Nokia-Siemens are basically stating (correctly) 'we didn't do anything there that we aren't required to do elsewhere.' That's all well and good, but it doesn't address the fundamental question: Is what they did in Iran (and do elsewhere) the Right Thing?
The whole question about how - and when, and who - to intercept in the context of the Internet is particularly troubling. Here's an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote about the situation:
Nokia-Siemens, defending its role in the creation of a centralised mobile telecommuncations network, stated recently that:
In most countries around the world, including all EU member states and the U.S., telecommunications networks are legally required to have the capability for Lawful Intercept and this is also the case in Iran. Lawful Intercept is specified in standards defined by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project).
Yes, decentralised communications come at a cost. They make surveillance efforts of all kinds more difficult. The two competing questions we need to ask ourselves are:
How far are we willing to compromise ourselves in the pursuit of state security?
How much are we willing to compromise state surveillance capability in order to protect our own freedom to communicate?
These are knotty issues with complex and often subtle ramifications on society. They demand a level of public engagement on the principle - and more importantly, the practice - of free speech that we havenâ(TM)t seen since the Red Scare of the 1950s.
why are they cloning better drug dogs, when you could completely solve the problem simply by cloning people who aren't drug dealers?
No, because then they'd need performance-enhanced canines to find out who's who, and we'd be reading a slashdot story about drugged clone-sniffing dogs.
True, but because it is so much easier to copy books today it is also easy to cause far greater harm to the copyright holders. Today any idiot can easily and anonymously copy and distribute a book by the millions, so it can be argued that actually today there is a greater need for stiff fines as deterrence, or alternatively, a new workable model of protecting the rights of the author and incentive to create, without the need for such strict enforcement of copyright but unfortunately there is no such model yet.
I'm sympathetic to the latter argument, that a 'new, workable model' of managing creative works be considered. But you've made a mistake by assuming a priori that it will be envisioned and enacted as including a concept of 'rights of the author'. Authors' rights as a definable concept have been nebulous at best since they were first posited.
A fundamental conflict exists between the creator's benefit and society's. It's a natural desire for all creators to want recognition (and ideally, validation) for their work. Creative processes resulting in notable works are time-consuming, exacting and often quite painful on a personal level. Poet Robert Frost memorably described it as 'the pleasure of taking pains.' Unless one receives some kind of reward for those efforts, there is little if any incentive to undergo the pain and effort of the creative process.
Society, on the other hand, benefits most when the fruit of these efforts are replicated simply and as close to no-cost as possible. We can play the chicken-and-egg game of guessing whether society benefits more from its great authors or its newfound ability to reproduce their works at no cost, but the fact remains that society as a whole does not benefit from any restrictions whatsoever on the reproduction of creative works and ideas.
(You can make the argument that creating an environment that makes rewards for creative works more predictable benefits society by allowing creators to prosper, but you'd have to demonstrate some sort of causative relationship between the two. You'd also have to deal with the numerous historical counter-examples where art and culture have flourished in their absence. Until you do, I'll assume that the argument is hypothetical at best.)
The approach that copyright took was to find a happy medium in which creators make reasonable demands on the public in exchange for reasonable limitations on those demands. But those demands are becoming increasingly unreasonable (thanks to Disney et alia) and unenforceable (bittorrent, etc.). The compromise has been subverted by both parties and cannot be remade.
Which leaves is with a sticky question: Can we actually express what we mean when we talk about 'droits d'auteur?' At the risk of oversimplifying, let's start with this broad summary:
The moral rights regime differs greatly between countries, but typically includes the right to be identified as the author of the work and the right to object to any distortion or mutilation of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honour or reputation [...]. In many countries, the moral rights of an author are perpetual.
The basic concept that creators retain some sort of moral (and therefore legal and economic) rights over their creations is implicit in many legal and philosophical arguments concerning creative works. That's all well and good, but the plain fact is that, left to itself, society doesn't recognise or respect them. It does not pay for creative works as 'just desserts'; it recognises and rewards such efforts - usually according to arbitrary and fundamentally fickle criteria.
In short, societies don't recognise author's rights. They reward the ones they like, and they often punish the ones they don't. (And because they are not monolithic, they sometimes do both at once. The list of authors who have perforce lived with this
I understand the point about pixel-perfect control being a shackle and how web is supposed to have the flexibility of displaying on different hardware, different browsers, anything from a PDA to a 24" graphic designer screen.
That's good news. As someone who's been producing content and writing software for the web since about 1995, allow me to say that it's high time this lesson started getting learned.
The mark of a good web developer -and a good browser- is not how they succeed, but how gracefully they fail. It is impossible to predict with any certainty how a website is going to look. Screen metrics, gamma, contrast, software, personal preference, window size etc. etc. etc. all conspire against those refined, pixel-perfect layouts that used to be so popular (and still crop up from time to time).
In the past, people misinterpreted this as an argument for the Lowest Common Denominator, and claimed they were being shackled with reduced expectations. The concept of failing gracefully - designing a site that remains usable and clearly laid out even when viewed with a minimal browser - is slowly catching on, but given the number of trivial operations that require JavaScript, I'd say we've still got a long way to go.
I like the idea of @font, even though I know it means that my eyes will be abused and insulted in new and inventive ways. My only admonition to would-be designers: If your site relies on having a particular font in order to render, you're doing it wrong.
My admonition to browser makers: Do not, not ever, make displaying a page contingent on having a particular font stored locally; and whatever you do, make sure there's a proverbial Big Red Button that allows the user to block fonts with ease.
Best I could tell from this headline: "Unsung, Unpaid Coders Behind Federal IT Dashboard", is that someone is pissed they didn't get part of the bailouts or federal stimulus. Guess what, whats how socialism works, they should get used to it, we'll see much more. It only really works on paper, eventually you have no motivation to work/create if you end up being "Unsung, Unpaid" and it will eventually collapse.
Wrong on 2 counts:
The fact that the coder was not paid for this particular use of the software doesn't mean the coder wasn't paid. There are other kinds of remuneration than license fees. In my lifetime I've made $100s of thousands of dollars getting paid to write software that was released under similar terms.
Experience demonstrates that FOSS does not 'eventually collapse'. Most of the Internet - and many of its biggest commercial entities - are running on FOSS. Apparently, there is a... wait for it... sustainable market for FOSS.
I don't know why the 'FOSS == hobbyist/amateur' myth is getting so much traction these days. It's been demonstrated time and again that most FOSS developers (but not general participants) are paid to do that work by someone. The contributions from true hobbyists tend to be more in skinning, testing, documentation and other meta-level work.
But even though that's true, the thing that most sustains the FOSS system is fundamentally socialist: We don't assume that the code belongs to anyone in particular once it's done. That precept is difficult to implement in the world of atoms, but in a world of limitless replicability, socialism works just fine, thank you very much. In fact, I'd venture to say it's going to survive the next decade in better shape than so-called 'Intellectual Property'.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put on my beret and join the other penguinistas as we storm the storm the Fed. 8^)
The SME Server distro itself is a general-purpose small office server, so it's likely not appropriate for your shop, but their approach to configuration management is simple, well-designed and extremely well-implemented.
Full disclosure: I worked for the company that developed SME Server for a couple of years, and I continue to deploy and support it widely.
According to the fine article there's an opt-out button on the page you get redirected to so I'm not certain that would be necessary:
We also understand that sometimes customers want to surf their own way, without the assistance of services like Domain Helper, so we offer an easy way to opt-out right on the Domain Helper search page.
Not enough. Not nearly.
Allowing people to opt out of something that subverts the very principle of an end-to-end network is not what I would call reasonable. DNS redirection is just wrong. It's not 'okay as long as we give you a choice'; it's just wrong in the 'It breaks the Internet' sense of the word.
Bullshit. Every person on Earth should be allowed, and encouraged, to create web pages. I hate this elitist crap.
You're conflating 'putting content on the web' with 'writing HTML'. They don't mean the same thing.
There is something to be said for your perspective, though: The majority of the 'tag soup' that's crufted up the Web these days is software-generated, not hand-crafted by so-called stupid users.
XHTML would have forced makers of stupid (i.e. non-XML-compliant) software applications to fix their engines. That would have required lots of effort, but the value of such an effort is philosophically similar to enforcing health and safety standards on manufacturing processes. Yes, it's cheaper to create quick and dirty implementations, but the public good is better served by enforcing minimal levels of quality. It increases the cost of production, but increases the value of the product, too.
HTML5 tries for a middle road wherein the parser tries to be more forgiving while at the same codifying the ways in which it should fail. It tries to make the failure modes as graceful and predictable as possible. It's sold as a more pragmatic approach to Tag Soup, a problem that's bedeviled us since FrontPage first reared its zombie head.
For my part, I think it's the wrong approach. I don't think it's as wrong as some of the sins committed by Netscape (<blink>, frames, etc.) and Microsoft (iframe, marquee) in the early days, when they treated the W3C as their bitch, foisting all kinds of stupidity into their browsers, never making more than a token effort at interoperability and openness. HTML5 is an attempt to move incrementally away from the sins of the fathers.
From that perspective, I'm willing to live with the decision to adopt it, but only because the W3C, as an industry consortium, just doesn't have the leverage to force its members into full conformance with properly machine-readable code.
People have always miscalculated the cost of creating HTML. The goal of allowing everyone and their dog to post content - any content - online was considered more important than making sure the content itself would be parseable, extensible (the 'X' in XML) and translatable into other, unforeseeable permutations.
I fundamentally disagree with this contention. I need only point to the mountain of good content lost in a morass of excreta passing for markup for evidence. When we treat user-generated content as a disposable, one-off product that will never again be parsed, processed or transformed, we devalue it. Essentially, we're stating that user-generated content has no enduring merit.
Now, some slashdot wit is almost certainly going to acerbically observe that the vast majority of user-generated content wasn't worthy of being published even once, let alone stored for posterity. That's as may be, but it's not our job to judge the content. It's our job to ensure that it remains useful. And we've failed at that job, in large part because we got lazy about markup, foisting most of the work on people who shouldn't be expected to know better, telling them to rely on software that should.
Or this. I've been actively supporting the work done by the People First Network (specifically their efforts to get a similar project up and running in neighbouring Vanuatu) for years now. PFNet has a network of dozens of HF radio stations transmitting email to the farthest reaches that lacks even the most basic infrastructure.
The service they provide is essential, even saving lives occasionally. When a 7.0 earthquake caused a tsunami in one remote area of the Solomons, PFNet staff were the first to generate casualty and damage reports, accompanied by photos and other documentary evidence. Thanks to their early warning, people downstream of the tsunami received a warning in time to move to higher ground.
However, I think setting up WiFi-based 'grid networks' in developing countries is a great idea, but as others have mentioned, what those countries really need is a lot more basic than WiFi.
Actually, there are few more basic needs than communications. I've been writing a weekly column on the topic for a little over 2 years now, looking at the issue of communications in the South Pacific region. The more I look at the issue, the more I realise that, especially in places where infrastructure (both political and physical) is lacking, poor communications slows everything down.
Access to information and the ability to share knowledge makes everything easier. I'm currently helping one project to build and repair roads throughout the country. One of their first prerequisites was ensuring that they'd have good communications between their work crews and the capital. Solutions like this networ-in-a-box are exactly on the mark. They serve a critical need.
If you address the problems of warlords/dictators and ethnic cleansing, corrupt governments, etc, those countries will build their own Internet infrastructure.
Let's ignore warlords for the moment, because about 90% of the developing world doesn't have to deal with them. As far as corrupt politicians are concerned, well... everyone has them. Everyone. In the country where I live, the biggest problem is that the MP gets elected, disappears to the capital for 4 years, and only reappears at election time. If people could actually keep in touch with him, they might be able to actually get some representation from him. Without communications, though, it's just 'out of sight, out of mind.'
Building awareness about what constitutes real political ability, enabling more principled candidates to learn the tools of their craft and - most importantly of all - enabling a dialogue with constituents scattered across large tracts of difficult terrain... all of this requires better communications than we have at the moment.
It's just a matter of having a stable economy
Not to nit-pick, but it's a matter of building a stable economy, and that doesn't happen without improved communications. Internet is the horse, and it's helping to pull the economic cart.
I expect that 'the Internet' for developing countries will first come in the form of digital cell phone networks, then expand from there.)
Either that or the postgress fanbois really are getting all the chicks and I am on the wrong bandwagon.
I'd reply to this, but my Postgres DBA is here, working on my equipment. Before she got her PhD, she was an Olympic gymnast. She can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch and gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'hot swap'. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some... uh, maintenance to perform.
Care to elaborate a bit on the world without IP laws? How will musicians, writers, movie studios, news organizations, software companies etc even approach covering the costs of producing their work if the first person who buys it can make infinite number of copies and share them with the whole world?
Care to speculate on how artists, musicians, writers, etc. managed in a world that not only lacked IP law, but also lacked the ability to reach anything approaching the kind of widespread audience that's available to modern artists?
Creative artists have survived far longer without so-called Intellectual Property protections than they have with them. And they've done so under far, far less salubrious circumstances.
Seriously, think about it: If strong copyright laws had existed in Elizabethan times, we'd probably have a much smaller Shakespearian canon than we do today. The Folios were compiled after his death by a couple of people who just happened to love his work. They collected partial manuscripts, interviewed actors, even worked from memory. And they did so not out of any particular desire for profit, but because they loved the man's work and wanted it to be remembered.
Tragically, we call these people 'fanbois' today and ridicule their efforts - when we're not busy making them outright illegal. Thank the heavens for simpler times....
I think a spokesman from Nokia claimed that installation of such systems is legally required to build a cellphone network in the western world, so it's not like they'd have had a strong moral standing to deny the sale.
That's correct, but doesn't do anything to excuse Nokia or Siemens.
What it does do is implicate the rest of us in the problem.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been writing about the implications of this issue. In a nutshell, there's an unresolved conflict between logical and physical network design. The Internet was meant to be robust and distributed precisely because we didn't want it to be susceptible to the kind of degradation we're seeing in Iran
.
We have abdicated responsibility for management of the physical networks themselves, relying on old-school, centralised telco models in both carrier-grade and consumer technology.
Our communications systems are symptomatic of our ability to make democracy work. We've been remiss these last 10 years, and have let significant weaknesses creep into our communications, with direct implications on our exercise of democracy.
This is one example where geeks especially should be putting our money where our mouth is. We should be investing significant time and effort into finding ways to mitigate the worst aspects of centralised networks. This means, among other things, making encryption workable, building mesh network applications into consumer devices, and - hardest of all - never, ever letting people forget that what we need is free and open access to the Internet. Not the Web, not just Facebook or Twitter.
We're not paying to subscribe to someone else's data service; we're paying for access to the network itself. We should never have let anyone forget that.
I, for one, am glad Mark Shuttleworth is attempting to put some top-down focus on a user-oriented set of goals into the Ubuntu desktop. Linux has not lacked for technical innovations, it has lacked for a unified vision that elevates the end-user and a chief to get developers to sign on to that vision. Go Mark, go!
BINGO!
You just nailed the flaw in the original article. The author seems to think that FOSS developers somehow need to remain responsive to anything beyond the particular itch they want to scratch. FOSS doesn't work that way. Developers do what they do. If their output is sufficiently interesting, distro-makers package, polish and bundle their work.
See what I did there? I allowed for diversity and division of labour in the FOSS ecosystem. Imagine that! Developers doing what they do best and distro-makers preparing that work for public consumption.
Do poorly-socialised package maintainers sometimes drive their users away? Damn straight. Are there flaws in Linux distros? You bet your boots. But if we're going to criticise them, couldn't we at least point our critiques in the right direction?
FOSS development, packaging and polishing is a decidedly human process, with all the inefficiencies, redundancies and illogical acts that all human processes entail. One can argue (though I never would) that commercial software designed and developed by customer-focused companies is inherently better. In my opinion it just trades one set of problems for another. (If I had to generalise, I'd say it's the difference between often useful but unpolished software and often useless but highly polished software. There are notable exceptions to each case, of course, but statistically, they are exceptions.)
At the end of the day, the FOSS ecosystem has differentiated roles and responsibilities, and the least we could do - if we really want things to improve - is to direct our criticisms to the right people. The folks at Ubuntu are devoted to the goal of making their distro 'Linux for human beings'. I know that when I bitched to them about certain shortcomings, I got a reasoned response from none other than the CTO himself. And given the improvements since that time, it's clear to me that they've taken such critiques to heart.
Linux distros are all decidedly imperfect. But they're a damn sight less imperfect than the alternatives.
Everyone who thinks they are helping by siding with the Iranian opposition has a very poor understanding of Iranian politics. It doesn't matter whether it's from the government or whether it's from regular Western citizens, helping the opposition figures does not help the United States in any way. It just puts a different face on the same anti-Western government.
I'm not American.
Even if I were American, why would I not want to support democracy in principle, even if the results weren't in my favour?
Even if I were only interested in Realpolitik, wouldn't I rather deal with a legitimately elected government than an illegitimate one? Legitimate governments tend to be more moderate and more, uh, sane.
hasn't there been multiple worms for openssl and apache?
i'm suprised i have to make this point yet again, but there are more machines infected than the whole linux marketshare. until linux is really in the hands of the common newb you won't have an apples and apples comparison.
Silence, in this context, really is golden.
The absence of data actually does signify, as far as this argument is concerned. In effective terms, users can find a secure haven in non-Windows systems. There is, admittedly, some truth to the assertion that there's a myth of invulnerability surrounding FOSS systems. Amusingly, black hats seem to buy into it as much as anyone else.
Want effective protection from malware right now? Don't run Windows.
Will that protection exist tomorrow? Will it exist even after everyone and their dog has flocked to FOSS? These are, for the moment, academic questions. Developers, however, deal with such academic questions all the time. My personal feeling is that FOSS developers are up to the task of securing their systems even in the face of concerted attacks.
So what about that famously touted malware vector, 'stupid user tricks'? Ignorance and naivete are vulnerabilities in any system, technical or human. One doesn't have to look far for proof of that. But there's a fundamental logical flaw in this argument when applied to FOSS systems: The argument essentially says, "Once FOSS is just like Windows, it will be just as insecure as Windows."
This assumes that a mass movement to FOSS won't be accompanied by a cultural change, and I can't see how that's possible. The culture of the incurious, uninvolved and too-trusting Windows user is exactly what keeps Linux (and much of FOSS) off the desktop. FOSS punishes each of those tendencies. In effect, it pushes back against the very behaviour that remains Windows' last, greatest vulnerability.
I'm not trying to make the case for cultural change. Frankly, I'm getting jaded enough that I'm not so sure there will ever be a year of Linux on the desktop. But here's the thing: I don't care. Linux (and FOSS systems generally) work for me and my customers now. That's enough for today. I'll continue looking ahead with caution, but today, at least, I'm safe, and most of the rest of the world is not.
I believe it was Lawrence Lessig who elaborated on this most clearly when he said that a constitution is really nothing more than a piece of paper. It cannot stop anyone. It is nothing more than an ideal to live by.
By 'nothing more' I assume you mean 'nothing less'.
Hacking (or blackjacking, to use the vernacular) cells has been in existence for quite awhile, with probably Thai coders taking the lead, with Chinese, Americans, Germans and Brits coming up from the rear.....
That must be uncomfortable for the Thais...
... What? Oh! 'Coming up from the rear.' Forget I said anything.
And I will defend curling as a wonderful pass-time.
This is the second time I've seen someone use the non-word "passtime", so I'm going Spelling Nazi on your ass. "Passtime" or "pass-time" is not a word. The word you're looking for is "pastime."
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to your problem is whole disk encryption, not trying to delete the data.
Feh. Your so-called answer does not include the word 'thermite' or the phrase 'earth-shattering kaboom'. And you call yourself a geek?
And the company themselves debunked this rumor. http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press+releases/news-archive/Provision+of+Lawful+Intercept+capability+in+Iran.htm
That's a rebuttal, not a refutation.
Nokia-Siemens are basically stating (correctly) 'we didn't do anything there that we aren't required to do elsewhere.' That's all well and good, but it doesn't address the fundamental question: Is what they did in Iran (and do elsewhere) the Right Thing?
The whole question about how - and when, and who - to intercept in the context of the Internet is particularly troubling. Here's an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote about the situation:
These are knotty issues with complex and often subtle ramifications on society. They demand a level of public engagement on the principle - and more importantly, the practice - of free speech that we havenâ(TM)t seen since the Red Scare of the 1950s.
why are they cloning better drug dogs, when you could completely solve the problem simply by cloning people who aren't drug dealers?
No, because then they'd need performance-enhanced canines to find out who's who, and we'd be reading a slashdot story about drugged clone-sniffing dogs.
True, but because it is so much easier to copy books today it is also easy to cause far greater harm to the copyright holders. Today any idiot can easily and anonymously copy and distribute a book by the millions, so it can be argued that actually today there is a greater need for stiff fines as deterrence, or alternatively, a new workable model of protecting the rights of the author and incentive to create, without the need for such strict enforcement of copyright but unfortunately there is no such model yet.
I'm sympathetic to the latter argument, that a 'new, workable model' of managing creative works be considered. But you've made a mistake by assuming a priori that it will be envisioned and enacted as including a concept of 'rights of the author'. Authors' rights as a definable concept have been nebulous at best since they were first posited.
A fundamental conflict exists between the creator's benefit and society's. It's a natural desire for all creators to want recognition (and ideally, validation) for their work. Creative processes resulting in notable works are time-consuming, exacting and often quite painful on a personal level. Poet Robert Frost memorably described it as 'the pleasure of taking pains.' Unless one receives some kind of reward for those efforts, there is little if any incentive to undergo the pain and effort of the creative process.
Society, on the other hand, benefits most when the fruit of these efforts are replicated simply and as close to no-cost as possible. We can play the chicken-and-egg game of guessing whether society benefits more from its great authors or its newfound ability to reproduce their works at no cost, but the fact remains that society as a whole does not benefit from any restrictions whatsoever on the reproduction of creative works and ideas.
(You can make the argument that creating an environment that makes rewards for creative works more predictable benefits society by allowing creators to prosper, but you'd have to demonstrate some sort of causative relationship between the two. You'd also have to deal with the numerous historical counter-examples where art and culture have flourished in their absence. Until you do, I'll assume that the argument is hypothetical at best.)
The approach that copyright took was to find a happy medium in which creators make reasonable demands on the public in exchange for reasonable limitations on those demands. But those demands are becoming increasingly unreasonable (thanks to Disney et alia) and unenforceable (bittorrent, etc.). The compromise has been subverted by both parties and cannot be remade.
Which leaves is with a sticky question: Can we actually express what we mean when we talk about 'droits d'auteur?' At the risk of oversimplifying, let's start with this broad summary:
The basic concept that creators retain some sort of moral (and therefore legal and economic) rights over their creations is implicit in many legal and philosophical arguments concerning creative works. That's all well and good, but the plain fact is that, left to itself, society doesn't recognise or respect them. It does not pay for creative works as 'just desserts'; it recognises and rewards such efforts - usually according to arbitrary and fundamentally fickle criteria.
In short, societies don't recognise author's rights. They reward the ones they like, and they often punish the ones they don't. (And because they are not monolithic, they sometimes do both at once. The list of authors who have perforce lived with this
Pro Tip: if you're going to mock people for not understanding a subject, at least be sure to spell the name of that subject correctly when you do it.
Aw, lay off him. He just left a gap so big in the word that an 'a' fell in.
(... Hmmm... this may be why there are so few kerning jokes....)
That's good news. As someone who's been producing content and writing software for the web since about 1995, allow me to say that it's high time this lesson started getting learned.
The mark of a good web developer -and a good browser- is not how they succeed, but how gracefully they fail. It is impossible to predict with any certainty how a website is going to look. Screen metrics, gamma, contrast, software, personal preference, window size etc. etc. etc. all conspire against those refined, pixel-perfect layouts that used to be so popular (and still crop up from time to time).
In the past, people misinterpreted this as an argument for the Lowest Common Denominator, and claimed they were being shackled with reduced expectations. The concept of failing gracefully - designing a site that remains usable and clearly laid out even when viewed with a minimal browser - is slowly catching on, but given the number of trivial operations that require JavaScript, I'd say we've still got a long way to go.
I like the idea of @font, even though I know it means that my eyes will be abused and insulted in new and inventive ways. My only admonition to would-be designers: If your site relies on having a particular font in order to render, you're doing it wrong.
My admonition to browser makers: Do not, not ever, make displaying a page contingent on having a particular font stored locally; and whatever you do, make sure there's a proverbial Big Red Button that allows the user to block fonts with ease.
I find developing Free software very rewarding, too, but I think we have different definitions for the word. In my definition, I get to keep my soul.
I get paid good money to do work with FOSS, too, but the 'keep your soul' part really sealed the deal for me.
Wrong on 2 counts:
I don't know why the 'FOSS == hobbyist/amateur' myth is getting so much traction these days. It's been demonstrated time and again that most FOSS developers (but not general participants) are paid to do that work by someone. The contributions from true hobbyists tend to be more in skinning, testing, documentation and other meta-level work.
But even though that's true, the thing that most sustains the FOSS system is fundamentally socialist: We don't assume that the code belongs to anyone in particular once it's done. That precept is difficult to implement in the world of atoms, but in a world of limitless replicability, socialism works just fine, thank you very much. In fact, I'd venture to say it's going to survive the next decade in better shape than so-called 'Intellectual Property'.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put on my beret and join the other penguinistas as we storm the storm the Fed. 8^)
If you want inspiration about automated configuration management done right, take a look at SME Server. It's got a template-based, event-driven configuration management system with a mature, well-documented API that could easily be appropriated for in-house use.
The SME Server distro itself is a general-purpose small office server, so it's likely not appropriate for your shop, but their approach to configuration management is simple, well-designed and extremely well-implemented.
Full disclosure: I worked for the company that developed SME Server for a couple of years, and I continue to deploy and support it widely.
According to the fine article there's an opt-out button on the page you get redirected to so I'm not certain that would be necessary:
Not enough. Not nearly.
Allowing people to opt out of something that subverts the very principle of an end-to-end network is not what I would call reasonable. DNS redirection is just wrong. It's not 'okay as long as we give you a choice'; it's just wrong in the 'It breaks the Internet' sense of the word.
I think 8e019226-9a00-41f4-b094-6f1545fd84a9 should be fairly easy to remember.
It's even easier when you remember that it's pronounced 'Basil'...
...In Vogon.
Bullshit. Every person on Earth should be allowed, and encouraged, to create web pages. I hate this elitist crap.
You're conflating 'putting content on the web' with 'writing HTML'. They don't mean the same thing.
There is something to be said for your perspective, though: The majority of the 'tag soup' that's crufted up the Web these days is software-generated, not hand-crafted by so-called stupid users.
XHTML would have forced makers of stupid (i.e. non-XML-compliant) software applications to fix their engines. That would have required lots of effort, but the value of such an effort is philosophically similar to enforcing health and safety standards on manufacturing processes. Yes, it's cheaper to create quick and dirty implementations, but the public good is better served by enforcing minimal levels of quality. It increases the cost of production, but increases the value of the product, too.
HTML5 tries for a middle road wherein the parser tries to be more forgiving while at the same codifying the ways in which it should fail. It tries to make the failure modes as graceful and predictable as possible. It's sold as a more pragmatic approach to Tag Soup, a problem that's bedeviled us since FrontPage first reared its zombie head.
For my part, I think it's the wrong approach. I don't think it's as wrong as some of the sins committed by Netscape (<blink>, frames, etc.) and Microsoft (iframe, marquee) in the early days, when they treated the W3C as their bitch, foisting all kinds of stupidity into their browsers, never making more than a token effort at interoperability and openness. HTML5 is an attempt to move incrementally away from the sins of the fathers.
From that perspective, I'm willing to live with the decision to adopt it, but only because the W3C, as an industry consortium, just doesn't have the leverage to force its members into full conformance with properly machine-readable code.
People have always miscalculated the cost of creating HTML. The goal of allowing everyone and their dog to post content - any content - online was considered more important than making sure the content itself would be parseable, extensible (the 'X' in XML) and translatable into other, unforeseeable permutations.
I fundamentally disagree with this contention. I need only point to the mountain of good content lost in a morass of excreta passing for markup for evidence. When we treat user-generated content as a disposable, one-off product that will never again be parsed, processed or transformed, we devalue it. Essentially, we're stating that user-generated content has no enduring merit.
Now, some slashdot wit is almost certainly going to acerbically observe that the vast majority of user-generated content wasn't worthy of being published even once, let alone stored for posterity. That's as may be, but it's not our job to judge the content. It's our job to ensure that it remains useful. And we've failed at that job, in large part because we got lazy about markup, foisting most of the work on people who shouldn't be expected to know better, telling them to rely on software that should.
I think that this is what you're looking for.
Or this. I've been actively supporting the work done by the People First Network (specifically their efforts to get a similar project up and running in neighbouring Vanuatu) for years now. PFNet has a network of dozens of HF radio stations transmitting email to the farthest reaches that lacks even the most basic infrastructure.
The service they provide is essential, even saving lives occasionally. When a 7.0 earthquake caused a tsunami in one remote area of the Solomons, PFNet staff were the first to generate casualty and damage reports, accompanied by photos and other documentary evidence. Thanks to their early warning, people downstream of the tsunami received a warning in time to move to higher ground.
However, I think setting up WiFi-based 'grid networks' in developing countries is a great idea, but as others have mentioned, what those countries really need is a lot more basic than WiFi.
Actually, there are few more basic needs than communications. I've been writing a weekly column on the topic for a little over 2 years now, looking at the issue of communications in the South Pacific region. The more I look at the issue, the more I realise that, especially in places where infrastructure (both political and physical) is lacking, poor communications slows everything down.
Access to information and the ability to share knowledge makes everything easier. I'm currently helping one project to build and repair roads throughout the country. One of their first prerequisites was ensuring that they'd have good communications between their work crews and the capital. Solutions like this networ-in-a-box are exactly on the mark. They serve a critical need.
If you address the problems of warlords/dictators and ethnic cleansing, corrupt governments, etc, those countries will build their own Internet infrastructure.
Let's ignore warlords for the moment, because about 90% of the developing world doesn't have to deal with them. As far as corrupt politicians are concerned, well... everyone has them. Everyone. In the country where I live, the biggest problem is that the MP gets elected, disappears to the capital for 4 years, and only reappears at election time. If people could actually keep in touch with him, they might be able to actually get some representation from him. Without communications, though, it's just 'out of sight, out of mind.'
Building awareness about what constitutes real political ability, enabling more principled candidates to learn the tools of their craft and - most importantly of all - enabling a dialogue with constituents scattered across large tracts of difficult terrain... all of this requires better communications than we have at the moment.
It's just a matter of having a stable economy
Not to nit-pick, but it's a matter of building a stable economy, and that doesn't happen without improved communications. Internet is the horse, and it's helping to pull the economic cart.
I expect that 'the Internet' for developing countries will first come in the form of digital cell phone networks, then expand from there.)
That's exactly what we've done here, anyway.
Either that or the postgress fanbois really are getting all the chicks and I am on the wrong bandwagon.
I'd reply to this, but my Postgres DBA is here, working on my equipment. Before she got her PhD, she was an Olympic gymnast. She can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch and gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'hot swap'. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some... uh, maintenance to perform.
Will Youtube be able to cover its costs? Probably not - but that's probably not the right level to look at the issue.
True, but I suspect everyone is missing the point. The question is: How will Google make money from youtube?
The possibility that they won't is a nightmare scenario, with P2P everything at its logical conclusion.
If Google can't make youtube pay, they fundamentally subvert the whole premise of centralised Internet services built around content delivery....
...and Gladwell looks even more like a vacuous twit. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm okay with that. 8^)
Care to elaborate a bit on the world without IP laws? How will musicians, writers, movie studios, news organizations, software companies etc even approach covering the costs of producing their work if the first person who buys it can make infinite number of copies and share them with the whole world?
Care to speculate on how artists, musicians, writers, etc. managed in a world that not only lacked IP law, but also lacked the ability to reach anything approaching the kind of widespread audience that's available to modern artists?
Creative artists have survived far longer without so-called Intellectual Property protections than they have with them. And they've done so under far, far less salubrious circumstances.
Seriously, think about it: If strong copyright laws had existed in Elizabethan times, we'd probably have a much smaller Shakespearian canon than we do today. The Folios were compiled after his death by a couple of people who just happened to love his work. They collected partial manuscripts, interviewed actors, even worked from memory. And they did so not out of any particular desire for profit, but because they loved the man's work and wanted it to be remembered.
Tragically, we call these people 'fanbois' today and ridicule their efforts - when we're not busy making them outright illegal. Thank the heavens for simpler times....
I think a spokesman from Nokia claimed that installation of such systems is legally required to build a cellphone network in the western world, so it's not like they'd have had a strong moral standing to deny the sale.
That's correct, but doesn't do anything to excuse Nokia or Siemens.
What it does do is implicate the rest of us in the problem.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been writing about the implications of this issue. In a nutshell, there's an unresolved conflict between logical and physical network design. The Internet was meant to be robust and distributed precisely because we didn't want it to be susceptible to the kind of degradation we're seeing in Iran
.
We have abdicated responsibility for management of the physical networks themselves, relying on old-school, centralised telco models in both carrier-grade and consumer technology.
Our communications systems are symptomatic of our ability to make democracy work. We've been remiss these last 10 years, and have let significant weaknesses creep into our communications, with direct implications on our exercise of democracy.
This is one example where geeks especially should be putting our money where our mouth is. We should be investing significant time and effort into finding ways to mitigate the worst aspects of centralised networks. This means, among other things, making encryption workable, building mesh network applications into consumer devices, and - hardest of all - never, ever letting people forget that what we need is free and open access to the Internet. Not the Web, not just Facebook or Twitter.
We're not paying to subscribe to someone else's data service; we're paying for access to the network itself. We should never have let anyone forget that.
BINGO!
You just nailed the flaw in the original article. The author seems to think that FOSS developers somehow need to remain responsive to anything beyond the particular itch they want to scratch. FOSS doesn't work that way. Developers do what they do. If their output is sufficiently interesting, distro-makers package, polish and bundle their work.
See what I did there? I allowed for diversity and division of labour in the FOSS ecosystem. Imagine that! Developers doing what they do best and distro-makers preparing that work for public consumption.
Do poorly-socialised package maintainers sometimes drive their users away? Damn straight. Are there flaws in Linux distros? You bet your boots. But if we're going to criticise them, couldn't we at least point our critiques in the right direction?
FOSS development, packaging and polishing is a decidedly human process, with all the inefficiencies, redundancies and illogical acts that all human processes entail. One can argue (though I never would) that commercial software designed and developed by customer-focused companies is inherently better. In my opinion it just trades one set of problems for another. (If I had to generalise, I'd say it's the difference between often useful but unpolished software and often useless but highly polished software. There are notable exceptions to each case, of course, but statistically, they are exceptions.)
At the end of the day, the FOSS ecosystem has differentiated roles and responsibilities, and the least we could do - if we really want things to improve - is to direct our criticisms to the right people. The folks at Ubuntu are devoted to the goal of making their distro 'Linux for human beings'. I know that when I bitched to them about certain shortcomings, I got a reasoned response from none other than the CTO himself. And given the improvements since that time, it's clear to me that they've taken such critiques to heart.
Linux distros are all decidedly imperfect. But they're a damn sight less imperfect than the alternatives.
Everyone who thinks they are helping by siding with the Iranian opposition has a very poor understanding of Iranian politics. It doesn't matter whether it's from the government or whether it's from regular Western citizens, helping the opposition figures does not help the United States in any way. It just puts a different face on the same anti-Western government.
hasn't there been multiple worms for openssl and apache?
i'm suprised i have to make this point yet again, but there are more machines infected than the whole linux marketshare. until linux is really in the hands of the common newb you won't have an apples and apples comparison.
Silence, in this context, really is golden.
The absence of data actually does signify, as far as this argument is concerned. In effective terms, users can find a secure haven in non-Windows systems. There is, admittedly, some truth to the assertion that there's a myth of invulnerability surrounding FOSS systems. Amusingly, black hats seem to buy into it as much as anyone else.
Want effective protection from malware right now? Don't run Windows.
Will that protection exist tomorrow? Will it exist even after everyone and their dog has flocked to FOSS? These are, for the moment, academic questions. Developers, however, deal with such academic questions all the time. My personal feeling is that FOSS developers are up to the task of securing their systems even in the face of concerted attacks.
So what about that famously touted malware vector, 'stupid user tricks'? Ignorance and naivete are vulnerabilities in any system, technical or human. One doesn't have to look far for proof of that. But there's a fundamental logical flaw in this argument when applied to FOSS systems: The argument essentially says, "Once FOSS is just like Windows, it will be just as insecure as Windows."
This assumes that a mass movement to FOSS won't be accompanied by a cultural change, and I can't see how that's possible. The culture of the incurious, uninvolved and too-trusting Windows user is exactly what keeps Linux (and much of FOSS) off the desktop. FOSS punishes each of those tendencies. In effect, it pushes back against the very behaviour that remains Windows' last, greatest vulnerability.
I'm not trying to make the case for cultural change. Frankly, I'm getting jaded enough that I'm not so sure there will ever be a year of Linux on the desktop. But here's the thing: I don't care. Linux (and FOSS systems generally) work for me and my customers now. That's enough for today. I'll continue looking ahead with caution, but today, at least, I'm safe, and most of the rest of the world is not.
By 'nothing more' I assume you mean 'nothing less'.
Hacking (or blackjacking, to use the vernacular) cells has been in existence for quite awhile, with probably Thai coders taking the lead, with Chinese, Americans, Germans and Brits coming up from the rear.....
That must be uncomfortable for the Thais...
... What? Oh! 'Coming up from the rear.' Forget I said anything.
That's ridiculous. Where would the US get its newscasters, comedians, and singer/songwriters from if not for Canada?
Heh, you've got the emphasis all wrong:
Who would Canada foist all its second-rate newscasters, comedians, and singer/songwriters on if not the US?
You're welcome. 8^)
And how to be lumberjacks.
So? I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay with that.
[Enter plaid chorus...]
And I will defend curling as a wonderful pass-time.
This is the second time I've seen someone use the non-word "passtime", so I'm going Spelling Nazi on your ass. "Passtime" or "pass-time" is not a word. The word you're looking for is "pastime."
Past time someone passed time parsing 'pastime'.