I think the issue is that it slows them down, but not necessarily enough to make them unusable. So if you release it for the older phones, you get complaints about slowness. If you don't release updates for older phones, you get complaints that they're not allowing people to upgrade their phones. Either way, it seems like a conspiracy to force people to upgrade.
Sadly, they mostly release new eye-candy to use up that extra computing power.
The effect of eye-candy is often overestimated. Sometimes there have been overhauls of the behind-the-scenes code to improve security, reliability, scalability, and robustness. Hard drives in almost every OS are all indexed for better searches now, which didn't used to be the case. If you add features like full-disk encryption, that will slow things down. iOS has been adding a lot more functionality for apps to draw on, including more multitasking options, which slows things and shortens batter life.
These days, there's often hardware support for the eye-candy, which means it doesn't actually slow things down very much. A few transparency effects and drop-shadows create a trivial amount of work for modern processors and GPUs.
If you wanted to share the file publicly, then there's no point in keeping it encrypted, so you'd provide the server with the key and it would decrypt, saving you the cost of downloading and reencrypting.
Right, so Dropbox would have the key. Part of my point is that an awful lot of people use Dropbox for sharing, at times not terribly concerned with who is being given access, and so all this freaking out would be unfounded for that subset of cases.
The client just needs one key, the RSA (or equivalent) public key.
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I may not have imagined this system properly. I was thinking the idea was that you encrypt each file with a single unique key, and then to use a public-key encryption scheme to encrypt that key. You can then send the encrypted file and the encrypted key to another user, knowing that it will need that users private key to decrypt.
So right there, you have to manage private keys per user. You have to manage a unique symmetric key per file, and you have to manage encrypted keys per file per user. If you have a hundred users and thousands of files, that's already adding up to a lot of keys. It also means that they's a lot more that can go wrong, compared to a simple case of storing unencrypted files.
Of course, a lot of this can be managed with software. Still, that adds a lot of complexity to the software. I would imagine the whole Dropbox syncing process would be slower and more processor/storage intensive, since it would need to cache the encrypted files and encrypted keys, decrypt all the keys, decrypt all of files, and then store the output files on the storage. Or would the files be decrypted on the fly, on access?
I'd imagine Dropbox doesn't particularly want to add all of that complexity, and users wouldn't want the additional overhead (slow syncs and higher resource usage). Most users can't be trusted with a single private encryption key. Oh, and on top of all that, it would also mean that Dropbox users would probably lose features, since Dropbox would be losing the kind of access that would allow them to easily index and process files, and Dropbox wouldn't be able to do things like deduplicate the data.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of encryption. I also think it's a bit silly to sit back and demand that Dropbox encrypt everything when we (the internet society/community), haven't even developed good standards and infrastructure for dealing with encryption. We haven't even made SSL cheap/easy enough to enable anyone setting up a website to use it, and a lot of our traffic is going unencrypted. I'd rather start with someone building a system that makes it easy for everyone to have their own private/public keyset, and use it ubiquitously instead of having to create passwords on every individual site, only to have half of the passwords pass through the Internet in plain-text. Given that, I think it'd be silly to think that Dropbox is the big danger to your security.
I don't think there's any reason to read a conspiracy into the situation. They release a new phone that's much faster, and then they release an updated OS with new features to take advantage of that extra computing power. Adding features that use more computing power makes the old phones seem slow.
I'm tempted to compare it to the development of desktops and laptops, both of which went through similar upgrade cycles before leveling off a bit. However, there's a big difference in that desktop and laptops were developing quickly to cram features into the OS, at the cost of focus on efficiency, which serves as a partial explanation as to why things became "slow" with upgrades. Desktop and laptop software went through a period of bloat, and then in recent years, additional features traded off against speed gains from recoding things with efficiency as a goal. Meanwhile, Android and iOS needed to be written to be efficient from the start. They wanted to make the hardware as small/thin/light as possible, which meant that the power requirements had to be low. To give an example of the effects of this, a requirement for using as little power as possible has been the reason iOS has always limited multitasking.
Of course, the employees probably already spend 2-3 hours/year dealing with the piece of shit that is Microsoft Office. They probably also devote some amount of IT time and resources to dealing with licensing and activation issues, additional troubleshooting associated with imaging and installation procedures, etc.
Actually, really, I'm not being fair. MS Office is not a piece of shit. It's a really good application, though the whole installation/licensing/activation thing can be a bit of a nightmare at times. LibreOffice is also a very good application that most people could use as their office suit without serious difficulties. Mostly people just get upset because people know it's free. The fact that it's cheap makes them think it's "cheap" in the sense of "flimsy" and "poor quality", so they resent being moved onto it. That seems to be the single largest issue, in my experience.
but are there any examples of our successfully reverse-engineering a system as complex as we are robustly enough to make those sorts of determinations?
I don't know if there is a system as complex as we are, so you're right, it's going to be difficult. On the plus side, we've already been working on the project for a few thousand years, and we started making some real progress in the last hundred years or so.
As someone with a science background, I always find it shocking how much random guesswork goes on in medicine. You'd think that we could take a person in, take a bunch of different samples for analysis, test their DNA, run a full body scan, and just find anything that wasn't working the way it should. Ideally, I think our goal should be to be able to find illness even when the patient doesn't know it's there.
It'd be great, for example, if you could go to the doctor and get a battery of tests, and have him say, "Hey, so you've been feeling a bit tired recently, right?"
The patient says, "Yeah, I guess I haven't been sleeping well, and..."
And the doctor interrupts, "Nope. I'm pretty sure the problem is that you haven't been eating enough [whatever]. It's causing too much of [something] in your system, which is causing you to be lethargic."
I would imagine that part of the problem is that you can't establish what constitutes a problematic variance from "normal" until you establish what is an acceptable variance from "normal". You can't establish what constitutes an acceptable variance from "normal" until you have some baseline of "normal".
I'm not particularly happy with the state of education, and I might agree that it'd be more effective to spend extra money on having more/better teachers rather than more computing equipment. I would just argue-- and you don't seem averse to this-- that providing each student with a computer *could* be a helpful educational tool. I think the problem that we run into tends to be that we want computers to be a replacement for good teachers and high-quality educational materials rather than a supplement.
then you may as well just give the server the AES key and ask it to decrypt the file
But in that model, if "the server" has the key, wouldn't Dropbox have the key? I thought that was the whole thing people were freaking out about.
I understand what you (and the AC) are saying about storing an encrypted key on the server, and then re-encrypting the key for each new user you'd want to share with. That's a clever arrangement and I admit that I hadn't thought of it, but it still seems like it has the potential to create more complexity than most people want to deal with. It still means you need to manage various encryption keys, and we (Internet culture) seem intent on not developing a coherent system for managing encryption keys.
I might be misunderstanding, but how does having a well protect you from people depleting the groundwater? If the groundwater is depleted, doesn't your well go dry?
There is nothing that providing a laptop per child affords that can't be accomplished through classroom media presentation devices (computer & projector) and a good school computer lab.
I would guess it depends on the implementation of the program. Giving kids laptops and then doing everything else the same old way doesn't really help. However, it opens up the possibility of having lessons that include multimedia, interactive lessons, and lessons in logic/programming. If you have some kind of open-source textbooks available on the computers, then you might be saving money over buying textbooks. The kids can' use the computers to write their papers, which is potentially more convenient and efficient then writing by hand. Teachers can potentially provide tests online which are automatically and immediately tabulated. They can take paper submissions online, grade online, provide faster feedback.
Media presentations in the classroom can't be interactive, and can't allow students to focus on the area that they're interested in or need the most help in. Everyone needs to look at the same thing. Computer labs assume that you have a few discrete tasks that will take place on the computer, and that computing isn't integrated into the curriculum. I remember the days when kids had to write/edit their papers by hand, and were only allowed in the computer room to type up the final draft, which is a dumb way of doing things.
I don't know what the best solution is, but it seems to me that it would be worth providing a cheap tablet to children just to avoid having them carry around 50 lbs of books.
I think the problem here is, to some extent, people assume that "STEM" degrees are somehow special. I suspect that impression largely comes from the egocentrism of people who hold "STEM" degrees.
I keep putting "STEM" in quotes because it's a dumb term. I don't know why people have suddenly decided to use this term. I suspect it was come up with by some marketing/propaganda professional, at the request of either a politician or businessman who was looking to push an agenda. Otherwise, I can't think of how such a stupid term came on so quickly, in apparent ignorance of the fact that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics cover a broad range of fields, education, and types of work.
But it seems as though programmers and CS majors have really latched on, I suppose in order to place themselves in the same class as astrophysicists and god knows what else. This has lead to an assumption that, if you have the capability to work in a "STEM" job, of course you'd want to. I mean, it's understandable why a marketing major would want to become a programmer, but why on earth would a CS major want to work in marketing?
The truth is, lots of us chose our major in college when we were in our late teens, when we didn't have a lot of experience. Maybe the we chose a major because we were interested in the subject, and not for vocational training. Maybe we chose a major for vocational training, at at some point afterwards realized that we didn't want that vocation. It will happen for marketing majors and CS majors both.
Not really. About 10 years ago, the word actually referenced a particular group of people. A few years ago, it meant something like, "People who think they're cool, but I don't think they're cool, and so I don't like that they think they're cool." Now, apparently it means, "something I don't like."
I haven't tried out Yosemite yet, but I generally like the flat look.
More specifically, I think things should generally be flat so that texture and dimension stand out. Having textures, depth, and animation in a UI can be a great way to provide visual cues, letting you immediately grasp the differentiation between elements and give you a sense of what the UI can do without explanation. However, the texture, depth, and animation can only provide those cues when it stands out against an otherwise static and flat UI. Having a UI where everything is textured and in motion creates a confusing mess. Remember web pages in the mid-90s?
I've actually thought that Windows, since XP, has overdone things in the UI. It has too may bright, garish colors and gradients, fake glass effects, etc. It doesn't make it attractive, and doesn't make the UI easier to understand. Metro aside, the Windows 8 flat design is easier on the eyes. I think the Yosemite screenshots so far look pretty good, though I want to withhold judgment until I see it in action.
I don't know. That's not what "hipster" meant as of a few years ago, but now it seems to mean everything. My mom is a hipster because she owns an iPad. My dog is a hipster because it eats canned dog food. Microsoft is a hipster because it created a new GUI.
My hard disk has nothing to do with privacy; anyone who can SSH into my computer can read my hard disk.
Really? Can you give me the IP, login, and password? I'm curious. I normally set up SSH in such a way to prevent any ol' person on the Internet from logging in, but that's just me.
anybody logged in to the Internet can read your dropbox
Maybe if you share your whole Dropbox publicly, and then pass the link around. But as for me, I usually don't do that. In fact, my company Dropbox is set up so that I can't even share files with people outside of my company. I guess Dropbox can see my data, but that's not the same as "anybody logged in to the Internet".
Also, Dropbox is quite popular because of the capability to share files. So I upload a file to Dropbox, and then at some point I want to make it available to my coworker. I can either share it so that it appears in my coworker's Dropbox, or I can just create a public link and allow anyone to access it if I want.
The simplest model of client-side encryption would not allow for that kind of sharing. I'd encrypt the files with an encryption key, and then I'd need that private encryption key to be able to decrypt it. The next simplest scheme would be standard public-key encryption, which would mean that when the file was encrypted in the first place, I'd have to already know who should be allowed access, and I'd have to use their public key for encryption.
Now I'm not saying that the problem is insurmountable, but it certainly increases the complexity of the system required. The simplest solution that I can think of would be to set it up so that, when you changed the permissions on the file, it would need to be downloaded, decrypted, rencrypted, and reuploaded. If it came to that, I'd generally rather forgo the encryption, since my data doesn't really require that much privacy. The other option that I could see would be that, when you want to share your data, you pass a private encryption key to the person you're sharing with. However, that would mean that you're either giving them the encryption key to your entire Dropbox, or you're going to end up managing a different encryption key for each file.
Maybe I'm missing a simpler solution, but in the end, it doesn't seem like a trivial problem.
Well, it's official, people. The word "hipster" is dead. It's now being used merely as an epithet for anything that you don't like, including describing graphical user interfaces for server operating systems.
Unifying the OS doesn't necessarily mean unifying the GUI. I think the problem with Windows 8 is that they did the opposite: fragmented the OS while trying to unify the GUI across disparate platforms.
What's terrifying about this is, there has been a precedent set that being a "terrorist" voids your constitutional rights. If you're a terrorist, the US government can assassinate you, even if you're a citizen. They can lock you up indefinitely in secret prisons. They can spy on all of your communications, and conduct searches that are otherwise illegal. They can torture you. They can do anything they want in the name of "winning the War on Terror".
So once you have that kind of policy towards terrorism, there's only one thing, in theory, protecting your constitutional rights: a strict definition of 'terrorist'.
If terrorist have no rights, and anyone can be considered a terrorist, then nobody's rights are protected. Now someone might respond, "No, you still have your rights. You can speak freely, you can bear arms, there are no soldiers in your house, and the government isn't searching through your belongings." And you're right. I currently have all of those freedoms. However, if those freedoms are contingent on the will of a government official, and those freedoms can be arbitrarily taken away, then they aren't 'rights' anymore.
They watch the news and have "facts" spoon fed to them by people with their own agenda.
It's actually a little bit worse than that. We could all be spoon-fed "facts" saying the DHS is terrible, and we could all agree it should be dismantled. And then the DHS will politely go about its way while the rest of us do nothing. While we very much enjoy judgmentally shaking our heads at the terrible things that go on in this world, very few people are willing to do anything about it.
That is also a very good point. Licensing fees are often per-processor or per-machine. If I buy 20 old servers and want to buy Windows Server licensing to go with it, I have to buy a separate version of Windows Standard for each. If I buy a single new, extremely powerful server, I might be able to set up 20 virtual servers, and only have to buy 1 copy of Windows Datacenter. And that's just talking about the OS.
Guy who sells used computer hardware claims that buying new computer hardware is a bad idea, and that you should buy used gear instead. News at 11.
Not what this guy is saying is wrong, but there are other unaddressed issues. They cover issues like "power savings", but not the much more important issue of buying an unknown piece of hardware from an unknown vendor, without a warranty. Aside from that, sometimes there are issues of physical constraints-- like I have limited space, limited ventilation, and one UPS to supply power. Do I want to buy 5 servers, or one powerful one?
Also, it's not true that hardware isn't advancing. In the past few years, USB has gotten much faster, virtualization support has improved, drives and drive interface has gotten faster, etc.
And sometimes, buying "new" is more about getting a known quantity with support, rather than wagering on a crap-shoot.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the issue is that it slows them down, but not necessarily enough to make them unusable. So if you release it for the older phones, you get complaints about slowness. If you don't release updates for older phones, you get complaints that they're not allowing people to upgrade their phones. Either way, it seems like a conspiracy to force people to upgrade.
Sadly, they mostly release new eye-candy to use up that extra computing power.
The effect of eye-candy is often overestimated. Sometimes there have been overhauls of the behind-the-scenes code to improve security, reliability, scalability, and robustness. Hard drives in almost every OS are all indexed for better searches now, which didn't used to be the case. If you add features like full-disk encryption, that will slow things down. iOS has been adding a lot more functionality for apps to draw on, including more multitasking options, which slows things and shortens batter life.
These days, there's often hardware support for the eye-candy, which means it doesn't actually slow things down very much. A few transparency effects and drop-shadows create a trivial amount of work for modern processors and GPUs.
If you wanted to share the file publicly, then there's no point in keeping it encrypted, so you'd provide the server with the key and it would decrypt, saving you the cost of downloading and reencrypting.
Right, so Dropbox would have the key. Part of my point is that an awful lot of people use Dropbox for sharing, at times not terribly concerned with who is being given access, and so all this freaking out would be unfounded for that subset of cases.
The client just needs one key, the RSA (or equivalent) public key.
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I may not have imagined this system properly. I was thinking the idea was that you encrypt each file with a single unique key, and then to use a public-key encryption scheme to encrypt that key. You can then send the encrypted file and the encrypted key to another user, knowing that it will need that users private key to decrypt.
So right there, you have to manage private keys per user. You have to manage a unique symmetric key per file, and you have to manage encrypted keys per file per user. If you have a hundred users and thousands of files, that's already adding up to a lot of keys. It also means that they's a lot more that can go wrong, compared to a simple case of storing unencrypted files.
Of course, a lot of this can be managed with software. Still, that adds a lot of complexity to the software. I would imagine the whole Dropbox syncing process would be slower and more processor/storage intensive, since it would need to cache the encrypted files and encrypted keys, decrypt all the keys, decrypt all of files, and then store the output files on the storage. Or would the files be decrypted on the fly, on access?
I'd imagine Dropbox doesn't particularly want to add all of that complexity, and users wouldn't want the additional overhead (slow syncs and higher resource usage). Most users can't be trusted with a single private encryption key. Oh, and on top of all that, it would also mean that Dropbox users would probably lose features, since Dropbox would be losing the kind of access that would allow them to easily index and process files, and Dropbox wouldn't be able to do things like deduplicate the data.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of encryption. I also think it's a bit silly to sit back and demand that Dropbox encrypt everything when we (the internet society/community), haven't even developed good standards and infrastructure for dealing with encryption. We haven't even made SSL cheap/easy enough to enable anyone setting up a website to use it, and a lot of our traffic is going unencrypted. I'd rather start with someone building a system that makes it easy for everyone to have their own private/public keyset, and use it ubiquitously instead of having to create passwords on every individual site, only to have half of the passwords pass through the Internet in plain-text. Given that, I think it'd be silly to think that Dropbox is the big danger to your security.
I don't think there's any reason to read a conspiracy into the situation. They release a new phone that's much faster, and then they release an updated OS with new features to take advantage of that extra computing power. Adding features that use more computing power makes the old phones seem slow.
I'm tempted to compare it to the development of desktops and laptops, both of which went through similar upgrade cycles before leveling off a bit. However, there's a big difference in that desktop and laptops were developing quickly to cram features into the OS, at the cost of focus on efficiency, which serves as a partial explanation as to why things became "slow" with upgrades. Desktop and laptop software went through a period of bloat, and then in recent years, additional features traded off against speed gains from recoding things with efficiency as a goal. Meanwhile, Android and iOS needed to be written to be efficient from the start. They wanted to make the hardware as small/thin/light as possible, which meant that the power requirements had to be low. To give an example of the effects of this, a requirement for using as little power as possible has been the reason iOS has always limited multitasking.
Of course, the employees probably already spend 2-3 hours/year dealing with the piece of shit that is Microsoft Office. They probably also devote some amount of IT time and resources to dealing with licensing and activation issues, additional troubleshooting associated with imaging and installation procedures, etc.
Actually, really, I'm not being fair. MS Office is not a piece of shit. It's a really good application, though the whole installation/licensing/activation thing can be a bit of a nightmare at times. LibreOffice is also a very good application that most people could use as their office suit without serious difficulties. Mostly people just get upset because people know it's free. The fact that it's cheap makes them think it's "cheap" in the sense of "flimsy" and "poor quality", so they resent being moved onto it. That seems to be the single largest issue, in my experience.
but are there any examples of our successfully reverse-engineering a system as complex as we are robustly enough to make those sorts of determinations?
I don't know if there is a system as complex as we are, so you're right, it's going to be difficult. On the plus side, we've already been working on the project for a few thousand years, and we started making some real progress in the last hundred years or so.
As someone with a science background, I always find it shocking how much random guesswork goes on in medicine. You'd think that we could take a person in, take a bunch of different samples for analysis, test their DNA, run a full body scan, and just find anything that wasn't working the way it should. Ideally, I think our goal should be to be able to find illness even when the patient doesn't know it's there.
It'd be great, for example, if you could go to the doctor and get a battery of tests, and have him say, "Hey, so you've been feeling a bit tired recently, right?"
The patient says, "Yeah, I guess I haven't been sleeping well, and..."
And the doctor interrupts, "Nope. I'm pretty sure the problem is that you haven't been eating enough [whatever]. It's causing too much of [something] in your system, which is causing you to be lethargic."
I would imagine that part of the problem is that you can't establish what constitutes a problematic variance from "normal" until you establish what is an acceptable variance from "normal". You can't establish what constitutes an acceptable variance from "normal" until you have some baseline of "normal".
I guess I'd better go get 0.07 of an arm amputated.
Yeah, but what if someone starts pumping the water out faster than rain is refilling it?
I'm not particularly happy with the state of education, and I might agree that it'd be more effective to spend extra money on having more/better teachers rather than more computing equipment. I would just argue-- and you don't seem averse to this-- that providing each student with a computer *could* be a helpful educational tool. I think the problem that we run into tends to be that we want computers to be a replacement for good teachers and high-quality educational materials rather than a supplement.
then you may as well just give the server the AES key and ask it to decrypt the file
But in that model, if "the server" has the key, wouldn't Dropbox have the key? I thought that was the whole thing people were freaking out about.
I understand what you (and the AC) are saying about storing an encrypted key on the server, and then re-encrypting the key for each new user you'd want to share with. That's a clever arrangement and I admit that I hadn't thought of it, but it still seems like it has the potential to create more complexity than most people want to deal with. It still means you need to manage various encryption keys, and we (Internet culture) seem intent on not developing a coherent system for managing encryption keys.
I might be misunderstanding, but how does having a well protect you from people depleting the groundwater? If the groundwater is depleted, doesn't your well go dry?
There is nothing that providing a laptop per child affords that can't be accomplished through classroom media presentation devices (computer & projector) and a good school computer lab.
I would guess it depends on the implementation of the program. Giving kids laptops and then doing everything else the same old way doesn't really help. However, it opens up the possibility of having lessons that include multimedia, interactive lessons, and lessons in logic/programming. If you have some kind of open-source textbooks available on the computers, then you might be saving money over buying textbooks. The kids can' use the computers to write their papers, which is potentially more convenient and efficient then writing by hand. Teachers can potentially provide tests online which are automatically and immediately tabulated. They can take paper submissions online, grade online, provide faster feedback.
Media presentations in the classroom can't be interactive, and can't allow students to focus on the area that they're interested in or need the most help in. Everyone needs to look at the same thing. Computer labs assume that you have a few discrete tasks that will take place on the computer, and that computing isn't integrated into the curriculum. I remember the days when kids had to write/edit their papers by hand, and were only allowed in the computer room to type up the final draft, which is a dumb way of doing things.
I don't know what the best solution is, but it seems to me that it would be worth providing a cheap tablet to children just to avoid having them carry around 50 lbs of books.
I think the problem here is, to some extent, people assume that "STEM" degrees are somehow special. I suspect that impression largely comes from the egocentrism of people who hold "STEM" degrees.
I keep putting "STEM" in quotes because it's a dumb term. I don't know why people have suddenly decided to use this term. I suspect it was come up with by some marketing/propaganda professional, at the request of either a politician or businessman who was looking to push an agenda. Otherwise, I can't think of how such a stupid term came on so quickly, in apparent ignorance of the fact that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics cover a broad range of fields, education, and types of work.
But it seems as though programmers and CS majors have really latched on, I suppose in order to place themselves in the same class as astrophysicists and god knows what else. This has lead to an assumption that, if you have the capability to work in a "STEM" job, of course you'd want to. I mean, it's understandable why a marketing major would want to become a programmer, but why on earth would a CS major want to work in marketing?
The truth is, lots of us chose our major in college when we were in our late teens, when we didn't have a lot of experience. Maybe the we chose a major because we were interested in the subject, and not for vocational training. Maybe we chose a major for vocational training, at at some point afterwards realized that we didn't want that vocation. It will happen for marketing majors and CS majors both.
Not really. About 10 years ago, the word actually referenced a particular group of people. A few years ago, it meant something like, "People who think they're cool, but I don't think they're cool, and so I don't like that they think they're cool." Now, apparently it means, "something I don't like."
I haven't tried out Yosemite yet, but I generally like the flat look.
More specifically, I think things should generally be flat so that texture and dimension stand out. Having textures, depth, and animation in a UI can be a great way to provide visual cues, letting you immediately grasp the differentiation between elements and give you a sense of what the UI can do without explanation. However, the texture, depth, and animation can only provide those cues when it stands out against an otherwise static and flat UI. Having a UI where everything is textured and in motion creates a confusing mess. Remember web pages in the mid-90s?
I've actually thought that Windows, since XP, has overdone things in the UI. It has too may bright, garish colors and gradients, fake glass effects, etc. It doesn't make it attractive, and doesn't make the UI easier to understand. Metro aside, the Windows 8 flat design is easier on the eyes. I think the Yosemite screenshots so far look pretty good, though I want to withhold judgment until I see it in action.
I don't know. That's not what "hipster" meant as of a few years ago, but now it seems to mean everything. My mom is a hipster because she owns an iPad. My dog is a hipster because it eats canned dog food. Microsoft is a hipster because it created a new GUI.
I think we're just done with that word.
My hard disk has nothing to do with privacy; anyone who can SSH into my computer can read my hard disk.
Really? Can you give me the IP, login, and password? I'm curious. I normally set up SSH in such a way to prevent any ol' person on the Internet from logging in, but that's just me.
anybody logged in to the Internet can read your dropbox
Maybe if you share your whole Dropbox publicly, and then pass the link around. But as for me, I usually don't do that. In fact, my company Dropbox is set up so that I can't even share files with people outside of my company. I guess Dropbox can see my data, but that's not the same as "anybody logged in to the Internet".
How is this insightful?
Also, Dropbox is quite popular because of the capability to share files. So I upload a file to Dropbox, and then at some point I want to make it available to my coworker. I can either share it so that it appears in my coworker's Dropbox, or I can just create a public link and allow anyone to access it if I want.
The simplest model of client-side encryption would not allow for that kind of sharing. I'd encrypt the files with an encryption key, and then I'd need that private encryption key to be able to decrypt it. The next simplest scheme would be standard public-key encryption, which would mean that when the file was encrypted in the first place, I'd have to already know who should be allowed access, and I'd have to use their public key for encryption.
Now I'm not saying that the problem is insurmountable, but it certainly increases the complexity of the system required. The simplest solution that I can think of would be to set it up so that, when you changed the permissions on the file, it would need to be downloaded, decrypted, rencrypted, and reuploaded. If it came to that, I'd generally rather forgo the encryption, since my data doesn't really require that much privacy. The other option that I could see would be that, when you want to share your data, you pass a private encryption key to the person you're sharing with. However, that would mean that you're either giving them the encryption key to your entire Dropbox, or you're going to end up managing a different encryption key for each file.
Maybe I'm missing a simpler solution, but in the end, it doesn't seem like a trivial problem.
Windows 8 Metro Hipster UI
Well, it's official, people. The word "hipster" is dead. It's now being used merely as an epithet for anything that you don't like, including describing graphical user interfaces for server operating systems.
We can all stop using it now.
Unifying the OS doesn't necessarily mean unifying the GUI. I think the problem with Windows 8 is that they did the opposite: fragmented the OS while trying to unify the GUI across disparate platforms.
What's terrifying about this is, there has been a precedent set that being a "terrorist" voids your constitutional rights. If you're a terrorist, the US government can assassinate you, even if you're a citizen. They can lock you up indefinitely in secret prisons. They can spy on all of your communications, and conduct searches that are otherwise illegal. They can torture you. They can do anything they want in the name of "winning the War on Terror".
So once you have that kind of policy towards terrorism, there's only one thing, in theory, protecting your constitutional rights: a strict definition of 'terrorist'.
If terrorist have no rights, and anyone can be considered a terrorist, then nobody's rights are protected. Now someone might respond, "No, you still have your rights. You can speak freely, you can bear arms, there are no soldiers in your house, and the government isn't searching through your belongings." And you're right. I currently have all of those freedoms. However, if those freedoms are contingent on the will of a government official, and those freedoms can be arbitrarily taken away, then they aren't 'rights' anymore.
They watch the news and have "facts" spoon fed to them by people with their own agenda.
It's actually a little bit worse than that. We could all be spoon-fed "facts" saying the DHS is terrible, and we could all agree it should be dismantled. And then the DHS will politely go about its way while the rest of us do nothing. While we very much enjoy judgmentally shaking our heads at the terrible things that go on in this world, very few people are willing to do anything about it.
That is also a very good point. Licensing fees are often per-processor or per-machine. If I buy 20 old servers and want to buy Windows Server licensing to go with it, I have to buy a separate version of Windows Standard for each. If I buy a single new, extremely powerful server, I might be able to set up 20 virtual servers, and only have to buy 1 copy of Windows Datacenter. And that's just talking about the OS.
Guy who sells used computer hardware claims that buying new computer hardware is a bad idea, and that you should buy used gear instead. News at 11.
Not what this guy is saying is wrong, but there are other unaddressed issues. They cover issues like "power savings", but not the much more important issue of buying an unknown piece of hardware from an unknown vendor, without a warranty. Aside from that, sometimes there are issues of physical constraints-- like I have limited space, limited ventilation, and one UPS to supply power. Do I want to buy 5 servers, or one powerful one?
Also, it's not true that hardware isn't advancing. In the past few years, USB has gotten much faster, virtualization support has improved, drives and drive interface has gotten faster, etc.
And sometimes, buying "new" is more about getting a known quantity with support, rather than wagering on a crap-shoot.