The easiest explication why DRM cannot work: Encryption means you have a sender, a receiver and an attacker. There are working systems for this. Now make the receiver the attacker...
I am not a programmer and even if I would love to contribute to the one or other piece of free software, I do not really find the time. But here my little story:
I am an earthquake engineer and what I sell - my work - is no mystery at all and is not allowed to be. When I sell a finished product to a customer, e.g. a study on the seismic capacities of his building, I can't tell him "Hey, your building is fine. I won't tell you how I figured that out, you might steal my method." Everybody on the street will agree with him that this is not how it is supposed to be. Firstly because somebody should be able to check if I did the right thing - security reasons. And secondly, what I sell is not the way the study is done, even if I figured out something new that is better of equivalent to the existing ways of doing it. But I sell the specific study of HIS building. If he can find a cheaper guy he might buy from him. And now the best thing: You can find everything on civil engineering on the web and in books! No limitation! No mysteries.
What if programmers just became software engineers? And were allowed to tell how they did?
I don't completely agree with you. The last big infections - those who even made it into the evening news - didn't need any user interaction. But a bad security management. The vast number of vulnerable machines did the rest.
But I am agreeing that the manual virus type - the email with the install instructions of the "anti-virus" or the hint to delete "PartOfYourSystem.exe" would also work, if the directory name was "/bin" and not "c:\WINNT". This would probably not make it into the news.
I heard the argument just a little too often... "There are no Linux viruses because Linux ist not popular enough."
Don't you think that with the current wide-spread discussion about security, it might just be the coolest thing to be the first to have written a real Linux virus? And could it be that this is not happening because it is f****g difficult?
Uh no, I think you are right, we are just not enough...
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The easiest explication why DRM cannot work: Encryption means you have a sender, a receiver and an attacker. There are working systems for this. Now make the receiver the attacker ...
There is also this knob calles brightness, but it doesn't work either.
Linux Needs Diet That's why they normally say 'Don't feed the animals' in a zoo.
I am not a programmer and even if I would love to contribute to the one or other piece of free software, I do not really find the time. But here my little story:
I am an earthquake engineer and what I sell - my work - is no mystery at all and is not allowed to be. When I sell a finished product to a customer, e.g. a study on the seismic capacities of his building, I can't tell him "Hey, your building is fine. I won't tell you how I figured that out, you might steal my method." Everybody on the street will agree with him that this is not how it is supposed to be. Firstly because somebody should be able to check if I did the right thing - security reasons. And secondly, what I sell is not the way the study is done, even if I figured out something new that is better of equivalent to the existing ways of doing it. But I sell the specific study of HIS building. If he can find a cheaper guy he might buy from him. And now the best thing: You can find everything on civil engineering on the web and in books! No limitation! No mysteries.
What if programmers just became software engineers? And were allowed to tell how they did?
I don't completely agree with you. The last big infections - those who even made it into the evening news - didn't need any user interaction. But a bad security management. The vast number of vulnerable machines did the rest. But I am agreeing that the manual virus type - the email with the install instructions of the "anti-virus" or the hint to delete "PartOfYourSystem.exe" would also work, if the directory name was "/bin" and not "c:\WINNT". This would probably not make it into the news.
I heard the argument just a little too often ... "There are no Linux viruses because Linux ist not popular enough."
Don't you think that with the current wide-spread discussion about security, it might just be the coolest thing to be the first to have written a real Linux virus? And could it be that this is not happening because it is f****g difficult?
Uh no, I think you are right, we are just not enough ...