To my generation (early 20s) RMS comes across as an egotistical control freak. I grew up with free software (largely thanks to him, I'm sure), but I don't know of any actual contributions he has made to free software in recent history. Instead, he ridicules people who don't associate his name with their own open source software (GNU/Linux is a joke), and acts like a fool because he thinks he can ride on the success of something neat that he did in the 70s (long before I was born). It makes all advocates of free software look bad, which is something I have personally had to deal with on many occasions.
On the other hand, Linus has some personality issues, and has made many decisions that I do not necessarily agree with, but he has earned a great deal of my respect. This is because he is in the trenches every day, and is actually working to make the world a better place, not just traveling the world and acting goofy.
I do not publish code under the GPL. The main reason for this is because I feel it is a scam designed to ensure the grand legacy of RMS. Viral free licenses may have been useful in the late 80s, but they are just a hindrance these days. I publish under licenses which grant more freedoms than the GPL, and because of this, I cannot integrate GPL code into my own.
He also shows no understanding of modern technologies. TPM and trusted computing in general have the potential to be our greatest defense against these malware spewing record companies. Anyone with sense can see that DRM is a lost cause, and the fact that these companies are investing so much money in TC technologies is epic humor.
In the end, information will be free. It will not, however, happen by force, and the creation of more copyrights. It will happen when corporations see the benefits of having large communities around their code, instead of attempting to bottle feed code to their customers. I fear that soon, all the legacy GPL code will need to be re-written as open source license incompatibilities become more and more of a problem.
I also have a HUGE problem with the way RMS and ESR try to tell me what is and is not a "hacker" when they themselves could probably not code themselves out of a paper bag on a modern system. That is a whole different rant though:-)
I got a surprisingly large amount of that on Sunday. Many people came up to me and said that they agreed with what we were doing, but it was too bad we were all dressed up like terrorists. One woman even likened us to the Taliban.
From what I understood, the whole point of rule 17 (the mask rule) was that we were not representing ourselves, we were representing a cause. Of course, after what happened to people like Paulette Cooper, and Dave Touretzky (a computer science professor at CMU), many people were afraid of retaliation from the church, but I think for most people (using my friends as a random sampling) it was a show of solidarity.
I think the most tragic thing about this is that it sounds like terrorists have now ruined the once noble image of the ninja mask. Maybe next time we can all get big smiley emoticon style masks.
I also find it interesting that the official CoS statement called us "terrorists". Where I was at, it was very civil. Towards the beginning, some jackass tried to grab a video camera from an Anonymous (too many thetans), but after that CoS members were very nice. Many of them taking our fliers and engaging in friendly conversation.
We were there to deliver information that has been suppressed by the church, to the church members, and to the general population. Attempting to "terrorize" anyone is counterproductive to freedom of information. Fear causes people to react without logic. If the church of scientology actually came to terms with their sketchy past, and confronted these problems instead of waging information warfare to deny their history, I would not have needed to go down there yesterday.
Plenty of pen testers use 0day when evaluating companies. The theory is that busting a single machine on the corporate network should not give you the "keys to the kingdom". Properly implemented security architecture should be able to mitigate single point failures. Immunity and core (American companies) both buy and sell 0day without informing the vendor. Wabisabilabi has a very convenient marketplace for such transactions as well. It's all supply and demand. Sure it's sketchy, but aren't you glad that these are being sold in public, and not just on the black market?
It makes me happy that this type of vulnerability is what we call serious these days. If you remember, just a couple of years ago microsoft was downplaying the WMF vulnerability. It was not considered "critical" because the target needed to manually visit a malicious website for the attacker to take over the target machine.
While this is a really neat find, and I am glad that it will be patched pretty soon, I don't think it is quite at the level of "sky falling" etc. From what I understand, an attacker that can execute javascript in your browser has the ability to read any file in the targets mozilla directory. This worst that I think an attacker could do would be to grab your stored password file. While this is definitely something to be concerned about, the headline had me pretty worried:-)
"One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work."
Isn't he describing exactly why DRM can never work? I love that these companies are spending so much money on crypto research, and in the end, it's things like TPM that are going to be what stops them from being able to install their anti piracy rootkits.
Facebook users deserve privacy in the same way that swimmers deserve dryness.
The whole point of social networks is that it allows one to easily control the information that they radiate. Remember when all we had to go on was rumours? Now we know who is gay, we know whose brother was killed in a car accident last year, we know that our previous significant other is now dating again. All of these things that once might have been awkward to bring up are now just pieces of information. If facebook and myspace are any indication, people are tired of keeping secrets, and hearing rumours about themselves, and welcome the opportunity to control the information about themselves directly. I think that this age of information is the best thing that could be happening to this world right now.
Even secondlife invasions are planned out in IRC first:-) It might be good for networking, and meeting like-minded people, but there are much better ways for actually discussing sketchy shit. I think anyone worth worrying about would have enough foresight to use decent crypto.
You owe me a mouthful of coffee, and a new keyboard.
Anywho, to GP, a very large portion of network attacks come from Brazil. I would say that a widespread knowledge of network security is what is allowing people to feel safer, as opposed to Germany, which recently outlawed research in the field. Then again, I am a security researcher, so I have a bit of a bias:-)
Yes, if slashdot did some automated submission comparison like digg, we might actually be able to avoid some of these dupes. Slashdot has a lot to learn from digg, and should copy it in every possible way. Maybe they can keep the cowboy Neal polls just for the nostalgia.
Ya, I was going to mention that between the ages of 6 to about 14, I went through 3 gameboys. Then I remembered that in my 4 years of undergrad, I went through about 9 or so laptops. 3 toshiba satalites, 2 librettos, a thinkpad, an ibook, a dell, and I am currently working on destroying my macbook. Many of them ended up being held together in various ways with duct tape.
My machines are my tools, and I treat them as such. Once you start treating your machines as if they are precious or magical, the things you own end up owning you.
I don't own a TV, I get 99% of my candidate exposure via youtube, google news, and my nightly daily show / colbert downloads.
I have heard Ron Paul talk, and I just don't think that his plans are actionable. He would need a HELL of a lot more support from the legislative branch to push through any of his initiatives. Without the support of his own party, let alone the opposing party, the country will simply be stalled until the next election rolls around. He has some interesting ideas, but I have not seen anything from him about how he plans to get around that fact.
It also doesn't help that I am a democrat, and actually believe that it is the responsibility of the successful to help out the system that allowed them to become that way (via taxes). I also believe that with proper economic oversight, we can increase the quality of life in the country, and reduce taxes.
Data mining is not a bad thing. It is just the act of going over old data looking for new information. The main reason that I am voting for him is that he wants the people to be able to data mine information about the government. If certain individuals or private interests are doing sketchy things, the people are able to know about this immediately, before the decisions are made. This allows democracy to actually work, so I can vote good people into power.
We live in an information age. The way to deal with it is not to isolate yourself from the government, cutting off the flow of information from yourself. You must learn to use the new technology to make sure that information is being used appropriately.
I believe that in a world of perfectly free information, anyone could google and get my DNA peculiarities, political leanings, sexual preferences, whatever. The key to this though is that I could also google to find out who is searching this information about me, and then find their phone number so I could call them up and ask "what the hell?".
It seems to me that it was more of a party bias than a media bias. I'm sure you watched the facebook debates. He made all of the other candidates look like petty, single minded fools. After that, I am sure each candidate refused to attend any debate that let him in. Even still he was constantly beating out Giuliani, but Giuliana was the "feel good" candidate that everyone liked in the debate.
With that said, I would still never vote for him. He has the same problems as Kucinich. He speaks too much about his goals, and not enough about his methods. It makes everything he says sound frantic and half thought out, and the changes he wants to make are so radical that one hiccup could do a lot of damage.
Also, someone of presidential material should have more political sense than to straight out attack everyone in their party. Being a politician is about getting stuff done, not having good ideas. A president should be able to rally other politicians, and get them to come together on issues that matter.
I am registered as a democrat, so I really don't care much about the republican primaries, but it really does make me happy that so many in the party want it to return to it's core values of conservative economics and small government. I don't necessarily agree with any of that, but I have really had enough of this Reganesque bullshit where people win elections based on politics of confusion and fear.
Someone posted part of this clip last time, where Obama talks at google about the future of technology. This is the full 64 minute clip, complete with Obama's joke about sorting algorithms:-)
I am not sure about other fields, but when physicists ask "why", we end up with people like Brian Green who tries to explain the universe via a loaf of bread, and ants crawling on phone cables, and other ridiculous analogies. You end up with string theorists who use the same math, but see different pictures in their head, and claim that their visions are the only correct way. Religious adherence to scientific methods are fine, but the fundamentalism and dogmatism are tearing academia apart. This is the main reason that I got out of quantum information and into computer security.
...the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking
The ability to parse through ridiculous amounts of fluff and filler is dying out. The reason for this is that it is not needed anymore. This is because we are developing the skills to parse dense, and data rich text, learn what we need, and then move on to absorb the next chunk of information. I see this as a good thing.
Notice his obsession with circumcision? I am guessing that his whole antisemitism thing comes from him resenting his parents for circumcision (he grew up in a Jewish family). He often talks about how the Jews "mutilate their children". Also keep in mind that his family was hounded endlessly by the FBI as he was growing up (during the red scare, when they were at their worst), which could only greatly inflame his sense of paranoia.
I am not a psychologist, but cases like his really make me wish I was. He achieved so much in his life, but I've always felt he could have done more if he had a happier childhood. I really hope that someday a psychologist will write a biography about him, maybe even reconstructed from the FBI case files. He was a brilliant guy, and he will be missed.
I'm sorry, but it sounds like you just said that I am wrong, and then restated what I said in my post. I think maybe I have a broader definition of "consultant" than you, but that seems to be it.
Well, they bought mysql the company, not mysql the database:-)
Mysql the company is essentially a large group of consultants that help optimize JEE backend systems, whose bottlenecks often happen somewhere around the database communications. Strategically, it looks like sun is trying to move more into the service model, and now sun's new consultants have direct access to optimising the JEE components themselves if needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure you read the legendary Forbes article:
:-)
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1030/104_print.html
To my generation (early 20s) RMS comes across as an egotistical control freak. I grew up with free software (largely thanks to him, I'm sure), but I don't know of any actual contributions he has made to free software in recent history. Instead, he ridicules people who don't associate his name with their own open source software (GNU/Linux is a joke), and acts like a fool because he thinks he can ride on the success of something neat that he did in the 70s (long before I was born). It makes all advocates of free software look bad, which is something I have personally had to deal with on many occasions.
On the other hand, Linus has some personality issues, and has made many decisions that I do not necessarily agree with, but he has earned a great deal of my respect. This is because he is in the trenches every day, and is actually working to make the world a better place, not just traveling the world and acting goofy.
I do not publish code under the GPL. The main reason for this is because I feel it is a scam designed to ensure the grand legacy of RMS. Viral free licenses may have been useful in the late 80s, but they are just a hindrance these days. I publish under licenses which grant more freedoms than the GPL, and because of this, I cannot integrate GPL code into my own.
He also shows no understanding of modern technologies. TPM and trusted computing in general have the potential to be our greatest defense against these malware spewing record companies. Anyone with sense can see that DRM is a lost cause, and the fact that these companies are investing so much money in TC technologies is epic humor.
In the end, information will be free. It will not, however, happen by force, and the creation of more copyrights. It will happen when corporations see the benefits of having large communities around their code, instead of attempting to bottle feed code to their customers. I fear that soon, all the legacy GPL code will need to be re-written as open source license incompatibilities become more and more of a problem.
I also have a HUGE problem with the way RMS and ESR try to tell me what is and is not a "hacker" when they themselves could probably not code themselves out of a paper bag on a modern system. That is a whole different rant though
You obviously have not seen the classic documentary "Naruto".
I got a surprisingly large amount of that on Sunday. Many people came up to me and said that they agreed with what we were doing, but it was too bad we were all dressed up like terrorists. One woman even likened us to the Taliban.
From what I understood, the whole point of rule 17 (the mask rule) was that we were not representing ourselves, we were representing a cause. Of course, after what happened to people like Paulette Cooper, and Dave Touretzky (a computer science professor at CMU), many people were afraid of retaliation from the church, but I think for most people (using my friends as a random sampling) it was a show of solidarity.
I think the most tragic thing about this is that it sounds like terrorists have now ruined the once noble image of the ninja mask. Maybe next time we can all get big smiley emoticon style masks.
I also find it interesting that the official CoS statement called us "terrorists". Where I was at, it was very civil. Towards the beginning, some jackass tried to grab a video camera from an Anonymous (too many thetans), but after that CoS members were very nice. Many of them taking our fliers and engaging in friendly conversation.
We were there to deliver information that has been suppressed by the church, to the church members, and to the general population. Attempting to "terrorize" anyone is counterproductive to freedom of information. Fear causes people to react without logic. If the church of scientology actually came to terms with their sketchy past, and confronted these problems instead of waging information warfare to deny their history, I would not have needed to go down there yesterday.
Plenty of pen testers use 0day when evaluating companies. The theory is that busting a single machine on the corporate network should not give you the "keys to the kingdom". Properly implemented security architecture should be able to mitigate single point failures. Immunity and core (American companies) both buy and sell 0day without informing the vendor. Wabisabilabi has a very convenient marketplace for such transactions as well. It's all supply and demand. Sure it's sketchy, but aren't you glad that these are being sold in public, and not just on the black market?
It makes me happy that this type of vulnerability is what we call serious these days. If you remember, just a couple of years ago microsoft was downplaying the WMF vulnerability. It was not considered "critical" because the target needed to manually visit a malicious website for the attacker to take over the target machine.
:-)
While this is a really neat find, and I am glad that it will be patched pretty soon, I don't think it is quite at the level of "sky falling" etc. From what I understand, an attacker that can execute javascript in your browser has the ability to read any file in the targets mozilla directory. This worst that I think an attacker could do would be to grab your stored password file. While this is definitely something to be concerned about, the headline had me pretty worried
Funny, this article just reminded me to sign up for the do not mail list. You can find it here.
https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/mps_consumer_description.php
"One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work."
Isn't he describing exactly why DRM can never work? I love that these companies are spending so much money on crypto research, and in the end, it's things like TPM that are going to be what stops them from being able to install their anti piracy rootkits.
Facebook users deserve privacy in the same way that swimmers deserve dryness.
The whole point of social networks is that it allows one to easily control the information that they radiate. Remember when all we had to go on was rumours? Now we know who is gay, we know whose brother was killed in a car accident last year, we know that our previous significant other is now dating again. All of these things that once might have been awkward to bring up are now just pieces of information. If facebook and myspace are any indication, people are tired of keeping secrets, and hearing rumours about themselves, and welcome the opportunity to control the information about themselves directly. I think that this age of information is the best thing that could be happening to this world right now.
Even secondlife invasions are planned out in IRC first :-) It might be good for networking, and meeting like-minded people, but there are much better ways for actually discussing sketchy shit. I think anyone worth worrying about would have enough foresight to use decent crypto.
I heard it with 4 Brazilian :-)
You owe me a mouthful of coffee, and a new keyboard.
:-)
Anywho, to GP, a very large portion of network attacks come from Brazil. I would say that a widespread knowledge of network security is what is allowing people to feel safer, as opposed to Germany, which recently outlawed research in the field. Then again, I am a security researcher, so I have a bit of a bias
Yes, if slashdot did some automated submission comparison like digg, we might actually be able to avoid some of these dupes. Slashdot has a lot to learn from digg, and should copy it in every possible way. Maybe they can keep the cowboy Neal polls just for the nostalgia.
Ya, I was going to mention that between the ages of 6 to about 14, I went through 3 gameboys. Then I remembered that in my 4 years of undergrad, I went through about 9 or so laptops. 3 toshiba satalites, 2 librettos, a thinkpad, an ibook, a dell, and I am currently working on destroying my macbook. Many of them ended up being held together in various ways with duct tape.
My machines are my tools, and I treat them as such. Once you start treating your machines as if they are precious or magical, the things you own end up owning you.
I don't own a TV, I get 99% of my candidate exposure via youtube, google news, and my nightly daily show / colbert downloads.
I have heard Ron Paul talk, and I just don't think that his plans are actionable. He would need a HELL of a lot more support from the legislative branch to push through any of his initiatives. Without the support of his own party, let alone the opposing party, the country will simply be stalled until the next election rolls around. He has some interesting ideas, but I have not seen anything from him about how he plans to get around that fact.
It also doesn't help that I am a democrat, and actually believe that it is the responsibility of the successful to help out the system that allowed them to become that way (via taxes). I also believe that with proper economic oversight, we can increase the quality of life in the country, and reduce taxes.
Data mining is not a bad thing. It is just the act of going over old data looking for new information. The main reason that I am voting for him is that he wants the people to be able to data mine information about the government. If certain individuals or private interests are doing sketchy things, the people are able to know about this immediately, before the decisions are made. This allows democracy to actually work, so I can vote good people into power.
We live in an information age. The way to deal with it is not to isolate yourself from the government, cutting off the flow of information from yourself. You must learn to use the new technology to make sure that information is being used appropriately.
I believe that in a world of perfectly free information, anyone could google and get my DNA peculiarities, political leanings, sexual preferences, whatever. The key to this though is that I could also google to find out who is searching this information about me, and then find their phone number so I could call them up and ask "what the hell?".
It seems to me that it was more of a party bias than a media bias. I'm sure you watched the facebook debates. He made all of the other candidates look like petty, single minded fools. After that, I am sure each candidate refused to attend any debate that let him in. Even still he was constantly beating out Giuliani, but Giuliana was the "feel good" candidate that everyone liked in the debate.
With that said, I would still never vote for him. He has the same problems as Kucinich. He speaks too much about his goals, and not enough about his methods. It makes everything he says sound frantic and half thought out, and the changes he wants to make are so radical that one hiccup could do a lot of damage.
Also, someone of presidential material should have more political sense than to straight out attack everyone in their party. Being a politician is about getting stuff done, not having good ideas. A president should be able to rally other politicians, and get them to come together on issues that matter.
I am registered as a democrat, so I really don't care much about the republican primaries, but it really does make me happy that so many in the party want it to return to it's core values of conservative economics and small government. I don't necessarily agree with any of that, but I have really had enough of this Reganesque bullshit where people win elections based on politics of confusion and fear.
Someone posted part of this clip last time, where Obama talks at google about the future of technology. This is the full 64 minute clip, complete with Obama's joke about sorting algorithms :-)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo&NR
Scientology murders people.
:-)
Scientology manipulates the sick and steals their money.
The RIAA is bad, but Scientology is downright horrific.
Anonymous FTW
for those that didn't see it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY
I am not sure about other fields, but when physicists ask "why", we end up with people like Brian Green who tries to explain the universe via a loaf of bread, and ants crawling on phone cables, and other ridiculous analogies. You end up with string theorists who use the same math, but see different pictures in their head, and claim that their visions are the only correct way. Religious adherence to scientific methods are fine, but the fundamentalism and dogmatism are tearing academia apart. This is the main reason that I got out of quantum information and into computer security.
...the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking
The ability to parse through ridiculous amounts of fluff and filler is dying out. The reason for this is that it is not needed anymore. This is because we are developing the skills to parse dense, and data rich text, learn what we need, and then move on to absorb the next chunk of information. I see this as a good thing.
Notice his obsession with circumcision? I am guessing that his whole antisemitism thing comes from him resenting his parents for circumcision (he grew up in a Jewish family). He often talks about how the Jews "mutilate their children". Also keep in mind that his family was hounded endlessly by the FBI as he was growing up (during the red scare, when they were at their worst), which could only greatly inflame his sense of paranoia.
I am not a psychologist, but cases like his really make me wish I was. He achieved so much in his life, but I've always felt he could have done more if he had a happier childhood. I really hope that someday a psychologist will write a biography about him, maybe even reconstructed from the FBI case files. He was a brilliant guy, and he will be missed.
I'm sorry, but it sounds like you just said that I am wrong, and then restated what I said in my post. I think maybe I have a broader definition of "consultant" than you, but that seems to be it.
Any bets on the next few headlines today?
I'm going for
Sun buys Oracle
Google buys Sun
Google buys Microsoft
Well, they bought mysql the company, not mysql the database :-)
Mysql the company is essentially a large group of consultants that help optimize JEE backend systems, whose bottlenecks often happen somewhere around the database communications. Strategically, it looks like sun is trying to move more into the service model, and now sun's new consultants have direct access to optimising the JEE components themselves if needed.