If you use the property of someone else, they have the right to decide on restrictions (within legal limits). Given the number of copyright restrictions that tend to be splurged over any source code, I find it implausible that you were unaware of the implications of your choice to sell on the modified operating system.
Of course, if you were merely building applications on top of Linux then you will have no such problems - this is, I believe, what Adobe do with Acrobat Reader (the linux version is evil but that's not the point). In particular:
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable." This is complete bollocks. Fire your lawyers.
What most makes sense to me is to distinguish between programs and applications. Simply-put, programs are written with the computer in mind; applications are written with the user in mind. It's the difference between NASM and Python.
Applications, at their best, are repackagings of several programs, grouped by functionality rather than by origin. An example would be:
*programs would be written to check DNS records, trace the route to a machine, check what IP addresses are connected to your computer and so on.
*An application would be written with a big button saying "find out about who I'm connected to".
The programs such as traceroute, netstat, etc are written very much to explore the computer's capacities. The application described would be written to explore the user's needs.
Applications don't have to be graphical, although this can make it far easier for the user. An excellent example of a non-graphical application is NMap - reasonably user-friendly and built around the needs of the user not the machine.
Read some Machiavelli. Wars have historically almost always been seen in economical and political terms. At the moment, the US is powerful enough and self-confident enough not to worry about the political, hence the economic factors will tend to take precedence.
I assume that this is a reference to the difficulty of tracking someone? I was thinking more along the lines of not being able to lose someone who is actively stalking you rather than that person being able to pick up your trail at a later date. That obviously can't be done with rfid tags - you'd have to go back to older methods like credit card checks.
RFID tags are still practically the ultimate ultra-short-range tracking tool. No amount of tricky driving or sneaking out the back of shops can help you lose your stalker. As a member of the assassins' guild, the most practical use would be as a simple way of checking whether anyone was round the next corner (once tags become standard in clothing this'll be easy). Less threatening but it again shows the power of these tools. Another, less palatable thought is that it would be possible to track the clothing of every person on a demonstration and, with access to the clothing and credit card companies' databases, identify a ridiculously high proportion of them.
It's quite hard usually to judge the dangers, in a "stalkerey fun" sense, of new technology. The stalkers aren't particularly interested in being interviewed and no-one else is willing to run the experiment to find out.
I'm in a university society called the Assassins' Guild, which is a cross between roleplay and live-action Quake Deathmatch. The game we play involves hunting down other people playing the same game until only one is standing, and is cooler than it sounds (hey, we have girls playing!). The thing that's interesting with respect to this discussion is the excellent testing ground this gives for new technologies vis-a-vis the tracking of indivisuals.
Number one on the list is, surprisingly, static IP addresses on home-user machines. If you know your target's IP address, it is trivial in many cases to check whether he/she is in his/her room, and secondary information like lecture times (and hence the target's course) can be inferred.
On a more sophisticated level, it is possible to examine the movement patterns of a target by the public workstations he/she uses (they have to be regulars on the #assassins IRC channel for this to apply), although this is more easily maskable using screen/irssi off a unix server. The holy grail would be to scan the mobile phone command frequency band - one would only need to know one's target's phone number to triangulate his/her position. I don't know of anyone who's done this, but I'll be attempting it myself over the holidays.
RFID tags present an issue at a similar level, albeit with far greater possibilities for abuse due to their small size. If I were to have access to a reader (of the sort that, if this technology were to become widespread, would be available with no hardware hackery required), I would wait til the target were dumb enough to leave something outside his/her door and drop a suitably crafted tag in it. This would enable me to trail and ambush the target fairly easily when they didn't have any means of defense to hand.
This would be a slightly overworked solution for the purposes of the guild (albeit an excellent way of dealing with one of the more skilled assassins) but would come into its own in the hands of an actual stalker. Imagine someone you can't flee, can't hide from. Imagine what could happen if this technology were abused.
Imagine tags in designer clothes. An excellent way for criminals to know that yes, that coat is genuinely worth a hell of a lot. Imagine tags in young children. Do you really want paedophiles to know exactly when kids have run away from mummy's care? Imagine tags in students. Your grades are fine but you skipped too many lectures - you're out. Imagine tags in employees. Now your fundamentalist boss knows about your trip to the sex toys shop a block over from the office.
Imagine tags in you. Imagine anyone who wanted to being able to track your motions. How secure does that make you feel?
Firstly, separating MS into several departments would improve matters as it would make it significantly harder for programs to be developed sans standards or sense. It's fine to code some api in a really obscure, undocumented way when you're in touch with the people who will actually use the thing to make your company cash. It's quite another to code it in a really obscure, undocumented way when the people working the application layer won't have a chance in hell of using it. Basically it's a barrier against "integration".
And mostly, I think, Microsoft is where it is cos it crushed everyone in its path, one way or another. For example, there is currently a lawsuit running which is based around MS's complete obliteration of WordPerfect as a competitor. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200411140 74810372
As part of the younger generation, I can definitively state that it is a right royal pain in the arse to get any decent understanding of how a system works. I'm attempting to deal with this by learning assembly language and running linux, but finding the relevant information is at least as time consuming as actually learning it.
"The only way Microsoft can really dethrone google is if they come out with a better internet search engine."
If only this were true. Unfortunately, convicted monopolists don't tend to play by market rules. Remember the DOS wars?
Difference being that a crack that stops something requiring network authentication allows a given program to be firewalled off from the world outside the intranet.
Sorry, reading headers is too close to RTFAing. The Slashdot Heavy Mob [tm] has been dispatched to your home to correct this unacceptable behaviour. Please stay calm - it will all be over very shortly.
Re:Love the title of this book..
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Wi-Fi Toys
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· Score: 1
Which will have the words "Don't Panic" on the cover. Of course, it will have to download content on request as to store the entire thing would require you to carry around several inconveniently large libraries
"anyone care to justify this application, which seems to be yet another blackhat/script kiddy tool?"
Anyone who's smart enough to use it effectively deserves results:)
Seriously, a swiss army knife for kiddies is by definition a swiss army knife for security testers and system managers. I'd prefer for hacking tools to be available for all rather than just for the malicious portion of the online population.
Re:Convert friends - add top 10 reasons for FF her
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
I'd tend to divide it up a little as some of your points are quite similar. From your post, I'd say that there are two key areas in which firefox is better:
1) Community philosophy (or, Thee Joye of Source)
Mozilla is open source, which IE isn't. This leads to the following benefits:
Security - anyone can fix a vulnerability they spot
Reliability - anyone can spot and remove malicious code
Stability - anyone can spot and remove buggy code that's crashing their computer
Portability - anyone can fiddle it to work on another platform
Extensibility - it's comparatively easy to interface with as you can always see what's gone wrong
Externalities - support for the 'open philosophy' benefits the whole community. The web itself is a great example of this.
2) Standards-compliance
In no way is this equivalent to the project being open-source - FOSS developers can be just as bad at compliance as anyone else:) However, the Mozilla developers do not fall into that category. Benefits are as follows:
Universality - if Firefox doesn't work with a website, you know it's the website's fault not your browser's
Extensibility again - website designers can feel free to use advanced stuff secure in the knowledge that browsers will know what to do with it. XUL would be a good example.
Externalities - promoting standards compliance leads to a happier internet, with everyone able to access everything regardless of who they got their software from
There are probably many others, and I doubt that this is a great summary, but a hierarchy of benefits is always more persuasive than a collection of 'anecdotal' improvements. Any suggestions?
and thanks for your reasoned tone, but I would disagree with your statement that "It's the responsibility of the government and municipalities to demand hardware that provides what they need (i.e., a paper audit trail)". I'd say it's the responsibility of anyone bothered about the effectiveness or otherwise of their vote. The municipalities just pass the message on.
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I would argue that the illegality of his actions is vastly out of proportion to the immorality of his actions
Not bad, you actually had me going til the bit about Word :)
If you use the property of someone else, they have the right to decide on restrictions (within legal limits). Given the number of copyright restrictions that tend to be splurged over any source code, I find it implausible that you were unaware of the implications of your choice to sell on the modified operating system.
Of course, if you were merely building applications on top of Linux then you will have no such problems - this is, I believe, what Adobe do with Acrobat Reader (the linux version is evil but that's not the point). In particular:
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable."
This is complete bollocks. Fire your lawyers.
I'd just like you all to know that I'm waiting with a cattle prod for the next person to make that joke. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind...
What most makes sense to me is to distinguish between programs and applications. Simply-put, programs are written with the computer in mind; applications are written with the user in mind. It's the difference between NASM and Python.
Applications, at their best, are repackagings of several programs, grouped by functionality rather than by origin. An example would be:
*programs would be written to check DNS records, trace the route to a machine, check what IP addresses are connected to your computer and so on.
*An application would be written with a big button saying "find out about who I'm connected to".
The programs such as traceroute, netstat, etc are written very much to explore the computer's capacities. The application described would be written to explore the user's needs.
Applications don't have to be graphical, although this can make it far easier for the user. An excellent example of a non-graphical application is NMap - reasonably user-friendly and built around the needs of the user not the machine.
Read some Machiavelli. Wars have historically almost always been seen in economical and political terms. At the moment, the US is powerful enough and self-confident enough not to worry about the political, hence the economic factors will tend to take precedence.
Cheers, useful info. I've been searching without result for decent resources on this stuff :)
I assume that this is a reference to the difficulty of tracking someone? I was thinking more along the lines of not being able to lose someone who is actively stalking you rather than that person being able to pick up your trail at a later date. That obviously can't be done with rfid tags - you'd have to go back to older methods like credit card checks.
RFID tags are still practically the ultimate ultra-short-range tracking tool. No amount of tricky driving or sneaking out the back of shops can help you lose your stalker. As a member of the assassins' guild, the most practical use would be as a simple way of checking whether anyone was round the next corner (once tags become standard in clothing this'll be easy). Less threatening but it again shows the power of these tools. Another, less palatable thought is that it would be possible to track the clothing of every person on a demonstration and, with access to the clothing and credit card companies' databases, identify a ridiculously high proportion of them.
I'm in a university society called the Assassins' Guild, which is a cross between roleplay and live-action Quake Deathmatch. The game we play involves hunting down other people playing the same game until only one is standing, and is cooler than it sounds (hey, we have girls playing!). The thing that's interesting with respect to this discussion is the excellent testing ground this gives for new technologies vis-a-vis the tracking of indivisuals.
Number one on the list is, surprisingly, static IP addresses on home-user machines. If you know your target's IP address, it is trivial in many cases to check whether he/she is in his/her room, and secondary information like lecture times (and hence the target's course) can be inferred.
On a more sophisticated level, it is possible to examine the movement patterns of a target by the public workstations he/she uses (they have to be regulars on the #assassins IRC channel for this to apply), although this is more easily maskable using screen/irssi off a unix server. The holy grail would be to scan the mobile phone command frequency band - one would only need to know one's target's phone number to triangulate his/her position. I don't know of anyone who's done this, but I'll be attempting it myself over the holidays.
RFID tags present an issue at a similar level, albeit with far greater possibilities for abuse due to their small size. If I were to have access to a reader (of the sort that, if this technology were to become widespread, would be available with no hardware hackery required), I would wait til the target were dumb enough to leave something outside his/her door and drop a suitably crafted tag in it. This would enable me to trail and ambush the target fairly easily when they didn't have any means of defense to hand.
This would be a slightly overworked solution for the purposes of the guild (albeit an excellent way of dealing with one of the more skilled assassins) but would come into its own in the hands of an actual stalker. Imagine someone you can't flee, can't hide from. Imagine what could happen if this technology were abused.
Imagine tags in designer clothes. An excellent way for criminals to know that yes, that coat is genuinely worth a hell of a lot. Imagine tags in young children. Do you really want paedophiles to know exactly when kids have run away from mummy's care? Imagine tags in students. Your grades are fine but you skipped too many lectures - you're out. Imagine tags in employees. Now your fundamentalist boss knows about your trip to the sex toys shop a block over from the office.
Imagine tags in you. Imagine anyone who wanted to being able to track your motions. How secure does that make you feel?
Two comments:
0 74810372
Firstly, separating MS into several departments would improve matters as it would make it significantly harder for programs to be developed sans standards or sense. It's fine to code some api in a really obscure, undocumented way when you're in touch with the people who will actually use the thing to make your company cash. It's quite another to code it in a really obscure, undocumented way when the people working the application layer won't have a chance in hell of using it. Basically it's a barrier against "integration".
And mostly, I think, Microsoft is where it is cos it crushed everyone in its path, one way or another. For example, there is currently a lawsuit running which is based around MS's complete obliteration of WordPerfect as a competitor. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041114
As part of the younger generation, I can definitively state that it is a right royal pain in the arse to get any decent understanding of how a system works. I'm attempting to deal with this by learning assembly language and running linux, but finding the relevant information is at least as time consuming as actually learning it.
"The only way Microsoft can really dethrone google is if they come out with a better internet search engine." If only this were true. Unfortunately, convicted monopolists don't tend to play by market rules. Remember the DOS wars?
Difference being that a crack that stops something requiring network authentication allows a given program to be firewalled off from the world outside the intranet.
Can't wait til my old Deputy Head gets one of these. This is the teacher colloquially known as "Powerpoint Steve"... The Earth is doomed :(
Or maybe not...
Sorry, reading headers is too close to RTFAing. The Slashdot Heavy Mob [tm] has been dispatched to your home to correct this unacceptable behaviour. Please stay calm - it will all be over very shortly.
Which will have the words "Don't Panic" on the cover. Of course, it will have to download content on request as to store the entire thing would require you to carry around several inconveniently large libraries
Since we're working on an "old ones are the best" basis :)
"anyone care to justify this application, which seems to be yet another blackhat/script kiddy tool?"
:)
Anyone who's smart enough to use it effectively deserves results
Seriously, a swiss army knife for kiddies is by definition a swiss army knife for security testers and system managers. I'd prefer for hacking tools to be available for all rather than just for the malicious portion of the online population.
I'd tend to divide it up a little as some of your points are quite similar. From your post, I'd say that there are two key areas in which firefox is better:
1) Community philosophy (or, Thee Joye of Source)
Mozilla is open source, which IE isn't. This leads to the following benefits:
2) Standards-compliance
In no way is this equivalent to the project being open-source - FOSS developers can be just as bad at compliance as anyone else :) However, the Mozilla developers do not fall into that category. Benefits are as follows:
There are probably many others, and I doubt that this is a great summary, but a hierarchy of benefits is always more persuasive than a collection of 'anecdotal' improvements. Any suggestions?
Thanks, that was a great explanation.
And that improves internet speeds for everyone. So we all win. Kudos to the BSD team :)
...on where to find resources that will help me write portable code? What parts of the code is it that FreeBSD would normally have trouble with?
Incidentally, I think OpenBGPD is a great idea even if it never gets used in real-life situations. It's the principle of the thing really.
I was wondering: you reckon this thing would have enough processor power to run Longhorn when it comes out?
and thanks for your reasoned tone, but I would disagree with your statement that "It's the responsibility of the government and municipalities to demand hardware that provides what they need (i.e., a paper audit trail)". I'd say it's the responsibility of anyone bothered about the effectiveness or otherwise of their vote. The municipalities just pass the message on.