No, it doesn't. Printers of legal documents have been successfully prosecuted for reading the documents, even when names are blanked out, and deducing the pending contracts and making stock trades accordingly. So have janitors and secretaries who steal thrown out documents, caterers and cafeteria workers who draw conclusions from the orders for meals, etc. It's the access to privileged information that makes it illegal, not the high office of the leak source.
You have a point, but we can also expect www.thepiratebay.org to get a lot more traffic, and tools to unlock DVD's and CD's to become even more popular. We can also expect a handly little cracker business in stealing the keys for the more critical software updates.
Microsoft has tried, repeatedly, to be a content manager through their Hotmail system, MSN, anWindows Media Player, and other tools. They want to be able to control out *other* software providers, and control media players, by managing the content encryption keys. It's the immediate and obvious use for "Trusted Computing".
It's called "Trusted Computing", and used to be called the Palladium project. It's led by Mr. LaMacchia, one of the authors of.NET. It's integral to the business plans for Vista.
Well, there is a point there. A lot of truly terrible drivers get published and hacked together by complete idiots making extremely low end PC hardware. Apple copes with this by only certifying devices with good drivers and good hardware quality: this sort of DRM could, theoretically, be used to manage this by refusing to authenticate bad drivers and, in turn, bad hardware.
But that is a level of control Microsoft wants without admitting it, because they have a terrible history of using their muscle to also block really good tools, such as DRDOS software and Netscape, and to force vendors to play ball the way they want, such as blockng the publication of Linux drivers for new hardware. You'd better believe that NVidia and ATI are under pressure from Microsoft not to publish good Linux drivers!
The more common approach is to refuse to allow robust encryption, forcing local companies to use weak ciphers or to only permit robust encryption and authentication tools where the key can be obtained trivially by the government. This has certainly been done by the NSA for decades, with their old unconstitutional interference with exporting encryption technologies, with their Skipjack encryption authorized for use in cell phones and digital communications, and with the new Trusted Computing initiative led by Microsoft but with NSA cooperation. In both recent technologies, the keys are centrally held and managed in repositories where no court oversight exists and where the keys can be obtained by anyone who can convince the repository to release them, and where an agency like the NSA need simply steal them without a warrant to have any key they desire.
Yes, it sounds paranoid: but it's cerainly consistent with their tapping of core fibe-optic backbones in the USA and their current lack of judicial review under the umbrella of the Patriot Act.
Document creation with the Word equivalent, and slide show creation with the Powerpoint substitute, are not the sticking points for OpenOffice. It's the mail client: Outlook with Exchange on the server has one of the better supported calendar applications, and OpenOffice doesn't have it. Evolution is close, but it's a separate tool and there are very few guidelines on how to migrate people from Outlook to Evolution that are useful when your IT department is not being helpful and cooperative by publishing guidelines. And if you still use Exchange, you've got a serious fight getting anythiing but Outlook supported as a mail client.
The result is a typical Microsoft market leverage trap, where the previous commitment to Exchange makes replacing other components with an open source or other commercial tool very, very expensive.
Round-robin'ing the load does not eliminate the wasted bandwidth: that costs someone money. Even if you Akamai'ize it, someone has to pay hte bills for it.
True, but that's harsh. If you're making email to reach a few hundred or a few thousand people, and you want to make sure they read it and get what they need and signed up for, it's worth a few hours paid work to design some formats and layouts to use for this month's letters.
I've seen a few well-written ones that use graphics sparingly, provide useful links to material I want, and have other usable links to material that I might want on another occasion.
But well over 90% of all HTML mail is spam. It's the simplest, most effective spam scoriing filter in SpamAssassin and other email spam tools. Of the remainder, most of it is Outlook generated marketing dross with too many fonts written iin MS-Word and badly converted to HTML, with huge graphics-filled "corporate signatures" that waste bandwidth and storage space for what can be written with a simple two-line copyright notice.
It looks like time to install Evolution for corporate users and move them off of Exchange: is Evolution up to the task yet?
Re:"Why is it so hard to make a good Trek game"?
on
Star Trek Legacy Review
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's because it was a direct theft by Paramount from JMS's plot proposal for a new Star Trek series, with an actual story ark. He was understandably furious when Paramount stole it, and went about showing what could be done without their budget or cooperation. And B5's plotting was much more powerful, although their special effects budget and actor budget wwere much smaller.
It then amused the heck out of me when I saw Nurse Chapel/Lwaxana Troi/the ship's voice/Gene Roddenberry's widow show up as the emperor's wido. She's just wonderful to watch, a majestic older woman, knows that she wants to work on really good projects, and isn't frightened of threats from a company htat exists because of Gene Roddenberry's legacy.
Having the source is a huge deal when you're dealing with difficult bugs that the author may not have discovered yet, when the API's are not well published, and when you wish to extend or improve the software. I can't count the number of times I've extended commercial products for internal use, but been prohibited from distributing the extensions by the commercial licenses and by the refusal of the software to provide a usable method of reporting the fix or extension.
I've worked for several companies who found having me extend their existing tools was vastly, vastly, vastly cheaper than buying the commercial Industral Grade versions of products, and the open source community is usually much better about feature requests and bug fixes. Look at the security records for web browsers for examples of this.
It might be one billion euros instead of 2.whatever. The infrastructure needed to do a search engine well is enormous: mny of Google's other services seem to be built from leftover cycles and resources of their core services, so leaving them out is not as much of a savings as one might hope.
Hardly. Too many "good firewalls" are deliberately left with open ports to necessary services that turn out to be vulnerable, or have their own vulnerabilities. And too many bots are being installed through web browser vulnerabilities, downloaded attachments, password sniffing, and propagation of the bots from inside a firewall.
If you ignore other security in favor of your firewally, it's like wearing a bullet proof vest and encountering tear gas: your particular defense is a very expensive burden that gets soiled in the process.
Have you ever tried to manage a Terabyte of search engine database? It's not a task for the weak-willed or overly optimistic, and Google is well beyond that size of search information to manage. The infrastructure to do the web-searching, as well, is large and expensive to manage. Even a great search tool, by itself, has no chance against that kind of infrastructure. It would take billions to build that from scratch.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
But Moses dropped one of the backup tapes, which is why we lost the commandment about "Thou shalt not invade thy neighbors".
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Then I suggest you take a close look at the copyrights on Washington University's Pine and its included Pico editor. They do not permit people to modify and rebundle the software, even simply for packaging purposes, without written permission. That's why it's no longer found in most distributions. There are better tools with better support of features like Maildir and better integration with local IMAP servers, and without the nasty copyright history.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Actually, what point do you think is wrong? I belieave their basic web caching service uses DNS games to route the HTTP requests to the nearest Akamai owned caching server, and those caches basically run Squid on steroids. So it is, in fact, a distributed web caching service. That's fairly close to a distributed hosting service for legal purposes. The files reside on Akamai machines, at least temporarily, per contracts with Akamai's customers.
You still need a 64-bit controller. 32 bit controller hardware still only gets you up to roughly 31 bits of disk size, or 2 Terabytes. Don't expect to see 64-bit controllers for desktop operating systems anytime soon, although there is certainly a demand for them in larger RAID arrays.
Since the biggest risk to such data is user error, not hardware error, it's not unreasonable. Slap in a hard-linked backup system such as "rsnapshot", and you can considerably ease recovery tasks.
But he definitely needs another drive on another system for that, given the amount of the data and the risk of catastrophic failures.
Yes, it really does cost something. I've seen kernel developers claiming they can backport 2.4, and later 2.6, kernel drivers to their 2.0 kernels "becuause that's what they wrote their modifications in" Never mind that that their modifications are proprietary crap: they think they can backport all the drivers, features, etc. of the newer software releases, including the glibc, gcc, kernels, modutils, sysutils, elfutils, etc. back to the older Os.
Yes, if you paid them enough money, they could install an afterburner on a mule. But eventually, what's the point? The developer OS's need development support, which means rapidly evolving tools, not wasting their time on legacy software and hardware.
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No, it doesn't. Printers of legal documents have been successfully prosecuted for reading the documents, even when names are blanked out, and deducing the pending contracts and making stock trades accordingly. So have janitors and secretaries who steal thrown out documents, caterers and cafeteria workers who draw conclusions from the orders for meals, etc. It's the access to privileged information that makes it illegal, not the high office of the leak source.
You have a point, but we can also expect www.thepiratebay.org to get a lot more traffic, and tools to unlock DVD's and CD's to become even more popular. We can also expect a handly little cracker business in stealing the keys for the more critical software updates.
Microsoft has tried, repeatedly, to be a content manager through their Hotmail system, MSN, anWindows Media Player, and other tools. They want to be able to control out *other* software providers, and control media players, by managing the content encryption keys. It's the immediate and obvious use for "Trusted Computing".
It's called "Trusted Computing", and used to be called the Palladium project. It's led by Mr. LaMacchia, one of the authors of .NET. It's integral to the business plans for Vista.
Well, there is a point there. A lot of truly terrible drivers get published and hacked together by complete idiots making extremely low end PC hardware. Apple copes with this by only certifying devices with good drivers and good hardware quality: this sort of DRM could, theoretically, be used to manage this by refusing to authenticate bad drivers and, in turn, bad hardware.
But that is a level of control Microsoft wants without admitting it, because they have a terrible history of using their muscle to also block really good tools, such as DRDOS software and Netscape, and to force vendors to play ball the way they want, such as blockng the publication of Linux drivers for new hardware. You'd better believe that NVidia and ATI are under pressure from Microsoft not to publish good Linux drivers!
The more common approach is to refuse to allow robust encryption, forcing local companies to use weak ciphers or to only permit robust encryption and authentication tools where the key can be obtained trivially by the government. This has certainly been done by the NSA for decades, with their old unconstitutional interference with exporting encryption technologies, with their Skipjack encryption authorized for use in cell phones and digital communications, and with the new Trusted Computing initiative led by Microsoft but with NSA cooperation. In both recent technologies, the keys are centrally held and managed in repositories where no court oversight exists and where the keys can be obtained by anyone who can convince the repository to release them, and where an agency like the NSA need simply steal them without a warrant to have any key they desire.
Yes, it sounds paranoid: but it's cerainly consistent with their tapping of core fibe-optic backbones in the USA and their current lack of judicial review under the umbrella of the Patriot Act.
Document creation with the Word equivalent, and slide show creation with the Powerpoint substitute, are not the sticking points for OpenOffice. It's the mail client: Outlook with Exchange on the server has one of the better supported calendar applications, and OpenOffice doesn't have it. Evolution is close, but it's a separate tool and there are very few guidelines on how to migrate people from Outlook to Evolution that are useful when your IT department is not being helpful and cooperative by publishing guidelines. And if you still use Exchange, you've got a serious fight getting anythiing but Outlook supported as a mail client.
The result is a typical Microsoft market leverage trap, where the previous commitment to Exchange makes replacing other components with an open source or other commercial tool very, very expensive.
And Verisign, when they broke .com by having all non-existent .com domains resolve to their advertising page.
Round-robin'ing the load does not eliminate the wasted bandwidth: that costs someone money. Even if you Akamai'ize it, someone has to pay hte bills for it.
And two more words: "Trusted Computing", which is very specifically designed for DRM.
True, but that's harsh. If you're making email to reach a few hundred or a few thousand people, and you want to make sure they read it and get what they need and signed up for, it's worth a few hours paid work to design some formats and layouts to use for this month's letters.
I've seen a few well-written ones that use graphics sparingly, provide useful links to material I want, and have other usable links to material that I might want on another occasion.
But well over 90% of all HTML mail is spam. It's the simplest, most effective spam scoriing filter in SpamAssassin and other email spam tools. Of the remainder, most of it is Outlook generated marketing dross with too many fonts written iin MS-Word and badly converted to HTML, with huge graphics-filled "corporate signatures" that waste bandwidth and storage space for what can be written with a simple two-line copyright notice.
It looks like time to install Evolution for corporate users and move them off of Exchange: is Evolution up to the task yet?
That's because it was a direct theft by Paramount from JMS's plot proposal for a new Star Trek series, with an actual story ark. He was understandably furious when Paramount stole it, and went about showing what could be done without their budget or cooperation. And B5's plotting was much more powerful, although their special effects budget and actor budget wwere much smaller.
It then amused the heck out of me when I saw Nurse Chapel/Lwaxana Troi/the ship's voice/Gene Roddenberry's widow show up as the emperor's wido. She's just wonderful to watch, a majestic older woman, knows that she wants to work on really good projects, and isn't frightened of threats from a company htat exists because of Gene Roddenberry's legacy.
Leave Kirk out of the fight. Let his toupee do the fighting: it's got less paunch and stands up a lot straigher.
Having the source is a huge deal when you're dealing with difficult bugs that the author may not have discovered yet, when the API's are not well published, and when you wish to extend or improve the software. I can't count the number of times I've extended commercial products for internal use, but been prohibited from distributing the extensions by the commercial licenses and by the refusal of the software to provide a usable method of reporting the fix or extension.
I've worked for several companies who found having me extend their existing tools was vastly, vastly, vastly cheaper than buying the commercial Industral Grade versions of products, and the open source community is usually much better about feature requests and bug fixes. Look at the security records for web browsers for examples of this.
It might be one billion euros instead of 2.whatever. The infrastructure needed to do a search engine well is enormous: mny of Google's other services seem to be built from leftover cycles and resources of their core services, so leaving them out is not as much of a savings as one might hope.
Hardly. Too many "good firewalls" are deliberately left with open ports to necessary services that turn out to be vulnerable, or have their own vulnerabilities. And too many bots are being installed through web browser vulnerabilities, downloaded attachments, password sniffing, and propagation of the bots from inside a firewall.
If you ignore other security in favor of your firewally, it's like wearing a bullet proof vest and encountering tear gas: your particular defense is a very expensive burden that gets soiled in the process.
Have you ever tried to manage a Terabyte of search engine database? It's not a task for the weak-willed or overly optimistic, and Google is well beyond that size of search information to manage. The infrastructure to do the web-searching, as well, is large and expensive to manage. Even a great search tool, by itself, has no chance against that kind of infrastructure. It would take billions to build that from scratch.
But Moses dropped one of the backup tapes, which is why we lost the commandment about "Thou shalt not invade thy neighbors".
Then I suggest you take a close look at the copyrights on Washington University's Pine and its included Pico editor. They do not permit people to modify and rebundle the software, even simply for packaging purposes, without written permission. That's why it's no longer found in most distributions. There are better tools with better support of features like Maildir and better integration with local IMAP servers, and without the nasty copyright history.
By Jove, I think he's got it!
Actually, what point do you think is wrong? I belieave their basic web caching service uses DNS games to route the HTTP requests to the nearest Akamai owned caching server, and those caches basically run Squid on steroids. So it is, in fact, a distributed web caching service. That's fairly close to a distributed hosting service for legal purposes. The files reside on Akamai machines, at least temporarily, per contracts with Akamai's customers.
You still need a 64-bit controller. 32 bit controller hardware still only gets you up to roughly 31 bits of disk size, or 2 Terabytes. Don't expect to see 64-bit controllers for desktop operating systems anytime soon, although there is certainly a demand for them in larger RAID arrays.
Since the biggest risk to such data is user error, not hardware error, it's not unreasonable. Slap in a hard-linked backup system such as "rsnapshot", and you can considerably ease recovery tasks.
But he definitely needs another drive on another system for that, given the amount of the data and the risk of catastrophic failures.
Yes, it really does cost something. I've seen kernel developers claiming they can backport 2.4, and later 2.6, kernel drivers to their 2.0 kernels "becuause that's what they wrote their modifications in" Never mind that that their modifications are proprietary crap: they think they can backport all the drivers, features, etc. of the newer software releases, including the glibc, gcc, kernels, modutils, sysutils, elfutils, etc. back to the older Os.
Yes, if you paid them enough money, they could install an afterburner on a mule. But eventually, what's the point? The developer OS's need development support, which means rapidly evolving tools, not wasting their time on legacy software and hardware.