I can't apt-get install mod_security because of their licencing issues.
Don't choose a distro that has that as one of their guidelines then. Debian is a great distribution if you're willing to abide by the principles on which it's built, unfortunatly sooner or later you'll find something that is missing because of it. In all honesty, the easiest thing to do is to build the package for yourself then, if you really want to use debian.
Again, this isn't a solution that works for everyone. There are time-issues, costs asociated with building those packages, and you have to keep them up to date yourself, but if you've got a couple of machines that need that package, building it once and running "dpkg -i" on several machines is a small price to pay
Now, here come all the posts telling me "You just need to do this", or "Point your apt at this server", or x, y, z. Why not just have a setup flag or a config file - perhaps if/etc/allow-other-packages exists, it works.
Really, what did you expect, this is slashdot after all. Nobody is forcing you to use debian, you know, and you can always get involved. But again, many people (like myself) simply don't have the time to get involved and build a package they can install themselves, apt it from someplace, or whatever seems like the best solution at the time.
If this is unacceptable, debian is not the distribution for you. You're better off with Redhat perhaps, or any other distro that doesn't make such an issue out of licensing. This isn't an elitist argument here, saying debian isn't for you in this case, it's simply pointing out that perhaps there are more time- and cost-effective solutions for you.
Distributing child pornography isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it's distributed for free on FreeNet, that means fewer and fewer people paying for it, which hopefully means less child porn all-together.
I don't agree with this idea. We're not really dealing with a good here where the demand decreases as the supply decreases. The demand for pornography (of any type) is there, no matter if there is a supply or not. Without the demand for it, you'd hardly see the amount of pornography available on the internet today. If the "commercial" providers of child pornography in certain countries stop existing, pedophiles will continue swapping home made movies.
Now, if you think potentially allowing more people to VIEW child pornography is inherently bad, and will lead to more child abuse, for instance, this isn't much consolation.
There are some who claim that pornography gives sexual gratification the user can't achieve, and there are others who claim it will make the user search for more material and perhaps (in the case of child pornography) turn the person into a predator. I'm not a psychologist, but I've read research papers where statistics indicate both. As far as I am concerned, both types of studies are usually doing statistical number juggling.
However, the supreme court has even ruled that *fake* child pornography is not criminal, so viewing animated or CGI child porn, for instance, isn't even illegal.
Thank god for free speech...
So, as disgusting as it may be, there doesn't seem to be a concensus that individuals privately viewing something that appears to be child porn is bad for society, and will lead to serious crimes.
How about this hypothetical situation: an adult woman is raped, and the perpetrator videotapes it. About a month later over 100.000 people have downloaded that movie from the internet and "enjoyed" it. Don't you think there is something wrong with people that enjoy other peoples suffering? Don't you think people like that need (at the very least) some help to realise that what they're enjoying is just completely wrong? Now extend this hypothetical example, and replace "adult woman" with "10 year old girl".
As for freenet itself. The idea is a very sound one, however it's being abused for all sorts of purposes. Some people would argue that protecting freedom includes allowing any type of freedom, this is a filosophical matter I'll leave to anarchists and totalitarians to discuss with eachother until they turn blue. What is more interesting is the technological aspect. Freenet turns off a lot of people by the presence of child pornography, by the fact that anyone could be using any storage you add to it to store this kind of material. Technologically, such an open door policy sounds like the dream of any person who likes freedom, but legally it opens up a very large gray area I don't want to venture in.
The word you're looking for is 'futile'. Hand in your geek card:-)
Damn you Douglas Adams, and your witty guide.
The Borg were great, until that Species 8472 business.
The Borg were great until Voyager really. Species 8472 was just the beginning. The borg episodes are full of plotholes in voyager. For instance, the episode where seven of boobs^H^H^H^H^H nine rejoins the collective as an individual, and the voyager crew saves her. Meh, I guess voyager was just full of plotholes. In fact, how many shuttles did they have on that ship?
The Doctor, an emergency backup AI running in the spare CPU time of one smallish starship's computer, can do it.
The Borg Collective, the largest neural net in the known universe, can't.
In TNG you had particle-of-the-week shows, in voyager it was nanoprobe-time. Man, those nanoprobes could do anything: assimilate technology, create life, resurrect the dead, create a conscience,... Ah well, brain off entertainment.
Star Trek: here. Shark: here. Off switch: here.
In theatres near you: Star Trek XXIII: Space Jaws
Voyager is flung back into the delta quadrant, only to find themselves being chased by a giant spaceshark. Will captain Janeway save her crew from being a crunchy snack for the giant spaceshark using Borg nanoprobes? Will the doctor finally pick a name, or will the crew of voyager feed him to the giant spaceshark as snackrifice?
Ooooh, a bright future ahead for the human race. within a couple of decades we'll be able to artificially enhance our brain with implants. In essence, all we need now is a wireless connection and we'll be able to create a network of minds rather than computers. Think of it, an entire species linked in a network, focussing on the betterment of mankind. What could possibly go#@$^#@@#$@#$... NO CARRIER
We are the borg, you will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is useless.
At least with The Bards Tale on my trusty ol' Atari ST, I could spend hours beneath Skara Brae without having to worry about my bank account being emptyied by Interplay.
Yeah, but they got in your wallet none the less. MMORPGs need the monthly subscription to keep paying their staff, servers, and of course make a profit. Single player games don't have those extra costs. If you want to play a persistent game online, and not end up playing on a server that is being maintained by volunteers, scripted by volunteers, and mostly populated by those same volunteers you have to be ready to fork over the cash.
I've played NWN on a persistent world server. If you've ever toyed around with the NWN construction kit, you know what a pain in the ass building a relatively small module was. There were people out there building entire persistent worlds on that engine, which is very impressive... Unfortunatly, it showed that it was a free server... While the content in the world was definatly worth while, the quality of the server was not. Serious load issues (in part to blame on NWN itself), the world itself was extremely bugged (which i don't blame the developers for, since it was a pretty huge undertaking on their part), and (most importantly) very few players.
My message to the current generation of hardcore-games players is: Free yourselves, and run! Stick to the single players while you still can avoid being sucked into a dominance that you might find one day hard to abandon.
The current generation of hardcore players isn't reading this, they're too busy grinding to repair their epix. You're preaching to the choir:) I play WoW in my sparetime, and in my guild there's a couple of these really hardcore kids. If you ask them about wether they mind shelling out x $ per month for a game, they'll happily announce that their parents are paying anyway (either directly, or indirectly). If you ask them if they ever play single player games, you'd be surprised at how many of them play WoW together with another game that takes less time.
Games today are complicated to look at, but stupid, requiring little brainpower (although RTS is an exception to that opinion), and like I said earlier, present day computer leisure-time is being designed to drain your coffers and turn people into currency slaves. (but what's new?)
Yeah, some games are really easy. Take Fable for instance. In less than 13 hours of gameplay you can finish that game, as long as you realise you can easily create an uber character with a few select choices in your abilities. But there are also a few games that really shine. The problem is that as a gamer you've evolved. The gametypes hardly ever change, and a lot of the game rules get recycled so often that you end up waltzing through most games at a very high pace.
But that isn't just a phenomenon in modern games. The old-school games have been recycled like mad. It's hard to be original when thousands of others have been making original things before you were.
If the worst case happens and the telcos "destroy" the internet, why couldn't everybody with a wifi card get together over a metropolitan area and create an internet-like ad-hoc wireless network?
Admirable initiative, however there are a few problems with this infrastructure (technically and legally):
How do you plan on making connections to remote areas? If you want to avoid telcos, you're looking at some very expensive wireless links or getting your own cable there (also very expensive, if not only for the permits you'll need)
How about connecting to other countries? Again, unfeasable over wireless, and if you have to work over telcos for that they've still got you by the proverbial balls.
Since you're setting up a wireless access point I suppose it would be open to anyone to route over. What about the people that use internet for less noble purposes? Since you don't have common carrier status, wouldn't you be held liable for any crimes comitted over that access point?
Face it, telcos have a serious grip on the Internet or whatever network that might follow it, and they know that all too well.
Co-operatives could get together and arrange for microwave links between cities (or, they could buy some of the "dark fiber" that we keep hearing about).
This is a pretty good argument, but soon enough you'll find that that microwave link gets saturated. That dark fiber you managed to buy (hopefully for a decent price) somehow also reached it's bandwidthlimit. Remember that these things aren't that cheap, and most people who buy that sort of stuff expect you to pay them for their use. People just don't throw money away unless there is a small chance of earning more money in doing so. Co-operatives soon become corporations, and within 5 to 10 years from now you'll either find them being sold to a larger telco company (remember all those small ISPs ? Where did they go when they didn't go out of business?), and you'll be back to square one.
Telcos don't own TCP/IP, but they do own the easiest and most cost-effective (since they already own the copper and fibre) medium to transmit it over. Starting a new internet isn't going to solve the problem as sooner or later you're still going to need physical cabling to connect to something. Perhaps you'll even need a gateway to the old Internet. Guess who'll happily provide you with that connection (for a nice price).
Re:Never understand when people say OSS is secure
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Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
I think OSS is the most insecure software out there. Think of it. Anybody could take RedHat's source code, create their own distro filled with back doors and zombie daemons, and then distribute this OS supposedly under the guise of a secure RedHat release.
Much unlike anyone can release a patch for windows on their own that could possibly contain some backdoor, rootkit or malware. As always, obtain your installation media from an official source, and not http://www.freeoperatingsystems.com/hax0r/.
If you are not careful (and it is easy not to be careful when OSS is distributed largely with P2P software and bit torrents), you can end up purposely installing a corrupted OS or application whose code base as been hacked INTERNALLY and exposes your data to great risk.
Most distributions have md5/sha1 sums of their installation media available, and some even sign their packages with pgp signatures. We could go into the discussion of how these signatures can be forged or constructed, but it hasn't happened yet (although it isn't impossible). Not just open source software is vulnerable to the internal cracker threat. This can occur just as easily in a closed source environment where developers/system administrators are careless.
I just never bought the whole OSS is more secure then proprietary software bit.
Neither do I. That doesn't make me a believer in security through obscurity though. The advantage with OSS is that many exploitable application receive patches much faster than some closed source companies. While many developers themselves might not see the bug the exploit takes advantage of, there are teams that help in patching broken software.
OSS has the benefit of being treated with respect by the hacker and OSS communities, its a hobbyist community after all, why sabotate your favourite pasttime? But if OSS produces the dominant OS and applications of choice for the corporate and government communities I think this whole myth of OSS as being more secure will be ended, very quickly.
Tell that to the admins of the recent string of bruteforce attacks. OSS is just as much a target for the average cracker as closed source software is. It's a pity that there's no accurate way to determine the amount of exploits. Many studies skew numbers (both in favor of OSS and closed software), many exploits are still unknown, but in the end it doesn't really matter. The assumption that any software is secure is naive at best, but I'd rather be able to see the exploitable code and have the opportunity to fix it, than to be subjected to very vague and deliberatly obscure patch notes.
Noticed this this morning when a customer called upset about his hosting services being unreachable. A quick traceroute showed one of level3's ip to be down. A few minutes later more customers had problems with different routers from level3. As soon as I saw level3 I knew enough, shrugged it off and told the customer that it was routing problem we couldn't fix but those responsible were most likely already trying to fix it.
It seems fixed now though, so no, this isn't the death of the Internet just yet.
And you're proud of that? I'm not sure it's as funny for everyone who might have benefitted from the service that's been taken down.
Yes, a service got taken down that might have been usefull, but if that service is on the Internet, you should've been prepared to have trolls and script kiddies ruin it for you.
Why do people do this sort of thing? Imagine handing a bunch of kids a carton of eggs. Will they cook the eggs or toss 'm at the first best target? Now imagine the effect of handing every kid a free virtual carton of eggs when they double click on their browser icon. Welcome to the Internet.
Well, you say, they can't charge for free software.
That's not quite true. You can charge money for free software, unless the license explicitly prohibits it. The GPL for instance doesn't prohibit you from selling software, but it doesn't prohibit the customer of copying and redistributing the software either.
They can raise the base computer price $25, and offer a $25 rebate if you buy the commercial software package.
Where I live, 3 out of 4 computer shops have gone out of business because of the cutthroat competition in that area. The last thing these people want is to raise prices while their competitors lower theirs.
They can also sell a 1 year support contract for package b for $50 (and then they buy the service from Geeks on wheels or something for $25).
Computer stores outsourcing their business to college geeks... That'll be the day. Honestly, they're afraid of the high-school/college geek because these are the people that force them to lower prices. Geeks will gladly buy directly from their supplier because they know what parts they need, opposed to mum and dad that just want one of those Intel Pentium 4 with HT-technology from the ads. Those very same geeks will most likely after hours suggest themselves as future suppliers for peripherals.
The remaining problem is that the computer shop buys their computers from HP (for instance) and they may refuse to sell a system without at least MS Works on it because of some contract that they in turn have with Microsoft.
Nah, most computer stores down here sell cheapo motherbords because they want the best margin. Those that sell quality hardware charge you an arm and a leg, forcing geeks to go to their supplier for a reasonable price.
Look, the idea seems good, but Geeks on Wheels will only work if you're working with students. Working people won't want to be bothered for 25$/month with John and Janes problems creating an automated index for their document. If you're teaming up with students as a computer store you're taking a hell of a lot of risk. Maybe geek X doesn't shower, or geek Y simply doesn't show up or even worse can't fix the problem and the customer calls the computer shop with complaints. Hell, if they're in college they might give tech support to the customer completely drunk or stoned, and that's the last thing you want to be asociated with as a reputable business.
They can raise the base computer price $25, and offer a $25 rebate if you buy the commercial software package.
That sort of thing is illegal here and is called coupled sales. It won't get you any jailtime, but it'll get you auditors and econical inspection. You don't want these people in your store.
its just like XML, its about as extensible or cross platform as Eddie Murphy is to an albino.
I hardly see what comparing java to XML will achieve. I'm not a fan of java myself, but if it gets the job done properly, why bash it? Sure, it's not as fast as writing the whole thing in C/C++, but for most people speed is a non-issue and the solution is what counts.
Looking at post-secondary curriculum I see nothing but Java being taught, and I think this is a pretty big mistake.
If the curriculum only includes Java isn't it the students responsibility to expand his knowledge further? I'd much rather have schools focussing on teaching people the right way to program in one language, in stead of teaching them x programming languages badly. Once you've learnt the principles behind certain techniques, applying them to other languages is sometimes simply a matter of changing keywords or a little bit of syntax.
if you don't undersstand the fundamentals of how computer hardware and operating systems interact, you don't stand a chance at either staying interested or actually writing anything not crappy.
True and false. It depends on what level you're programming. If you're designing an API for FooWidget, the most commonly used cross-platform communications layer between programs, you might need to have such extensive knowledge. But if you're writing a small application that simply uses those APIs, why would you need to know all of the internals? Isn't that the sort of thing OO is meant to prevent? Needless to say, the extra knowledge is always a boon, and comes handy in analyzing potential problems.
the IT industry was flooded with fucking asshats interested in it only for the money.
Hey, I love coding, but I won't hesitate to say that I'm in it for the money. I have to eat, pay the roof above my head and provide for my family. I'm essentially in it for the money, despite the fact that I just love coding.
I recall quite clearly a former friend who was a landscaper. I didn't see him for a couple of years and then ran into him downtown where he told me he was learning C++ and Java, at which point I suddenly felt the urge to vommit.
Hey, I've met philosophy students, historians and chemists that somehow ended up in programming. Some of them are bad programmers, and some of them are good programmers, but the same can be said from people who graduate in IT. I've seen kids come out of IT with little or no knowledge of TCP/IP.
Don't look down on people because of what they studied, that doesn't always mean they will be bad programmers.
I was going to mod you troll or flamebait for a moment, but you struck up a couple of good points for discussion.
When I take a look at my own siblings, they are more interested in MP3 players and iPODS, and in fact, they listen and play these gadgets on their way to school and back home.
Take away the ipods and other mp3 players and they'll be playing with something else that is cool and popular. Kids are like that. Perhaps they merely bought the ipod because it's so cool to have an ipod these days.
They hardly think about last night's homework...or how to best solve problem they might have encountered.
You mean that kids actually don't think about homework when they're not doing it? Shock and gasp... When I was a kid I didn't spend my time pondering about polynomal function (I hope I translated this correctly), and I certainly didn't care about the complexity of the different kinds of soil we were studying in geography.
They also spend most of their time on cell phones.
I agree with you on this point. I wonder what a 15 year old (and younger) does with a cellphone in the first place.
Rappers have not helped in this for they even sing (in their songs) <snip> Youngsters listen to this and believe that they too, can make it without taking school serious.
Don't blame music for a problem that is rooted much deeper. The problem doesn't lie with rappers singing about having millions in a bankaccount, or with kids believing that sort of thing. When I was a kid I listened to music that some people would say contained messages from satan himself, still I haven't gone on a murderous rampage (yet).
The problem in our culture is that we're a society focussed almost completely on entertainment, where work is considdered something you need to do in order to get to the fun part. I'm not saying we can't have entertainment, but I notice a lot of people who simply hate working. Music isn't the cause of this, as much as it is a consequence of a trend. When I hear that one of my nephews got a cellphone from his parents just because he went on and on endlessly about it, I tend to think of the time where I actually worked for buying a 386.
What these vulnerabilities all have in common is that they work on programs written in C.
Sure, I'll take the bait...
What the solution is is to only use tools that have safe buffers, where buffer size constraints are enforced at the compiler or execution level. There's no performance penalty inherent in such tools and they make the programmer's job easier.
Lies, lies, damned out lies... Checking your boundaries does cost time, it's not much, but it does cost time. Checking the length of your buffer at compiletime is impossible if you're dealing with a users input (unless you want to limit the length of a string a user can input, or filesize). Checking at execution level means keeping something like an internal counter and throwing an exception. Guess what... That costs CPÜ time. Granted, it's negligable, but it still costs time.
Finally, all programs should run under the constraints of a capabilities system, so that even if the program is 100% malicious, it can only take actions which are pre-defined by a user.
Ah yes, capabilities. Capabilities would most likely run at kernel level, and kernels are typically written (unlike the link you provided) in C or C++. Oh dear, those languages have pointers and the *gasp* unsafe buffers.
For example a chat program should not have the capability to write sectors on a disk, access network ports beyond its allocated port, execute other code, or write or delete files outside of its directory.
So, if I store logs under "my documents\msn logs\" and decide that I want to keep them from now on in "my documents\flying monkeypoo\" I'd have to adjust the capabilities for this program, etc. Most people that use MSN don't even know the difference between chat logs and flying monkeypoo and will happily complain that favourite feature X is too difficult. The "allow MSN Messenger to do X" dialog box gets added, and well, you know the drill...
Switching to new languages with their own set of libraries and perhaps interpreters or VMs won't really solve the problem. These things will be written in C or C++, and some programmer will create a bug, and the floodgates will open again.
Software written in no matter what language will contain bugs, and some bugs allow attackers to do nasty things. The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to submit your programs source to peer review (eg. open source it, allow other trusted companies to review the source under an NDA) and testing, and even then you can never be 100% sure. The only alternative is to fix bugs as soon as they are known, and make it easy for the masses to upgrade.
You mean, photoshop and a couple of hours smearing, copy-pasting, burning and dodging? If you take a look at the pictures you'll find that most of them have used this technique.
I agree that it's a step forward, but I'd harldy call something you can do with Gimp "advanced technology" when it's actually manual labor. Hell, in some pictures they just took a brush and painted a non-matching color over the original image.
When I type evil I was thinking of the case described to me by the state patrol guys - a nine year old girl bound, suspended from the ceiling, and penetrated orally, analy, and vaginally.
While this ranks pretty high on the evil scale, it isn't a typical child molestation case. Most child molestation still happens in the family (most often not even direct line family (parents & siblings)). If you were to take the percentage of people that are interested in BDSM and apply that to child molesters you'd probably get a realistic view on how many will go that far with a child.
But to be honest, I think you've been scared to believe that the worst kind of pedophile is the only kind of pedophile. There are probably pedophiles out there that "simply" don't act on their urges and cope with their affliction. When I try to convince a customer he needs backup software, I always dig out the worst case scenario that I've seen with a customer that didn't have backups. When a police officer is trying to make you worry about pedophiles, he'll probably tell you the worst kind of story he can remember from his career.
Take a minute and imagine how that girl is going to feel when she is eighteen and wanting a normal relationship. She'll either be completely unable to interact with a man in any fashion, or she'll have no boundaries at all. She has been robbed of something that can never be replaced and the harm will never, ever be undone.
Think of the children... Think of the children... I'm sorry if this sounds mocking of this girls horrible experience, I'm sure she won't lead a "normal" life and spends many years in therapy getting over what a mentally disturbed person has done to her. On the other hand, what makes this case different from an adult woman being bound, gagged and raped? The adult woman didn't willingly participate either, yet most people will react more appalled because it was a child. Rape has a serious effect on your relationship or future relationships, wether you're an adult or a child.
I've seen the effect of mass-hysteria that happens when a particulary nasty child molester (eg. one who abducts and then abuses his victim for months) is caught and the press jumps on the story like a pack of rabid hounds onto the scent of blood. First of all, the victims are further traumatized for a couple of extra months while the press interviews the next-door neighbours dogsitter for the fourth time, digs into case details that shouldn't have gone public before the trial commenced, interferes with an ongoing investigation by letting people make outrageous claims.
The result was that FALSE accusations rose to unimaginable proportions. The press also jumped on these, showing the homes of these people on TV. Vigilante justice resulted in property damage and in worst cases people getting injured. It went so far that several fathers were afraid to hug their children because they didn't want to be a pedophile (I'm not kidding here). In the UK dozens of people have been arrested for making "lewd" pictures of their children nude at the beach, and consequently acquitted. (C'mon, my parents have a pic of me in the buff when I was a kid) Hell, even a young boy was arrested for molesting when helping his sister (a toddler) undo her pants to take a leak.
After two months of pedophile craze the media found "reliable" witnesses who claimed there were child molestation networks. After a week or so politicians were being accused of protecting child pornography networks, and for each of these baseless accusations and inquiry had to be started. The justice department was reformed so this could never happen again. The whole thing cost our goverment millions, and contributed NOTHING to those who really were being abused and catching those that did this.
I just find the reactions to this type of crime exaggerated when rape (of an adult) is an equally horrible crime. I would much rather have the ass
Anyone of the attendees could have carried and fired a gun at him at close range.
Who'd want to kill Bill Gates when you can throw pie? Honestly, I'd get more of a kick out of it seeing his face full of whipped cream again than to see him dead.
Aaaaah, the good old days. You can't imagine how hard I laughed when it was on the news here. Too bad nobody gave him some pie as a present this year (gave, not threw)
Now.. is the ID card REQUIRED to use the MSN service, or is it just another level of idenitifcation? One model, such as what Amazon.com uses for reviews, is to accredit reviews with a 'Real Name' sticker if it is indeed the poster's real name (as verified by their credit card). But it isn't required to actually post a review, only to get that extra level of verification.
When it was announced here (yes I'm from Sell-your-privacy Belgium) a minister here spoke at great length about how this would provide chatrooms that children could safely enter without fear of pedophiles. How this could make online banking safe. Etc etc etc
Within seconds my colleages and I had broken this ministers theory. What if your passport is (drumroll) stolen? (Technical crowd bursts out in laughter)
It won't take long before these passports will be forged like any other, and pedophiles will roam the chatrooms and online banking will be done the traditional way (with encryption and a password). When it comes to MSN requiring an eID... Well, I'll just switch to another service and extend my middle finger to our government who (once again) has sold privacy and progress to a large multinational.
The questions that pop up into my mind, even when I'm not considdering the fact that this system might not be as secure as announced by our government, are:
How long before ISPs require their customers to ID themselves and log everything from their proxy linked to that specific ID?
How long before all my e-mail gets signed with my eID?
How long before access to certain public places requires an eID? (eg. library, colleges, universities) How long before access is denied based on eID?
How long before the government starts using the eID to actively track my habits online and in public places?
Yes, I know... It's all tin-foil hat speculation, worst case scenario dramas and overly paranoid mumblings. It's just very disappointing to see my government spending money on a system that can be foiled with something as simple as theft.
As with any tough question this isn't simply answered with Distribution X is obviously the way to go. Corporate focus has been mainly on Redhat and Novell lately. I've heard very good comments from the usability front when it comes from Novell/Suse, although I can't vouch for it myself. But a beginning linux admin can manage their linux servers pretty easily, even in more advanced setups like OpenLDAP.
On the other hand, Redhat seems to somewhat more of a more popular choice for most commercial software and is more widely supported by third parties when it comes to binary drivers. Yet again, your mileage may vary. If you're working for a large company that is willing to pay for support contracts, definatly check out RH Enterprise Linux or RH Advanced Server.
But if you're running on standard hardware, don't need the latest and greatest software (eg. a standard firewall/mailserver), give Debian a try. Together with backports Debian can even be a Samba 3 fileserver, or a mailserver with the latest and greatest spamassassin installed. Debian stable is well, to put it most eloquently, stable.
I've seen a lot of developers start out with a linux from scratch system for embedded systems. Although for server administration, I'd definatly advise not to go down that road. Don't ignore the smaller distros, but remember that your managements warm and fuzzy feeling comes from that reassuring "It's been done before and I have full documentation".
But honestly, do some research on what you're going to run on those machines. Invest a little time into what your management wants, and then use google to find where you get the results you need best. And stop starting flamewars on slashdot:)
If we had the adequate resources, wouldn't we choose NOT to work at all, or just work a little bit?
What irritates me when I don't do anything for a long period of time is that I feel useless. I'm not saying that I am my job, but not having accomplished anything in a long period of time makes me feel that way.
If I had adequate resources, I'd honestly choose to work a little. That way, I'd have enough spare time to do what I want, and enough work to feel as if I've accomplished something.
Do I love my job? Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends on the moment you ask:) But it beats sitting in the couch watching TV all day feeling useless.
That the reason I did reasonably well in high-school with very little outside work was because I went to class. Even if I slept through some of it I was taking it all in. You cannot succeed unless you attend class. Don't think that when you get to college or the real world you can succeed by not showing up just because you don't have to. It doesn't work like that.
The reason I did well in college was because I didn't go. It took a class full of people 3 weeks to understand an iteration. To me that was a given. Granted, in my second year I went more often, not because of the intresting programming classes, but the difficulty of non-computer classes.
Even now when there's certification courses, I'd rather take the time to study them on my own than go to classes filled with people that don't understand netmasks or recursion. I just find it a waste of time to sit through something I can teach myself quicker.
That's correct. Nice little country with a lot of laws that are fair (especially when it comes to copyright and privacy). For example, I don't know how it's in the US on the privacy matter, but ANY traffic you generate on your employers network may only be statistically analysed. If your employer wants to look at the content of your network traffic, he has to petition your union (if you're unionized, which most people here are) and he has to have your written approval.
It even goes as far as differentiating between general network traffic, web traffic and email, although most companies go for the "let's make 'm sign everything"-approach. It's covered in your basic workers rights, and the penalties are quite severe. The right to privacy here even extends further into private internet connections where the government regulated that ISPs may not release personal information of customers without proper warrants.
The bad thing about it is that our government is slowly (but steadily) pushing to take some of these freedoms away. Fear of terrorists and pedophiles is slowly taking over our legaslative system and while unions in Belgium are still touchy about privacy at work they can't attract much attention in the media without being painted as irrational.
To bad that is not the situation here in the USA.
As I said above, times are changing here as well. I fear that consumer rights and privacy rights will be a thing of the past in 20 years from now in most European countries. While many politicians have Good Ideas, they fail to put them into words properly creating very large gray areas or come out looking ridiculous.
Some politicians have Bad Ideas as well, such as protecting children by enforcing the use of electronic identity cards in chatrooms to protect them from predators. With very little knowledge of what actually can be an online forum (an http bulletin board, or perhaps even usenet) to chatrooms (the java applet kind, IRC or even instant messengers like MSN and ICQ) they will happily write legislation that can't be implemented technically without everyone implementing it at once or outlawing the Internet in the rest of the world.
My guess is that most of the problems that we're seeing these days in this country isn't just because people can be bribed by companies out to earn yet another buck, but that most politicians don't have a good insight into how technology like the internet works. A couple of weeks ago one of our more prominent politicians was on the news claiming he had invented a sure way to protect our children on the internet (as mentioned above), only to be laughed at by most of the geek community with the typical "Do you really think children will use that once they learn how to circumvent it?"
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Don't choose a distro that has that as one of their guidelines then. Debian is a great distribution if you're willing to abide by the principles on which it's built, unfortunatly sooner or later you'll find something that is missing because of it. In all honesty, the easiest thing to do is to build the package for yourself then, if you really want to use debian.
Again, this isn't a solution that works for everyone. There are time-issues, costs asociated with building those packages, and you have to keep them up to date yourself, but if you've got a couple of machines that need that package, building it once and running "dpkg -i" on several machines is a small price to pay
Really, what did you expect, this is slashdot after all. Nobody is forcing you to use debian, you know, and you can always get involved. But again, many people (like myself) simply don't have the time to get involved and build a package they can install themselves, apt it from someplace, or whatever seems like the best solution at the time.
If this is unacceptable, debian is not the distribution for you. You're better off with Redhat perhaps, or any other distro that doesn't make such an issue out of licensing. This isn't an elitist argument here, saying debian isn't for you in this case, it's simply pointing out that perhaps there are more time- and cost-effective solutions for you.
I don't agree with this idea. We're not really dealing with a good here where the demand decreases as the supply decreases. The demand for pornography (of any type) is there, no matter if there is a supply or not. Without the demand for it, you'd hardly see the amount of pornography available on the internet today. If the "commercial" providers of child pornography in certain countries stop existing, pedophiles will continue swapping home made movies.
There are some who claim that pornography gives sexual gratification the user can't achieve, and there are others who claim it will make the user search for more material and perhaps (in the case of child pornography) turn the person into a predator. I'm not a psychologist, but I've read research papers where statistics indicate both. As far as I am concerned, both types of studies are usually doing statistical number juggling.
Thank god for free speech...
How about this hypothetical situation: an adult woman is raped, and the perpetrator videotapes it. About a month later over 100.000 people have downloaded that movie from the internet and "enjoyed" it. Don't you think there is something wrong with people that enjoy other peoples suffering? Don't you think people like that need (at the very least) some help to realise that what they're enjoying is just completely wrong? Now extend this hypothetical example, and replace "adult woman" with "10 year old girl".
As for freenet itself. The idea is a very sound one, however it's being abused for all sorts of purposes. Some people would argue that protecting freedom includes allowing any type of freedom, this is a filosophical matter I'll leave to anarchists and totalitarians to discuss with eachother until they turn blue. What is more interesting is the technological aspect. Freenet turns off a lot of people by the presence of child pornography, by the fact that anyone could be using any storage you add to it to store this kind of material. Technologically, such an open door policy sounds like the dream of any person who likes freedom, but legally it opens up a very large gray area I don't want to venture in.
Damn you Douglas Adams, and your witty guide.
The Borg were great until Voyager really. Species 8472 was just the beginning. The borg episodes are full of plotholes in voyager. For instance, the episode where seven of boobs^H^H^H^H^H nine rejoins the collective as an individual, and the voyager crew saves her. Meh, I guess voyager was just full of plotholes. In fact, how many shuttles did they have on that ship?
In TNG you had particle-of-the-week shows, in voyager it was nanoprobe-time. Man, those nanoprobes could do anything: assimilate technology, create life, resurrect the dead, create a conscience,... Ah well, brain off entertainment.
In theatres near you: Star Trek XXIII: Space Jaws
Voyager is flung back into the delta quadrant, only to find themselves being chased by a giant spaceshark. Will captain Janeway save her crew from being a crunchy snack for the giant spaceshark using Borg nanoprobes? Will the doctor finally pick a name, or will the crew of voyager feed him to the giant spaceshark as snackrifice?
yeah, i know... i have waaaaaay to much time
Ooooh, a bright future ahead for the human race. within a couple of decades we'll be able to artificially enhance our brain with implants. In essence, all we need now is a wireless connection and we'll be able to create a network of minds rather than computers. Think of it, an entire species linked in a network, focussing on the betterment of mankind. What could possibly go#@$^#@@#$@#$... NO CARRIER We are the borg, you will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is useless.
Yeah, but they got in your wallet none the less. MMORPGs need the monthly subscription to keep paying their staff, servers, and of course make a profit. Single player games don't have those extra costs. If you want to play a persistent game online, and not end up playing on a server that is being maintained by volunteers, scripted by volunteers, and mostly populated by those same volunteers you have to be ready to fork over the cash.
I've played NWN on a persistent world server. If you've ever toyed around with the NWN construction kit, you know what a pain in the ass building a relatively small module was. There were people out there building entire persistent worlds on that engine, which is very impressive... Unfortunatly, it showed that it was a free server... While the content in the world was definatly worth while, the quality of the server was not. Serious load issues (in part to blame on NWN itself), the world itself was extremely bugged (which i don't blame the developers for, since it was a pretty huge undertaking on their part), and (most importantly) very few players.
The current generation of hardcore players isn't reading this, they're too busy grinding to repair their epix. You're preaching to the choir :) I play WoW in my sparetime, and in my guild there's a couple of these really hardcore kids. If you ask them about wether they mind shelling out x $ per month for a game, they'll happily announce that their parents are paying anyway (either directly, or indirectly). If you ask them if they ever play single player games, you'd be surprised at how many of them play WoW together with another game that takes less time.
Yeah, some games are really easy. Take Fable for instance. In less than 13 hours of gameplay you can finish that game, as long as you realise you can easily create an uber character with a few select choices in your abilities. But there are also a few games that really shine. The problem is that as a gamer you've evolved. The gametypes hardly ever change, and a lot of the game rules get recycled so often that you end up waltzing through most games at a very high pace.
But that isn't just a phenomenon in modern games. The old-school games have been recycled like mad. It's hard to be original when thousands of others have been making original things before you were.
Admirable initiative, however there are a few problems with this infrastructure (technically and legally):
Face it, telcos have a serious grip on the Internet or whatever network that might follow it, and they know that all too well.
This is a pretty good argument, but soon enough you'll find that that microwave link gets saturated. That dark fiber you managed to buy (hopefully for a decent price) somehow also reached it's bandwidthlimit. Remember that these things aren't that cheap, and most people who buy that sort of stuff expect you to pay them for their use. People just don't throw money away unless there is a small chance of earning more money in doing so. Co-operatives soon become corporations, and within 5 to 10 years from now you'll either find them being sold to a larger telco company (remember all those small ISPs ? Where did they go when they didn't go out of business?), and you'll be back to square one.
Telcos don't own TCP/IP, but they do own the easiest and most cost-effective (since they already own the copper and fibre) medium to transmit it over. Starting a new internet isn't going to solve the problem as sooner or later you're still going to need physical cabling to connect to something. Perhaps you'll even need a gateway to the old Internet. Guess who'll happily provide you with that connection (for a nice price).
Much unlike anyone can release a patch for windows on their own that could possibly contain some backdoor, rootkit or malware. As always, obtain your installation media from an official source, and not http://www.freeoperatingsystems.com/hax0r/ .
Most distributions have md5/sha1 sums of their installation media available, and some even sign their packages with pgp signatures. We could go into the discussion of how these signatures can be forged or constructed, but it hasn't happened yet (although it isn't impossible). Not just open source software is vulnerable to the internal cracker threat. This can occur just as easily in a closed source environment where developers/system administrators are careless.
Neither do I. That doesn't make me a believer in security through obscurity though. The advantage with OSS is that many exploitable application receive patches much faster than some closed source companies. While many developers themselves might not see the bug the exploit takes advantage of, there are teams that help in patching broken software.
Tell that to the admins of the recent string of bruteforce attacks. OSS is just as much a target for the average cracker as closed source software is. It's a pity that there's no accurate way to determine the amount of exploits. Many studies skew numbers (both in favor of OSS and closed software), many exploits are still unknown, but in the end it doesn't really matter. The assumption that any software is secure is naive at best, but I'd rather be able to see the exploitable code and have the opportunity to fix it, than to be subjected to very vague and deliberatly obscure patch notes.
Not if they can plug it on slashdot for free. 30% marketing reduction cost guaranteed.
damn, you beat me to it :-(
Noticed this this morning when a customer called upset about his hosting services being unreachable. A quick traceroute showed one of level3's ip to be down. A few minutes later more customers had problems with different routers from level3. As soon as I saw level3 I knew enough, shrugged it off and told the customer that it was routing problem we couldn't fix but those responsible were most likely already trying to fix it.
It seems fixed now though, so no, this isn't the death of the Internet just yet.
Yes, a service got taken down that might have been usefull, but if that service is on the Internet, you should've been prepared to have trolls and script kiddies ruin it for you.
Why do people do this sort of thing? Imagine handing a bunch of kids a carton of eggs. Will they cook the eggs or toss 'm at the first best target? Now imagine the effect of handing every kid a free virtual carton of eggs when they double click on their browser icon. Welcome to the Internet.
That's not quite true. You can charge money for free software, unless the license explicitly prohibits it. The GPL for instance doesn't prohibit you from selling software, but it doesn't prohibit the customer of copying and redistributing the software either.
Where I live, 3 out of 4 computer shops have gone out of business because of the cutthroat competition in that area. The last thing these people want is to raise prices while their competitors lower theirs.
Computer stores outsourcing their business to college geeks... That'll be the day. Honestly, they're afraid of the high-school/college geek because these are the people that force them to lower prices. Geeks will gladly buy directly from their supplier because they know what parts they need, opposed to mum and dad that just want one of those Intel Pentium 4 with HT-technology from the ads. Those very same geeks will most likely after hours suggest themselves as future suppliers for peripherals.
Nah, most computer stores down here sell cheapo motherbords because they want the best margin. Those that sell quality hardware charge you an arm and a leg, forcing geeks to go to their supplier for a reasonable price.
Look, the idea seems good, but Geeks on Wheels will only work if you're working with students. Working people won't want to be bothered for 25$/month with John and Janes problems creating an automated index for their document. If you're teaming up with students as a computer store you're taking a hell of a lot of risk. Maybe geek X doesn't shower, or geek Y simply doesn't show up or even worse can't fix the problem and the customer calls the computer shop with complaints. Hell, if they're in college they might give tech support to the customer completely drunk or stoned, and that's the last thing you want to be asociated with as a reputable business.
That sort of thing is illegal here and is called coupled sales. It won't get you any jailtime, but it'll get you auditors and econical inspection. You don't want these people in your store.
I hardly see what comparing java to XML will achieve. I'm not a fan of java myself, but if it gets the job done properly, why bash it? Sure, it's not as fast as writing the whole thing in C/C++, but for most people speed is a non-issue and the solution is what counts.
If the curriculum only includes Java isn't it the students responsibility to expand his knowledge further? I'd much rather have schools focussing on teaching people the right way to program in one language, in stead of teaching them x programming languages badly. Once you've learnt the principles behind certain techniques, applying them to other languages is sometimes simply a matter of changing keywords or a little bit of syntax.
True and false. It depends on what level you're programming. If you're designing an API for FooWidget, the most commonly used cross-platform communications layer between programs, you might need to have such extensive knowledge. But if you're writing a small application that simply uses those APIs, why would you need to know all of the internals? Isn't that the sort of thing OO is meant to prevent? Needless to say, the extra knowledge is always a boon, and comes handy in analyzing potential problems.
Hey, I love coding, but I won't hesitate to say that I'm in it for the money. I have to eat, pay the roof above my head and provide for my family. I'm essentially in it for the money, despite the fact that I just love coding.
Hey, I've met philosophy students, historians and chemists that somehow ended up in programming. Some of them are bad programmers, and some of them are good programmers, but the same can be said from people who graduate in IT. I've seen kids come out of IT with little or no knowledge of TCP/IP.
Don't look down on people because of what they studied, that doesn't always mean they will be bad programmers.
I was going to mod you troll or flamebait for a moment, but you struck up a couple of good points for discussion.
Take away the ipods and other mp3 players and they'll be playing with something else that is cool and popular. Kids are like that. Perhaps they merely bought the ipod because it's so cool to have an ipod these days.
You mean that kids actually don't think about homework when they're not doing it? Shock and gasp... When I was a kid I didn't spend my time pondering about polynomal function (I hope I translated this correctly), and I certainly didn't care about the complexity of the different kinds of soil we were studying in geography.
I agree with you on this point. I wonder what a 15 year old (and younger) does with a cellphone in the first place.
Don't blame music for a problem that is rooted much deeper. The problem doesn't lie with rappers singing about having millions in a bankaccount, or with kids believing that sort of thing. When I was a kid I listened to music that some people would say contained messages from satan himself, still I haven't gone on a murderous rampage (yet).
The problem in our culture is that we're a society focussed almost completely on entertainment, where work is considdered something you need to do in order to get to the fun part. I'm not saying we can't have entertainment, but I notice a lot of people who simply hate working. Music isn't the cause of this, as much as it is a consequence of a trend. When I hear that one of my nephews got a cellphone from his parents just because he went on and on endlessly about it, I tend to think of the time where I actually worked for buying a 386.
Sure, I'll take the bait...
Lies, lies, damned out lies... Checking your boundaries does cost time, it's not much, but it does cost time. Checking the length of your buffer at compiletime is impossible if you're dealing with a users input (unless you want to limit the length of a string a user can input, or filesize). Checking at execution level means keeping something like an internal counter and throwing an exception. Guess what... That costs CPÜ time. Granted, it's negligable, but it still costs time.
Ah yes, capabilities. Capabilities would most likely run at kernel level, and kernels are typically written (unlike the link you provided) in C or C++. Oh dear, those languages have pointers and the *gasp* unsafe buffers.
So, if I store logs under "my documents\msn logs\" and decide that I want to keep them from now on in "my documents\flying monkeypoo\" I'd have to adjust the capabilities for this program, etc. Most people that use MSN don't even know the difference between chat logs and flying monkeypoo and will happily complain that favourite feature X is too difficult. The "allow MSN Messenger to do X" dialog box gets added, and well, you know the drill...
Switching to new languages with their own set of libraries and perhaps interpreters or VMs won't really solve the problem. These things will be written in C or C++, and some programmer will create a bug, and the floodgates will open again.
Software written in no matter what language will contain bugs, and some bugs allow attackers to do nasty things. The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to submit your programs source to peer review (eg. open source it, allow other trusted companies to review the source under an NDA) and testing, and even then you can never be 100% sure. The only alternative is to fix bugs as soon as they are known, and make it easy for the masses to upgrade.
You mean, photoshop and a couple of hours smearing, copy-pasting, burning and dodging? If you take a look at the pictures you'll find that most of them have used this technique.
I agree that it's a step forward, but I'd harldy call something you can do with Gimp "advanced technology" when it's actually manual labor. Hell, in some pictures they just took a brush and painted a non-matching color over the original image.
While this ranks pretty high on the evil scale, it isn't a typical child molestation case. Most child molestation still happens in the family (most often not even direct line family (parents & siblings)). If you were to take the percentage of people that are interested in BDSM and apply that to child molesters you'd probably get a realistic view on how many will go that far with a child.
But to be honest, I think you've been scared to believe that the worst kind of pedophile is the only kind of pedophile. There are probably pedophiles out there that "simply" don't act on their urges and cope with their affliction. When I try to convince a customer he needs backup software, I always dig out the worst case scenario that I've seen with a customer that didn't have backups. When a police officer is trying to make you worry about pedophiles, he'll probably tell you the worst kind of story he can remember from his career.
Think of the children... Think of the children... I'm sorry if this sounds mocking of this girls horrible experience, I'm sure she won't lead a "normal" life and spends many years in therapy getting over what a mentally disturbed person has done to her. On the other hand, what makes this case different from an adult woman being bound, gagged and raped? The adult woman didn't willingly participate either, yet most people will react more appalled because it was a child. Rape has a serious effect on your relationship or future relationships, wether you're an adult or a child.
I've seen the effect of mass-hysteria that happens when a particulary nasty child molester (eg. one who abducts and then abuses his victim for months) is caught and the press jumps on the story like a pack of rabid hounds onto the scent of blood. First of all, the victims are further traumatized for a couple of extra months while the press interviews the next-door neighbours dogsitter for the fourth time, digs into case details that shouldn't have gone public before the trial commenced, interferes with an ongoing investigation by letting people make outrageous claims.
The result was that FALSE accusations rose to unimaginable proportions. The press also jumped on these, showing the homes of these people on TV. Vigilante justice resulted in property damage and in worst cases people getting injured. It went so far that several fathers were afraid to hug their children because they didn't want to be a pedophile (I'm not kidding here). In the UK dozens of people have been arrested for making "lewd" pictures of their children nude at the beach, and consequently acquitted. (C'mon, my parents have a pic of me in the buff when I was a kid) Hell, even a young boy was arrested for molesting when helping his sister (a toddler) undo her pants to take a leak.
After two months of pedophile craze the media found "reliable" witnesses who claimed there were child molestation networks. After a week or so politicians were being accused of protecting child pornography networks, and for each of these baseless accusations and inquiry had to be started. The justice department was reformed so this could never happen again. The whole thing cost our goverment millions, and contributed NOTHING to those who really were being abused and catching those that did this.
I just find the reactions to this type of crime exaggerated when rape (of an adult) is an equally horrible crime. I would much rather have the ass
Who'd want to kill Bill Gates when you can throw pie? Honestly, I'd get more of a kick out of it seeing his face full of whipped cream again than to see him dead.
Aaaaah, the good old days. You can't imagine how hard I laughed when it was on the news here. Too bad nobody gave him some pie as a present this year (gave, not threw)
When it was announced here (yes I'm from Sell-your-privacy Belgium) a minister here spoke at great length about how this would provide chatrooms that children could safely enter without fear of pedophiles. How this could make online banking safe. Etc etc etc
Within seconds my colleages and I had broken this ministers theory. What if your passport is (drumroll) stolen? (Technical crowd bursts out in laughter)
It won't take long before these passports will be forged like any other, and pedophiles will roam the chatrooms and online banking will be done the traditional way (with encryption and a password). When it comes to MSN requiring an eID... Well, I'll just switch to another service and extend my middle finger to our government who (once again) has sold privacy and progress to a large multinational.
The questions that pop up into my mind, even when I'm not considdering the fact that this system might not be as secure as announced by our government, are :
Yes, I know... It's all tin-foil hat speculation, worst case scenario dramas and overly paranoid mumblings. It's just very disappointing to see my government spending money on a system that can be foiled with something as simple as theft.
As with any tough question this isn't simply answered with Distribution X is obviously the way to go. Corporate focus has been mainly on Redhat and Novell lately. I've heard very good comments from the usability front when it comes from Novell/Suse, although I can't vouch for it myself. But a beginning linux admin can manage their linux servers pretty easily, even in more advanced setups like OpenLDAP.
On the other hand, Redhat seems to somewhat more of a more popular choice for most commercial software and is more widely supported by third parties when it comes to binary drivers. Yet again, your mileage may vary. If you're working for a large company that is willing to pay for support contracts, definatly check out RH Enterprise Linux or RH Advanced Server.
But if you're running on standard hardware, don't need the latest and greatest software (eg. a standard firewall/mailserver), give Debian a try. Together with backports Debian can even be a Samba 3 fileserver, or a mailserver with the latest and greatest spamassassin installed. Debian stable is well, to put it most eloquently, stable.
I've seen a lot of developers start out with a linux from scratch system for embedded systems. Although for server administration, I'd definatly advise not to go down that road. Don't ignore the smaller distros, but remember that your managements warm and fuzzy feeling comes from that reassuring "It's been done before and I have full documentation".
But honestly, do some research on what you're going to run on those machines. Invest a little time into what your management wants, and then use google to find where you get the results you need best. And stop starting flamewars on slashdot :)
What irritates me when I don't do anything for a long period of time is that I feel useless. I'm not saying that I am my job, but not having accomplished anything in a long period of time makes me feel that way.
If I had adequate resources, I'd honestly choose to work a little. That way, I'd have enough spare time to do what I want, and enough work to feel as if I've accomplished something.
Do I love my job? Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends on the moment you ask :) But it beats sitting in the couch watching TV all day feeling useless.
The reason I did well in college was because I didn't go. It took a class full of people 3 weeks to understand an iteration. To me that was a given. Granted, in my second year I went more often, not because of the intresting programming classes, but the difficulty of non-computer classes.
Even now when there's certification courses, I'd rather take the time to study them on my own than go to classes filled with people that don't understand netmasks or recursion. I just find it a waste of time to sit through something I can teach myself quicker.
Actually, even for piracy it's still not very useful. It takes the legal battle to the next logical step: the user
That's correct. Nice little country with a lot of laws that are fair (especially when it comes to copyright and privacy). For example, I don't know how it's in the US on the privacy matter, but ANY traffic you generate on your employers network may only be statistically analysed. If your employer wants to look at the content of your network traffic, he has to petition your union (if you're unionized, which most people here are) and he has to have your written approval.
It even goes as far as differentiating between general network traffic, web traffic and email, although most companies go for the "let's make 'm sign everything"-approach. It's covered in your basic workers rights, and the penalties are quite severe. The right to privacy here even extends further into private internet connections where the government regulated that ISPs may not release personal information of customers without proper warrants.
The bad thing about it is that our government is slowly (but steadily) pushing to take some of these freedoms away. Fear of terrorists and pedophiles is slowly taking over our legaslative system and while unions in Belgium are still touchy about privacy at work they can't attract much attention in the media without being painted as irrational.
As I said above, times are changing here as well. I fear that consumer rights and privacy rights will be a thing of the past in 20 years from now in most European countries. While many politicians have Good Ideas, they fail to put them into words properly creating very large gray areas or come out looking ridiculous.
Some politicians have Bad Ideas as well, such as protecting children by enforcing the use of electronic identity cards in chatrooms to protect them from predators. With very little knowledge of what actually can be an online forum (an http bulletin board, or perhaps even usenet) to chatrooms (the java applet kind, IRC or even instant messengers like MSN and ICQ) they will happily write legislation that can't be implemented technically without everyone implementing it at once or outlawing the Internet in the rest of the world.
My guess is that most of the problems that we're seeing these days in this country isn't just because people can be bribed by companies out to earn yet another buck, but that most politicians don't have a good insight into how technology like the internet works. A couple of weeks ago one of our more prominent politicians was on the news claiming he had invented a sure way to protect our children on the internet (as mentioned above), only to be laughed at by most of the geek community with the typical "Do you really think children will use that once they learn how to circumvent it?"