was put together from unclassified information.
The information was unclassified for very good reasons. There is absolutely nothing technical in the Progressive article, that was not already common knowledge, even back in 1979. Heck, even highschool textbooks showed the basic principle, with diagrams and all, and every physics sophomore student knew at least theoretically, how to build a fusion bomb.
The real secret is the Engineering part, not the widely known physics: What kind of material do you use? Electronics? And, most importantly, geometry! Even this is not really secret, it just requires digging out publicly available papers.
The biggest challenge to everyone willing to put an H-bomb togther, is to find a test area! Every A-bomb (and of course H-bomb) test would immediately trigger sensors all around the world! The kind of vibrations is very typical, and specialists can tell, simply by looking at the waveform what kind of device detonated, how strong it was, where it happened, etc.
Oh, and testing nukes is illegal for non-governmental institutions everywhere in the world. The only practical way to develop such weapons is to do it in a rogue state, that refuses to participate in the non-proliferation treaty. Or, do it on the hidden side of the moon (but then, you'd have so much resources that you won't bother with H-bombs anymore!)
Keeping something illegal, but turning a blind eye
can also be a way for a government to control its
population: as long as you accept their laws, regulations
and the politicians who run all this, you're pretty
safe from prosecution. As soon as you start being
more critical to the so called Establishment, you'd
better have a clean record of fully legal behaviour.
I'm not assuming that this is a deliberate
policy (and certainly not in the very liberal Netherlands),
but it can be (and has been) used in many political
trials. A lot of people have been sentenced to fines
or prison time, officially because they did something
illegal, but actually because they were starting to
become "inconvenient."
Girls wearing the veil (or being forced to?) are not
directly dangerous for democracy per se. It is
the ideology that they are trying to force upon other
women of the same religion. Please don't confuse islam,
with islamism. Former is a tolerant religion (and
women are not required to wear a veil at all in
the religion), the latter is an extremely virulent
and aggressive political movement.
They will, when sub-region codes in DVD become compulsory. Viewers in California will be able to view region 1.1 DVDs, but people in Florida will have to wait for region 1.35 DVDs to be released, preferably 6 or so months later (if at all).
Soon, non-subregion respecting DVD players will be outlawed by a new law that the MPAA will lobby Congress for.
Then, and only then, will people stand for it. Now, it's only those pesky Europeans who are not allowed to view region 1 encoded movies, but they are irrelevant anyway, right?
The new improved DVD regional coding scheme includes a regional subcode. This code will allow content providers to restrict distribution to single states and/or cities. "Being able to restrict our brand new DVDs to California only, will create a pent-up demand in Florida, therefore increasing our profit margin." says an anonymous source.
Multisubregion DVD players that simply ignore the regional subcode should become illegal in the US, according to a bill proposed by the MPAA.
1984 was just delayed. SCO claimed that '1984' was part of their IP (a #define constant in the file copyrights.h), resulting in a long litigation process. As a result, 1984 was not allowed to proceed up until now.
What about blackholes? Light can't escape, not because it is slowed down or halted, but because the space is distorted. Did they create a small artificial blackhole to trap light?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it: Congress helps terrorism too, by legalizing spam. Is there anything better than a constant flow of junk, to defeat NSA's traffic analysis?
Next time Darl will be talking to the President about how spammers use that damned Linux to spread their stuff. With tightly controlled UNIX(tm) (or Windows(tm)), spammers would be tracked down with spyware. With open code, Gov't doesn't stand a chance...
SCO is about to sue its own attorneys, because their firm uses Linux-based software.
"We cannot sit idly by and let our lawyers steal source code from us. Therefore, SCO is suing the law firm representing them, as they have apparently infringed upon use of SCO's UNIX source code. We decided, oh, their total legal fees would be about right."
Visiting a site is giving them implicit permission to bother you with their ads or whatever they're throwing at you.
In fact, it's your browser that requests the stuff you don't want to see. If you don't like the ads, configure your browser not to load them in the first place. Just because some browsers can't be configured properly doesn't mean that "they" (the websites) are forcing you to download things. Just switch browsers!
Please don't get me wrong here. I hate ads just like everybody else. I use w3m (or lynx...) whenever I can, and I do avoid flash sites completely. If the content providers don't care for me as non-flash user, why should I trust them to provide accurate information or good service?
Personally, I think maglev trains could change the way we travel today.
Maglev is a technology whose time has yet to come. Remember these quotes?
SCO will expand its licensing program to all european foreign dictionaries in the near future.
A quick seach shows that the english version of /usr/share/dict/words alone already contains
1613 words, which illegally include the SCO trademark. Examples are diSCO(tm)mfort,
diSCO(tm)mmodity, MoSCO(tm)w.
SCO, in the attempt to protect its trademark, and the legitimate interests of its stock owners, will sue everyone who uses any of these words without permission.
Right now, the legal department of SCO is reviewing european word lists, and is expecting to find a huge amount of diSCO(tm)ompliance to the trademark and IP laws.
A lot of countries are offering 2nd level domains, like co.uk etc... Would they all be sued for patent infrigement?
What if the "random" words were actually a hidden communications channel?
One known method of defeating traffic analysis is to send a continuous stream of junk from random locations to random destinations, and, at the right moment, insert the real payload into the random stream.
The constant stream of spam, esp. when combined with this seemingly random gibberish set of words, is a great way to hide real communication from traffic analysis.
If the NSA were to effectively do traffic analysis on a worldwide scale, they will have to monitor an enormous amount of spam, and this could even amount to a DDoS of their surveilliance software.
So, Mr. Ashcroft: Spammers are (helping) terrorists! Wouldn't it be time to change your CAN spam law to a CANNOT spam law (just to be sure) and start prosecuting those criminal enemy combatants?
And who knows? Napster-NG (new generation) could be also build on top of that great anti-traffic-analysis spam network. RIAA sheriffs, are you there?
So it's obvious the CEO of SCO hails from a long line of bastards.
So he's The Bastard Litigator From Hell, or, more commonly known as the BLFH.
Wondering who's the PFY...
One person died
...which would represent approx 1/2000th of the total population. How many people would that be in the US?
If you're using IP-to-IP VoIP instead, the FBI will just use Carnivore.
VoIP traffic will have to be end-to-end encrypted. There are many ciphers to choose from (OpenSSL being one possible library).
But, VoIP traffic may have some very predictable pattern in it, which could subject it to cryptanalysis. Even when session keys get renegotiated every now and then, I wouldn't completely rely on this.
People who are interested in keeping things secret, will have to avoid (encrypted) VoIP completely, and revert back to plain old text. If they are really paranoid, they could even use one-time pads, like, say, pairs of CDRs or DVDs full of truly random bits. Such a one-time pad would also last much longer without VoIP!
If you're using crypto, the FBI will just break into your house/office and backdoor your computer.
Exactly! Crypto is just one possible technical measure to make it harder for the feds to eavesdrop things on a wide scale. If you're on their radar, you have much bigger problems than encryption alone.
And don't forget traffic analysis! Even with securely encrypted channels, the feds will still know that A is communicating with B. They'll also know when they are communicating, how often and how much they exchange. Correlating this with other informations can help their investigations.
"They're out there, to get us! Let's lock up the doors, shut down the blinds, and crawl under our beds..." BREAKING NEWS! A family father, who was suffering from paranoia, was found dead under his own bed this afternoon. According to the coroner, the cause of death was a snake bite from a cobra that was lying under the vicitim's bed.
Trying to protect ourselves from terrorism by closing borders is illusive. All we're achieving here is to sacrifice our own civil liberties for a little feeling of security.
"He who gives up essential liberty for a little temporary security deserves neither liberty nor security." (Benjamin Franklin).
We're actually doing the terrorists a favor by willingly giving up our liberty. That's exactly what they wanted: to transform our open society into a police state. It's sad, but true.
The Hurd is a microkernel-based kernel. The principles behind it are very much different from well-understood monolithic designs a la Linux or *BSD.
The Hurd currently runs on top of Mach. There is a Debian Hurd distribution that you can try out, if you wish. Currently, the Hurd is being redesigned and in the process of being ported to L4. See l4-hurd page.
More importantly is this: the Hurd project was not (yet?) able to attract enough kernel gurus, 'cause most of them are fiddling with Linux. Should Linux become illegal (I'm sure it won't, please don't get me wrong here), a lot of those talented Linux hackers would probably turn their attention to Hurd (or the l4-hurd project), and this project will pick up steam very rapidly.
They may have a reverse Chronoscope, as described in Asimov's "The Dead Past."
Hitchkiker's Guide to /. Linux Users: Don't Panic!
There's no reason to panic(9), should the current Linux implementation be declared illegal in a US court:
But this is only theoretical. It is most likely that a judge will require that some code be purged from the Linux kernel; code that can be really easily hacked up in a few hours or days.
DONT'T PANIC! (The Hitchhiker's Guide to /. Linux-Users)
Would we complain because someone doesn't want us to enter their homes? No, of course! Why? Because it's private property, and we aren't entitled to enter without the owner's permission. Mr. Ralsky and other spammers invade our systems, eating up disk space, network resources and time to throw away the amount of spam that made it through the filters. And they're complaining that it's not fair to put a fence 'round our systems? Wow, that's amazing!
"What about sending mails to people who opt-in, not opt-out?" Well, that's exactly what EU anti-spam laws are all about. The US could have had such an opt-in law if it had better legislators. Sadly, marketers are way too influencial in Washington, so the CAN-SPAM law is exactly this: You CAN spam, until someone's fed up and unsubscribes. But, hey, if they unsub, and you won't stop spamming them (you could even retaliate by sending 10 times more spam to them), they won't be able to sue spammers privately. Isn't that a GREAT pro SPAM law?
Just remember: Every country always gets the government it deserves. It's up to us, voters, to take appropriate steps if we want better laws. Because we were not able to lobby Congress for tougher anti SPAM laws doesn't give us the right to wine about it now. It's entirely our fault that we failed. But we're geeks, ain't we? We'll have to come up with a technical solution to a social problem (once again). I'm confident that the people in some IETF working group are planning a new generation E-Mail system that would be much more resilient to Mr. Ralsky's and other attacks. Of course, such system would change the way we use E-Mail today, but that's the way it is: The more thieves on the roads, the higher the fences and the more security guards. *Sigh*
it was put together from unclassified information.
The information was unclassified for very good reasons. There is absolutely nothing technical in the Progressive article, that was not already common knowledge, even back in 1979. Heck, even highschool textbooks showed the basic principle, with diagrams and all, and every physics sophomore student knew at least theoretically, how to build a fusion bomb.
The real secret is the Engineering part, not the widely known physics: What kind of material do you use? Electronics? And, most importantly, geometry! Even this is not really secret, it just requires digging out publicly available papers.
The biggest challenge to everyone willing to put an H-bomb togther, is to find a test area! Every A-bomb (and of course H-bomb) test would immediately trigger sensors all around the world! The kind of vibrations is very typical, and specialists can tell, simply by looking at the waveform what kind of device detonated, how strong it was, where it happened, etc.
Oh, and testing nukes is illegal for non-governmental institutions everywhere in the world. The only practical way to develop such weapons is to do it in a rogue state, that refuses to participate in the non-proliferation treaty. Or, do it on the hidden side of the moon (but then, you'd have so much resources that you won't bother with H-bombs anymore!)
Keeping something illegal, but turning a blind eye can also be a way for a government to control its population: as long as you accept their laws, regulations and the politicians who run all this, you're pretty safe from prosecution. As soon as you start being more critical to the so called Establishment, you'd better have a clean record of fully legal behaviour.
I'm not assuming that this is a deliberate policy (and certainly not in the very liberal Netherlands), but it can be (and has been) used in many political trials. A lot of people have been sentenced to fines or prison time, officially because they did something illegal, but actually because they were starting to become "inconvenient."
Girls wearing the veil (or being forced to?) are not directly dangerous for democracy per se. It is the ideology that they are trying to force upon other women of the same religion. Please don't confuse islam, with islamism. Former is a tolerant religion (and women are not required to wear a veil at all in the religion), the latter is an extremely virulent and aggressive political movement.
So Microsoft's End-of-Life is 2015?
US consumers are least affected by region codes
They will, when sub-region codes in DVD become compulsory. Viewers in California will be able to view region 1.1 DVDs, but people in Florida will have to wait for region 1.35 DVDs to be released, preferably 6 or so months later (if at all).
Soon, non-subregion respecting DVD players will be outlawed by a new law that the MPAA will lobby Congress for.
Then, and only then, will people stand for it. Now, it's only those pesky Europeans who are not allowed to view region 1 encoded movies, but they are irrelevant anyway, right?
The new improved DVD regional coding scheme includes a regional subcode. This code will allow content providers to restrict distribution to single states and/or cities. "Being able to restrict our brand new DVDs to California only, will create a pent-up demand in Florida, therefore increasing our profit margin." says an anonymous source.
Multisubregion DVD players that simply ignore the regional subcode should become illegal in the US, according to a bill proposed by the MPAA.
99% of the spam I get is from outside the US
You must be VERY lucky then. According to the ROKSO list, most power-spammers are in the US, not outside...
Next version of "Lindows" would be... "Mindows", followed by "Nindows", "Oindows", "Pindows", ... There's plenty of room in that namespace...
1984 was just delayed. SCO claimed that '1984' was part of their IP (a #define constant in the file copyrights.h), resulting in a long litigation process. As a result, 1984 was not allowed to proceed up until now.
What about blackholes? Light can't escape, not because it is slowed down or halted, but because the space is distorted. Did they create a small artificial blackhole to trap light? :-)