Every time this issue comes up, I make the same suggestion: the Wikipedia should branch into something like "stable" and "unstable" versions. Let the kooks vandalize the unstable version, but try to get trusted editors and fact-checkers to check-in changes to the stable branch.
First, this keeps the kooks out. Second, if you limit trust strictly enough, then you limit the number of people who can do damage to the stable branch. You set up a review process for those people, which should be easier since there are fewer of them and they're somehow in your "trust" system. Give them instructions that all information that's presented as fact needs to be cited to a reliable source, and have someone watching the watchmen. If any of your fact checkers or experts violate their trust, revoke their trust.
Either way, it'd be nice if you were able to do these things on the iPhone with built-in functionality or supported 3rd-party development. You never know what's going to happen with hacks, what they'll break or what will break them, and anything broken won't be supported by Apple.
Yeah, I think the idea was to be able to do those things without unapproved hacks. Not that Installer.app is difficult to use, but it'd be nice to know that Apple wasn't going to release an update that will break everything.
Well, also my point was partially that they are kind of still a laughing stock. Vista has a number of security systems redesigned, and they still aren't quite good, but I think they're probably better, or at least closer to being better. Because let's face it, Windows 2000/XP pretty well stinks. It's hard as hell to get a lot of programs running under a non-privileged account. They've at least begun to address that with Vista.
Sure, there are still vulnerabilities, but it's also true that OSX and Linux have vulnerabilities too. The question is, are Microsoft's products inherently less secure than the competition because of poor security design. The answer is (IMHO) "Yes". But at least they've shown they're trying to address those issues. Not going a spectacular job, but *trying* is better than not trying, and they didn't even try with previous versions of Windows.
Remember, Windows 95/98/ME didn't really even have permissions in the filesystem-- I'm just trying to point out how much they were ignoring security in the past.
It's also a bit funny to consider how high the bar is set that they get credit for achieving "no longer the laughingstock..." status.?
Do you mean how low the bar is set? It seems kind of funny to me to hear someone from Microsoft admit that they were a laughingstock, and that they're looking for kudos for not being a laughingstock. It reminds me of Chris Rock's bit about people who brag, "I've never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?
Anyway, I guess it's true that Microsoft has gotten more secure and therefore isn't as much of a security laughing stock. There's still something to make fun of in how annoying UAC is, but I guess it's better than what they had before. So... yeah, I guess I'll give it to him. Microsoft is no longer a security laughingstock. They're just a marketing laughingstock for producing the disaster that is Windows Vista.
Well... yeah. That's what the 700Mhz spectrum is going to be used for, and Google is one of the players looking to bid.
Of course, the really big idea is not to have a voice/data network, but to have it be an all-data network with VOIP. Of course, carriers really hate the idea because it pushes the idea that you can have a dumb pipe, and separate from that you have voice service which could possible be provided by another provider. The cell carrier business model relies on the presumption that the pipe and the service are inseparable, and building the pipe entitles you to all service contracts of any sort.
Verizon and the cable companies like this idea, too, that phone services, data services, and video services are all somehow inherently bound to the data network that carries them. This is what the net neutrality debate is all about. These big companies want to say, "I own the pipe, so I should get a piece of anyone providing any service through that pipe." If we can ever knock the services free of the pipe, I think we'll see a bit of a revolution.
Very insightful post. I think it's one thing to say the control should somehow be "international", but "international" doesn't necessarily mean the UN. I think you're right to look at successful and effective international standards bodies as the model for how these things should be handled.
One thing is clear: technical standards should be kept away from politics as much as possible.
From my reading various stories at the time, I'd put the conversation more like this:
Maynor: I have this way that I can hack any Mac in 30 seconds, using stock Apple hardware and a normal install of OSX. I'm doing this because all Mac users are horrible people and morons who deserve to be tortured. By the way, I'm only going to demonstrate this using 3rd party hardware and 3d party drivers. And I won't disclose any details. And this hack also works on other platforms who have the same hardware and drivers, but let's not talk about that...
People with any sense: Um.... WTF are you talking about. Your methods are suspicious, your comments are inflammatory, and if you're a decent security expert, you should disclose enough information so that people can fix the bug. We don't trust you.
A couple random people: This guy's an asshole and a liar.
Anti-Mac crowd: Look at all the Apple fanboys, foaming at the mouth. They're insane!!!
Maynor: I won't respond to anything people are saying, because... um... I'm not allowed to.
People with any sense: Ok, screw it. You're being useless so we'll ignore you.
Some random Mac user: You suck. Shut up and die.
Maynor: But pay attention to me!!! I'm getting death threats!!!
People with any sense: What the hell is wrong with you?.
Anti-Mac crowd: Look at all the Apple fanboys, foaming at the mouth. They're insane!!!
...Months pass...
Maynor: Ok, now I'm allowed to talk about all this, so I'll inform you all that I was disclosing a bug that was fixed a long time ago, and that has already been documented.
People with any sense: Whatever... This isn't really a story anymore.
Anti-Mac crowd: Look at all the Apple fanboys, foaming at the mouth. They're insane!!!
My cynical suspicion is that he hadn't gotten the exploit to work on the MacBook stock WiFi card at the time, and rather than wait until he could and risk being "scooped", he tried to bluff.
Well I don't know whether that's true, but I just think the choice is curious. I don't know why I got modded "flamebait". It's just strange to make part of the point of your demonstration be that Apple's stock hardware is vulnerable but refuse to demonstrate using Apple's stock hardware. I was hoping that, in hindsight, someone might have something more than suspicions.
I don't know-- at the point where you're joining that many MMOG where you need this whole convoluted system to keep track of it all, are you actually going to have time to play any of them?
It seems to me that the real benefit is if multiple companies could all run their own SL or WOW servers with their own content and rules, but that there was some method for exchanging characters/items between other servers running the same basic game.
replacing the ubiquous web browser with an SL client
I still don't understand why people think this is going to happen, or even why you'd want it to happen. Which is easier and more efficient, to read from a web page, or to read from a web page rendered as some kind of sign in a 3D virtual world?
I'm certainly not claiming that there's no room for improvement or innovation in the web browser, but there are reasons why that model won out and continues to be used today. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources.
I don't think it's even a panic piece. The "uncertain future" isn't whether it will be developed or not. It's just uncertain how much control Sun will maintain, and whether developers displeased with Sun will bother to make a fork.
Either way, OpenOffice will continue to exist, continue to be developed, and continue to be used.
1) I'd rather see them make it easily skinnable. I don't know what's involved, but I know that in Gnome, some applications will use different icons depending on what icon set you're using for Gnome. I know the NeoOffice guys have had some problems with replacing the icons-- they've finally done it, but apparently it was troublesome somehow.
3.2??) I know that Ribbon has gained a lot of fans, but it annoys a lot of people too. I wouldn't say it shouldn't be done, but they should be careful about its implementation.
What you're saying is right, and also it made a lot of people curious that even though he was saying it worked on a stock Macbook and was willing to disclose that fact, he still chose to use a 3rd party WiFi card.
After all that, does anyone know why? Does this hack indeed work in a stock Macbook, and if so why wouldn't he just use the stock Macbook WiFi card?
Yeah, I meant to be pretty obvious in implying that living without culture is comparable to living without civilization, and claiming that we could do either was meant to be somewhat sarcastic.
eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product
Well, "must" might be going a bit far. I mean, we could all just live without music or movies. Of course, we could also live without the internet, computers, electricity, running water, houses, and civilization in general. A person could technically survive living in the woods, gathering berries from the local plant life and things like that... I guess.
On the other hand, I think you're right that people won't always be given the choice of a "better product". There are situations where it is simply not in the best interest of a company to produce a better product, particularly when a single entity (or several colluding entities) control a market.
The assertion is absolutely correct. DMCA is working fine.
DMCA was designed to protect copyright, and it is protecting it.
Oh, well that's good news. I thought there was still a ton of copyrighted material floating around the Internet. Silly me. Because that was part of my objection to the whole thing, that not only did it limit the ability of people use use copyrighted material, but also that it didn't really do much to prevent copyright infringement.
There's something I like about your idea. Most attempts at solving our spam problems in some permanent way include having "trusted" servers. One of the problems with this is that, either you have to make it so easy to become "trusted" that spammers will be able to achieve that status, or else lots of people won't be able to get a "trusted" status. If lots of people don't get "trusted" status, then lots of legitimate e-mail will get filtered out.
However, I do like the idea of having a sort of "trusted" status, and then a secondary status that is "untrusted, but not verified spam". It would help people (or at least me) sort things a little better than just "junk" or "trusted". The exact implementation could vary.
I think you have a decent point, which is that the whole "e-mail problem" is not solved. If you don't know what I mean by that, I mean that if e-mail was a solved problem, then there wouldn't really be anything for a new company to do except tweak performance and use better marketing. However, there are real improvements still to be made in terms of features, sorting, archiving, aggregation, etc. Spam protection might be something that we deal with forever. Encryption still has problems that have to be worked out. But those are only two examples of where e-mail can still be improved.
I think this is just an indicator of a more general piece of knowledge that everyone should know, but very few seem to recognize: Knowledge is constantly in flux. Science is just one method for attaining knowledge. Scientific knowledge is also in flux.
What this means is, what we "discover" and "prove" today might be proven wrong tomorrow. The aim of the process of attaining knowledge is to be constantly refining our knowledge, without any end in sight. The latest studies might be the best grounding available today for our future experiments, but they are not absolute and objective.
Don't look for the experimentation and learning to be "done". Don't expect the whole knowledge thing to be "solved". One study suggests one thing, another will suggest another, a third might contradict one or the other. 10 years from now, someone will completely redefine what has been learned in all those studies due to new concepts. The whole thing will continue.
I know, people want a complete "theory of everything" that starts from the smallest quantum detail, moves up to explain everything on our level, and explains everything in the cosmic scale too. They think that the correct collections of equations will give the meaning of life. If you're one of those people, I'm sorry to inform you that things don't work this way. No set of equations will bring heaven to earth.
What's more, many of the differences between "desktop" and "server" operating systems tend to be pretty artificial. With OSX and Linux, the server side sometimes leaves off the GUI, and extra server admin tools are added. With Windows, Microsoft will sometimes even hobble the desktop OS to prevent it from being used as a server (lower the max number of connections for a particular service or something).
Now, there really are optimizations to be made on each side, but many of the differences in most real-world Desktop/Server OSes aren't necessarily, but changes made by developers to make extra money by selling "server software". Many of those changes aren't related to the kernel anyhow.
Well, a real fork would mean that you would be dividing your labor and know-how between two different projects. That's the problem.
To me the first question is, what about the current kernel is causing problems for servers, and what about the current kernel is causing problems for desktop? The second question would be, are those problems actually mutually exclusive? (is it true that fixing server problems will necessarily break the desktop, and vice versa?) Third, can you just build the kernel without that functionality? If not, is it worth the trouble of creating and maintaining a fully separate fork?
I'm not a huge expert or anything, but I don't see a need for a fork. If you really want to, you can drop a lot of kernel features during the build procedure. I'm more interested to hear what server and desktop needs aren't being met by today's kernel, and what the plans are for fixing those issues.
The stupid part of this idea is removing 70-80% (the share of iPods in the portable music market) of the market for your product.
This is what I thought about the NBC thing. It seems a little misguided. "We aren't making enough money selling music or TV shows! To solve this, let's withdraw from the most successful online music/video store and disallow our content from playing on the dominant portable music/video player!"
What kind of sense does that make?
I know, they think they're going to move to some other stores and services, but that seems pretty dumb too. There isn't really anyone but Apple whose online music/video stores have been successful, and Apple has been successful by pairing the store with a popular media device, operating the store as a loss-leader, keeping their DRM relatively unobtrusive, and keeping prices low. The record companies keep wanting to move to services with stricter DRM and higher prices, with no media device attached, and they think they'll be more successful?
It seems to me that the reason these record companies are in a bind right now because they didn't "get it" quickly enough, and therefore failed to create a realistic business model on Internet distribution. These sorts of moves demonstrate that Universal still doesn't "get it".
Slashdot Mirror
Every time this issue comes up, I make the same suggestion: the Wikipedia should branch into something like "stable" and "unstable" versions. Let the kooks vandalize the unstable version, but try to get trusted editors and fact-checkers to check-in changes to the stable branch.
First, this keeps the kooks out. Second, if you limit trust strictly enough, then you limit the number of people who can do damage to the stable branch. You set up a review process for those people, which should be easier since there are fewer of them and they're somehow in your "trust" system. Give them instructions that all information that's presented as fact needs to be cited to a reliable source, and have someone watching the watchmen. If any of your fact checkers or experts violate their trust, revoke their trust.
Either way, it'd be nice if you were able to do these things on the iPhone with built-in functionality or supported 3rd-party development. You never know what's going to happen with hacks, what they'll break or what will break them, and anything broken won't be supported by Apple.
Yeah, I think the idea was to be able to do those things without unapproved hacks. Not that Installer.app is difficult to use, but it'd be nice to know that Apple wasn't going to release an update that will break everything.
Well, also my point was partially that they are kind of still a laughing stock. Vista has a number of security systems redesigned, and they still aren't quite good, but I think they're probably better, or at least closer to being better. Because let's face it, Windows 2000/XP pretty well stinks. It's hard as hell to get a lot of programs running under a non-privileged account. They've at least begun to address that with Vista.
Sure, there are still vulnerabilities, but it's also true that OSX and Linux have vulnerabilities too. The question is, are Microsoft's products inherently less secure than the competition because of poor security design. The answer is (IMHO) "Yes". But at least they've shown they're trying to address those issues. Not going a spectacular job, but *trying* is better than not trying, and they didn't even try with previous versions of Windows.
Remember, Windows 95/98/ME didn't really even have permissions in the filesystem-- I'm just trying to point out how much they were ignoring security in the past.
It's also a bit funny to consider how high the bar is set that they get credit for achieving "no longer the laughingstock..." status.?
Do you mean how low the bar is set? It seems kind of funny to me to hear someone from Microsoft admit that they were a laughingstock, and that they're looking for kudos for not being a laughingstock. It reminds me of Chris Rock's bit about people who brag, "I've never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?
Anyway, I guess it's true that Microsoft has gotten more secure and therefore isn't as much of a security laughing stock. There's still something to make fun of in how annoying UAC is, but I guess it's better than what they had before. So... yeah, I guess I'll give it to him. Microsoft is no longer a security laughingstock. They're just a marketing laughingstock for producing the disaster that is Windows Vista.
Well... yeah. That's what the 700Mhz spectrum is going to be used for, and Google is one of the players looking to bid.
Of course, the really big idea is not to have a voice/data network, but to have it be an all-data network with VOIP. Of course, carriers really hate the idea because it pushes the idea that you can have a dumb pipe, and separate from that you have voice service which could possible be provided by another provider. The cell carrier business model relies on the presumption that the pipe and the service are inseparable, and building the pipe entitles you to all service contracts of any sort.
Verizon and the cable companies like this idea, too, that phone services, data services, and video services are all somehow inherently bound to the data network that carries them. This is what the net neutrality debate is all about. These big companies want to say, "I own the pipe, so I should get a piece of anyone providing any service through that pipe." If we can ever knock the services free of the pipe, I think we'll see a bit of a revolution.
Very insightful post. I think it's one thing to say the control should somehow be "international", but "international" doesn't necessarily mean the UN. I think you're right to look at successful and effective international standards bodies as the model for how these things should be handled.
One thing is clear: technical standards should be kept away from politics as much as possible.
From my reading various stories at the time, I'd put the conversation more like this:
Maynor: I have this way that I can hack any Mac in 30 seconds, using stock Apple hardware and a normal install of OSX. I'm doing this because all Mac users are horrible people and morons who deserve to be tortured. By the way, I'm only going to demonstrate this using 3rd party hardware and 3d party drivers. And I won't disclose any details. And this hack also works on other platforms who have the same hardware and drivers, but let's not talk about that...
People with any sense: Um.... WTF are you talking about. Your methods are suspicious, your comments are inflammatory, and if you're a decent security expert, you should disclose enough information so that people can fix the bug. We don't trust you.
A couple random people: This guy's an asshole and a liar.
Anti-Mac crowd: Look at all the Apple fanboys, foaming at the mouth. They're insane!!!
Maynor: I won't respond to anything people are saying, because... um... I'm not allowed to.
People with any sense: Ok, screw it. You're being useless so we'll ignore you.
Some random Mac user: You suck. Shut up and die.
Maynor: But pay attention to me!!! I'm getting death threats!!!
People with any sense: What the hell is wrong with you?.
Anti-Mac crowd: Look at all the Apple fanboys, foaming at the mouth. They're insane!!!
...Months pass...
Maynor: Ok, now I'm allowed to talk about all this, so I'll inform you all that I was disclosing a bug that was fixed a long time ago, and that has already been documented.
People with any sense: Whatever... This isn't really a story anymore.
Anti-Mac crowd: Look at all the Apple fanboys, foaming at the mouth. They're insane!!!
My cynical suspicion is that he hadn't gotten the exploit to work on the MacBook stock WiFi card at the time, and rather than wait until he could and risk being "scooped", he tried to bluff.
Well I don't know whether that's true, but I just think the choice is curious. I don't know why I got modded "flamebait". It's just strange to make part of the point of your demonstration be that Apple's stock hardware is vulnerable but refuse to demonstrate using Apple's stock hardware. I was hoping that, in hindsight, someone might have something more than suspicions.
I don't know-- at the point where you're joining that many MMOG where you need this whole convoluted system to keep track of it all, are you actually going to have time to play any of them?
It seems to me that the real benefit is if multiple companies could all run their own SL or WOW servers with their own content and rules, but that there was some method for exchanging characters/items between other servers running the same basic game.
replacing the ubiquous web browser with an SL client
I still don't understand why people think this is going to happen, or even why you'd want it to happen. Which is easier and more efficient, to read from a web page, or to read from a web page rendered as some kind of sign in a 3D virtual world?
I'm certainly not claiming that there's no room for improvement or innovation in the web browser, but there are reasons why that model won out and continues to be used today. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources.
I don't think it's even a panic piece. The "uncertain future" isn't whether it will be developed or not. It's just uncertain how much control Sun will maintain, and whether developers displeased with Sun will bother to make a fork.
Either way, OpenOffice will continue to exist, continue to be developed, and continue to be used.
1) I'd rather see them make it easily skinnable. I don't know what's involved, but I know that in Gnome, some applications will use different icons depending on what icon set you're using for Gnome. I know the NeoOffice guys have had some problems with replacing the icons-- they've finally done it, but apparently it was troublesome somehow.
3.2??) I know that Ribbon has gained a lot of fans, but it annoys a lot of people too. I wouldn't say it shouldn't be done, but they should be careful about its implementation.
What you're saying is right, and also it made a lot of people curious that even though he was saying it worked on a stock Macbook and was willing to disclose that fact, he still chose to use a 3rd party WiFi card.
After all that, does anyone know why? Does this hack indeed work in a stock Macbook, and if so why wouldn't he just use the stock Macbook WiFi card?
I'd tell you the answer to that, but I'm under and NDA.
Yeah, I meant to be pretty obvious in implying that living without culture is comparable to living without civilization, and claiming that we could do either was meant to be somewhat sarcastic.
eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product
Well, "must" might be going a bit far. I mean, we could all just live without music or movies. Of course, we could also live without the internet, computers, electricity, running water, houses, and civilization in general. A person could technically survive living in the woods, gathering berries from the local plant life and things like that... I guess.
On the other hand, I think you're right that people won't always be given the choice of a "better product". There are situations where it is simply not in the best interest of a company to produce a better product, particularly when a single entity (or several colluding entities) control a market.
The assertion is absolutely correct. DMCA is working fine. DMCA was designed to protect copyright, and it is protecting it.
Oh, well that's good news. I thought there was still a ton of copyrighted material floating around the Internet. Silly me. Because that was part of my objection to the whole thing, that not only did it limit the ability of people use use copyrighted material, but also that it didn't really do much to prevent copyright infringement.
There's something I like about your idea. Most attempts at solving our spam problems in some permanent way include having "trusted" servers. One of the problems with this is that, either you have to make it so easy to become "trusted" that spammers will be able to achieve that status, or else lots of people won't be able to get a "trusted" status. If lots of people don't get "trusted" status, then lots of legitimate e-mail will get filtered out.
However, I do like the idea of having a sort of "trusted" status, and then a secondary status that is "untrusted, but not verified spam". It would help people (or at least me) sort things a little better than just "junk" or "trusted". The exact implementation could vary.
I think you have a decent point, which is that the whole "e-mail problem" is not solved. If you don't know what I mean by that, I mean that if e-mail was a solved problem, then there wouldn't really be anything for a new company to do except tweak performance and use better marketing. However, there are real improvements still to be made in terms of features, sorting, archiving, aggregation, etc. Spam protection might be something that we deal with forever. Encryption still has problems that have to be worked out. But those are only two examples of where e-mail can still be improved.
I think this is just an indicator of a more general piece of knowledge that everyone should know, but very few seem to recognize: Knowledge is constantly in flux. Science is just one method for attaining knowledge. Scientific knowledge is also in flux.
What this means is, what we "discover" and "prove" today might be proven wrong tomorrow. The aim of the process of attaining knowledge is to be constantly refining our knowledge, without any end in sight. The latest studies might be the best grounding available today for our future experiments, but they are not absolute and objective.
Don't look for the experimentation and learning to be "done". Don't expect the whole knowledge thing to be "solved". One study suggests one thing, another will suggest another, a third might contradict one or the other. 10 years from now, someone will completely redefine what has been learned in all those studies due to new concepts. The whole thing will continue.
I know, people want a complete "theory of everything" that starts from the smallest quantum detail, moves up to explain everything on our level, and explains everything in the cosmic scale too. They think that the correct collections of equations will give the meaning of life. If you're one of those people, I'm sorry to inform you that things don't work this way. No set of equations will bring heaven to earth.
What's more, many of the differences between "desktop" and "server" operating systems tend to be pretty artificial. With OSX and Linux, the server side sometimes leaves off the GUI, and extra server admin tools are added. With Windows, Microsoft will sometimes even hobble the desktop OS to prevent it from being used as a server (lower the max number of connections for a particular service or something).
Now, there really are optimizations to be made on each side, but many of the differences in most real-world Desktop/Server OSes aren't necessarily, but changes made by developers to make extra money by selling "server software". Many of those changes aren't related to the kernel anyhow.
Well, a real fork would mean that you would be dividing your labor and know-how between two different projects. That's the problem.
To me the first question is, what about the current kernel is causing problems for servers, and what about the current kernel is causing problems for desktop? The second question would be, are those problems actually mutually exclusive? (is it true that fixing server problems will necessarily break the desktop, and vice versa?) Third, can you just build the kernel without that functionality? If not, is it worth the trouble of creating and maintaining a fully separate fork?
I'm not a huge expert or anything, but I don't see a need for a fork. If you really want to, you can drop a lot of kernel features during the build procedure. I'm more interested to hear what server and desktop needs aren't being met by today's kernel, and what the plans are for fixing those issues.
of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun
Don't forget Novell. And supposedly Apple is building some kind of ODF support into their next OS.
The stupid part of this idea is removing 70-80% (the share of iPods in the portable music market) of the market for your product.
This is what I thought about the NBC thing. It seems a little misguided. "We aren't making enough money selling music or TV shows! To solve this, let's withdraw from the most successful online music/video store and disallow our content from playing on the dominant portable music/video player!"
What kind of sense does that make?
I know, they think they're going to move to some other stores and services, but that seems pretty dumb too. There isn't really anyone but Apple whose online music/video stores have been successful, and Apple has been successful by pairing the store with a popular media device, operating the store as a loss-leader, keeping their DRM relatively unobtrusive, and keeping prices low. The record companies keep wanting to move to services with stricter DRM and higher prices, with no media device attached, and they think they'll be more successful?
It seems to me that the reason these record companies are in a bind right now because they didn't "get it" quickly enough, and therefore failed to create a realistic business model on Internet distribution. These sorts of moves demonstrate that Universal still doesn't "get it".