All of the cases you cited are instances where corrupt government officials sold power to the corporations, which is the opposite of government control.
What I am suggesting is sending more tax dollars towards research and development that helps all the people in the united states. This research should be run by people that are answerable to voters, not shareholders. There are industries out there (infosec included) that would make the people safer and more secure if the goal was more about helping people than making profit.
I believe that this is one of the primary tasks of a government. Security should not just go to the highest bidder, it should be available to all citizens.
Yes, OF COURSE corruption will always damage any system, and no system is free from corruption.
In general, the government answers to the voters, and corporations answer to their shareholders. In service based industries, pure capitalism works fine, but when it comes to my health and my security I would rather have an elected entity in place rather than a corporation looking to maximise their profit margins.
Of course government should not expand where it is not needed, and I would never dream of handing all security matters over to the government, but wouldn't you rather have a system in place that you can vote down in two years rather than allowing some corporation the ability to monopolise on the fear of the people?
I think that the government needs to have a hand in every industry that profits off of people's misfortunes.
Medical companies have no financial incentive to keep people healthy the same way that infosec companies have no financial incentive to secure the nation's infrastructure. Instead of research scientists working for cures we have greedy corporations that have risen up, trying to sell the antidote of the day.
What if, instead of hoarding 0day and designing proprietary crypto, the National Security Agency actually published their research publicly? What if their research allowed Americans to make secure phone calls with each other, instead of finding new ways to wiretap us? What if, with all their unlimited funding, they released their static analysis methods to the public and actually made America a more secure place?
Miro + tvrss.net works fine for me. (rss feeds pointing to torrents of whatever shows)
If not offered there, I can just search for things like "60 minutes eklob" on mininova, and grab that feed, so I can get it right when the content is uploaded.
If I had the option to pay for a feed that had quicker turnaround, or for a search engine that would give me better feeds, I would. Option number 1 is good for the future, but until this whole content distribution clusterfuck calms down, I am fine with my current setup.
There is information, and then there is stuff. Stuff is generally considered as physical objects, though can more precisely be defined as something that cannot be perfectly copied (the text of a book is information, and the book itself is stuff).
Making laws against possession of information is dangerous.
In my opinion, only actions should be outlawed. Then situations like this, where judges attempt to use their position to settle their own moral dilemmas would not happen. Are there any signs of child abuse? Of course not.
That's like complaining that the leaver is so much more useful than the button. It is the same reasoning that people have against iphone keyboards, and after a couple weeks, I could type on that thing with my eyes closed.
There is the added advantage of being able to have multiple control consoles in the same convenient area, instead of having arrays of buttons and knobs all the hell over the place.
Despite popular belief, the trusting trust paper was not written as an "OMG WERE FUCKED NO MATTER WHAT WE DO" paper, the compiler example was put there to emphasise the importance of having a stable root of trust in any given system you want to be secure.
There are perfectly sane ways to have a stable root of trust with electronic voting, which is not the case with the paper alternatives.
Except that I have tried that with every recent version of every vmware product (as well as kvm, qemu, and virtualbox), and every hacked disk I could find online, with every boot option that I could find, and it simply does not work for me (which seems to be pretty common if you look on the various forums).
I always get some random mesh of disk read errors, bios errors, and signal timeouts that break the install.
Funny thing. At home I have comcast internet, but no TV package. A few months ago I noticed that the only difference between internet + TV and just internet was a small filter plugged inline with the cable at the cable box.
For the first time in my life, I had cable TV. I watched some fun shows about cheese and nazis on the history channel, random movies on scifi, reality cooking shows on the food network, had fun watching the random punditry on CNBC etc.
Then about 3 weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my residential internet line to business (so I could get static IPs, send email etc). Before the cable guy came, I went back into the room in my building with the cable box, and put the filter back on the line.
Three weeks later, and I just realised that I still have not gone back to remove the filter. It is also fairly likely that I won't go back.
The shows that I do watch, I follow with miro, and less than half of those shows are even on cable. The only things that aren't on miro that I am interested in are the local news broadcasts. Also, miro lets me pause/rewind whatever.
My point is, maybe their marketing team was on to something, since the truly "tech savy" have already abandoned them. This seems very similar to what the music industry did in the late 90s. Big labels kept dumbing their music down, since the only ones that were still buying music from record stores were the ones that didn't know better.
All of which are part of the gimpy bluetooth stack.
What bugs me the most on the list is the A2DP. My old corny ass motorola phone from 5 years ago can play music through my bluetooth headphones, but my iPhone, which is supposed to be a modern marvel that actually evolved from a music player, cannot.
Also on my wish list is the ability to develop iphone apps on my computer (OSX does not work at all in vmware), and maybe someday I have dreams of being able to get firmware updates, and be able to install them from linux.
Where I am at we were looking at setting up a similar machine, and have been evaluating various virtualization solutions, so maybe someone here might have insight on this issue.
Is xen dead/dying? The only company that seems to be interested in keeping it around is citrix. Citrix seems far more interested in pimping Hyper-V from microsoft, and even their xen management tools seem to be all centered around windows (we are entirely a linux shop here).
For the past week or so, we have been looking at various solutions from citrix and vmware (judgements based on free/trial versions etc from the internet) and have not been too impressed.
The most promising solution we have seen so far has been convirt/kvm (http://convirture.com), which seems to have just sprung to life in the past couple days. It looks like it was originally designed to manage xen servers, but it is also capable of using kvm. All you need is a host box that is running ssh, and has kvm installed, and convirt manages everything through an ssh tunnel, including piping back vnc etc. It is currently pretty damn buggy, but the interface is super clean.
I know it's a bit shallow to judge a vituralization solution based on management tools, but we could not find anything from vmware or citrix that looked nearly that good that would run in linux. Even at the core, XenServer and ESX seem to be built on crudely hacked versions of an antiquated linux kernel, and KVM is in vanilla, so we never need to worry about upkeep when it comes to security updates and kernel patches.
What we found seems to go against everything I have ever heard (ESX is awesome, XenServer is in the same ballpark, KVM is a virtualization toy for desktops). Did we miss something? I have the feeling that there was some magical fantastic powertoy for ESX and XenServer that we just failed to find.
It would be nice if google used this service as a way to ween people off of the whole POTS style phone numbers forever. I think that something more like voice://[identity]@[company] makes much more sense in the long run.
When someone calls my google voice number, it could redirect the call to my google talk, skype, personal sip server, or even fall back to a landline or cell number if able. Then when I need to contact someone inside the POTS network, it would be nice if there was a way to multiplex back out through that same phone number.
This way, I can give my grandparents a single phone number to contact me, and I would only need to have a data plan on any given mobile device, instead of these hybrid internet/pseudo-POTS style plans that are sold with phones these days.
Then I could give my business contacts my work identity, (deanpierce@unemployed), and give my friends/family my google identity (pierce403@gmail), or even my home identity (dean@deanpierce.net), and never have to bother with phone numbers ever again. Phone numbers just seem like such an antiquated method of identity management. Those other identities could also be used for other things such as IM or email etc.
Also, as a big plus for google, they would then have complete legal access to the full tetragrammaton of human thought. Searches, IM, Email, and Voice.
Then Mr. Lesher tracked down comments Officer Ettienne had made on the Internet about video clips of arrests. An officer should not have punched a handcuffed man, Officer Ettienne wrote. "If he wanted to tune him up some, he should have delayed cuffing him."
He added: "If you were going to hit a cuffed suspect, at least get your money's worth 'cause now he's going to get disciplined for" a relatively light punch.
Joking on the Internet? This guy is insane, and should not be allowed in law enforcement. I sure as hell wouldn't want someone like that on the street "protecting and serving" me. The officer was accused of using excessive force, and the victim pointed to comments the officer had made online about how to get away with police brutality. Seems completely fair to me.
What makes you think that every person has the same exact vision for an ideal child?
Analogies suck, but isn't that a bit like saying that if you give people the ability to select their own clothing, everyone is just going to choose the best clothing, which would create a monoculture in the fashion industry? (assuming we come from a world where clothing is randomly assigned and static from birth)
In my opinion, genetic engineering is the best way to encourage diversity. There are some pretty interesting recessive traits out there.
There really is not much an attacker can do with a bank user/pass.
Email accounts are significantly shittier to lose. Pretty much no matter what you do on the internet, your email ties into everything. From just the email account, they can get into any social networks, hosted servers, code repositories, domain management, paypal, amazon, online games, etc.
It's made even worse when so many of the free email providers (especially google) seem to be allergic to HTTPS, and firefox is more than happy to pass obviously sensitive data over the wire in clear text.
"Wrong. Discriminating against people because they are of African descent is just dumb. Discriminating against someone because they are physically weaker, less intelligent, less emotionally stable, more likely to contract diseases and will generally die younger is a totally different thing."
Watch the movie again. The main character was faster, stronger, and more intelligent than even the genetically pure elite around him. The reason that he was not able to even go to a normal school was that he had a genetic predisposition for many negative things, none of which manifested.
I believe that if he had fought the discrimination in the legal system, instead of turning to fraud, he would have won. It also would have likely set a good precedence, and made it so that others in his situation would not have to turn to the black market to get decent jobs.
Not that it would have made for a better movie, but I think it would have turned out better in the end. Maybe I just have too much faith in humanity.
Re:This too was foreseen
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A lot of people saw gattaca, and pulled out the message that we should abandon all genetic research before it destroys us all.
In the beginning of gattaca, the narrator even mentions that "genoism" laws were passed, but in the movie we see blatant discrimination.
The message that I got out of that movie is less about genetic engineering, and more about discrimination in general. If we as a society just flatly ignore certain discrimination laws, then of course society is going to go to hell in a short amount of time.
It seems like there is this whole branch of scifi designed to terrorize people about the horrors of technology. The creators seem to think that we would all be better off if we abandoned technology and all went back to live in caves.
If I had the opportunity to have children who were smarter, faster, stronger, and with laser eyes, I would do it in a heartbeat. What is the point of life in general without progression of evolution?
Slashdot Mirror
I have an unlimited wimax connection for 20 dollars per month, and regularly get download speeds of about a megabyte per second.
All of the cases you cited are instances where corrupt government officials sold power to the corporations, which is the opposite of government control.
What I am suggesting is sending more tax dollars towards research and development that helps all the people in the united states. This research should be run by people that are answerable to voters, not shareholders. There are industries out there (infosec included) that would make the people safer and more secure if the goal was more about helping people than making profit.
I believe that this is one of the primary tasks of a government. Security should not just go to the highest bidder, it should be available to all citizens.
Blah for pessimism.
Yes, OF COURSE corruption will always damage any system, and no system is free from corruption.
In general, the government answers to the voters, and corporations answer to their shareholders. In service based industries, pure capitalism works fine, but when it comes to my health and my security I would rather have an elected entity in place rather than a corporation looking to maximise their profit margins.
Of course government should not expand where it is not needed, and I would never dream of handing all security matters over to the government, but wouldn't you rather have a system in place that you can vote down in two years rather than allowing some corporation the ability to monopolise on the fear of the people?
I think that this is a great idea.
I think that the government needs to have a hand in every industry that profits off of people's misfortunes.
Medical companies have no financial incentive to keep people healthy the same way that infosec companies have no financial incentive to secure the nation's infrastructure. Instead of research scientists working for cures we have greedy corporations that have risen up, trying to sell the antidote of the day.
What if, instead of hoarding 0day and designing proprietary crypto, the National Security Agency actually published their research publicly? What if their research allowed Americans to make secure phone calls with each other, instead of finding new ways to wiretap us? What if, with all their unlimited funding, they released their static analysis methods to the public and actually made America a more secure place?
If you are working at a job where you could get fired for reading slashdot, it might be time to start looking for another job.
*ekolb
I select "2"
Miro + tvrss.net works fine for me. (rss feeds pointing to torrents of whatever shows)
If not offered there, I can just search for things like "60 minutes eklob" on mininova, and grab that feed, so I can get it right when the content is uploaded.
If I had the option to pay for a feed that had quicker turnaround, or for a search engine that would give me better feeds, I would. Option number 1 is good for the future, but until this whole content distribution clusterfuck calms down, I am fine with my current setup.
There is information, and then there is stuff. Stuff is generally considered as physical objects, though can more precisely be defined as something that cannot be perfectly copied (the text of a book is information, and the book itself is stuff).
Making laws against possession of information is dangerous.
In my opinion, only actions should be outlawed. Then situations like this, where judges attempt to use their position to settle their own moral dilemmas would not happen. Are there any signs of child abuse? Of course not.
You are old fashion.
That's like complaining that the leaver is so much more useful than the button. It is the same reasoning that people have against iphone keyboards, and after a couple weeks, I could type on that thing with my eyes closed.
There is the added advantage of being able to have multiple control consoles in the same convenient area, instead of having arrays of buttons and knobs all the hell over the place.
It's not strange that they split up cities. It's strange they listed entire countries as hotspots.
Compilers are signed.
Code auditors use IDA.
Despite popular belief, the trusting trust paper was not written as an "OMG WERE FUCKED NO MATTER WHAT WE DO" paper, the compiler example was put there to emphasise the importance of having a stable root of trust in any given system you want to be secure.
There are perfectly sane ways to have a stable root of trust with electronic voting, which is not the case with the paper alternatives.
iphones put GPS data in the exif data of any picture you take.
Except that I have tried that with every recent version of every vmware product (as well as kvm, qemu, and virtualbox), and every hacked disk I could find online, with every boot option that I could find, and it simply does not work for me (which seems to be pretty common if you look on the various forums).
I always get some random mesh of disk read errors, bios errors, and signal timeouts that break the install.
Funny thing. At home I have comcast internet, but no TV package. A few months ago I noticed that the only difference between internet + TV and just internet was a small filter plugged inline with the cable at the cable box.
For the first time in my life, I had cable TV. I watched some fun shows about cheese and nazis on the history channel, random movies on scifi, reality cooking shows on the food network, had fun watching the random punditry on CNBC etc.
Then about 3 weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my residential internet line to business (so I could get static IPs, send email etc). Before the cable guy came, I went back into the room in my building with the cable box, and put the filter back on the line.
Three weeks later, and I just realised that I still have not gone back to remove the filter. It is also fairly likely that I won't go back.
The shows that I do watch, I follow with miro, and less than half of those shows are even on cable. The only things that aren't on miro that I am interested in are the local news broadcasts. Also, miro lets me pause/rewind whatever.
My point is, maybe their marketing team was on to something, since the truly "tech savy" have already abandoned them. This seems very similar to what the music industry did in the late 90s. Big labels kept dumbing their music down, since the only ones that were still buying music from record stores were the ones that didn't know better.
Exactly. Main features I am looking for:
1. tethering
2. OBEX file management (to replace USB sticks)
3. A2DP
All of which are part of the gimpy bluetooth stack.
What bugs me the most on the list is the A2DP. My old corny ass motorola phone from 5 years ago can play music through my bluetooth headphones, but my iPhone, which is supposed to be a modern marvel that actually evolved from a music player, cannot.
Also on my wish list is the ability to develop iphone apps on my computer (OSX does not work at all in vmware), and maybe someday I have dreams of being able to get firmware updates, and be able to install them from linux.
Hahaha then too,
but my guess is that spazztastic is referring to ms09-002
http://milw0rm.com/video/watch.php?id=96
Where I am at we were looking at setting up a similar machine, and have been evaluating various virtualization solutions, so maybe someone here might have insight on this issue.
Is xen dead/dying? The only company that seems to be interested in keeping it around is citrix. Citrix seems far more interested in pimping Hyper-V from microsoft, and even their xen management tools seem to be all centered around windows (we are entirely a linux shop here).
For the past week or so, we have been looking at various solutions from citrix and vmware (judgements based on free/trial versions etc from the internet) and have not been too impressed.
The most promising solution we have seen so far has been convirt/kvm (http://convirture.com), which seems to have just sprung to life in the past couple days. It looks like it was originally designed to manage xen servers, but it is also capable of using kvm. All you need is a host box that is running ssh, and has kvm installed, and convirt manages everything through an ssh tunnel, including piping back vnc etc. It is currently pretty damn buggy, but the interface is super clean.
I know it's a bit shallow to judge a vituralization solution based on management tools, but we could not find anything from vmware or citrix that looked nearly that good that would run in linux. Even at the core, XenServer and ESX seem to be built on crudely hacked versions of an antiquated linux kernel, and KVM is in vanilla, so we never need to worry about upkeep when it comes to security updates and kernel patches.
What we found seems to go against everything I have ever heard (ESX is awesome, XenServer is in the same ballpark, KVM is a virtualization toy for desktops). Did we miss something? I have the feeling that there was some magical fantastic powertoy for ESX and XenServer that we just failed to find.
It would be nice if google used this service as a way to ween people off of the whole POTS style phone numbers forever. I think that something more like voice://[identity]@[company] makes much more sense in the long run.
When someone calls my google voice number, it could redirect the call to my google talk, skype, personal sip server, or even fall back to a landline or cell number if able. Then when I need to contact someone inside the POTS network, it would be nice if there was a way to multiplex back out through that same phone number.
This way, I can give my grandparents a single phone number to contact me, and I would only need to have a data plan on any given mobile device, instead of these hybrid internet/pseudo-POTS style plans that are sold with phones these days.
Then I could give my business contacts my work identity, (deanpierce@unemployed), and give my friends/family my google identity (pierce403@gmail), or even my home identity (dean@deanpierce.net), and never have to bother with phone numbers ever again. Phone numbers just seem like such an antiquated method of identity management. Those other identities could also be used for other things such as IM or email etc.
Also, as a big plus for google, they would then have complete legal access to the full tetragrammaton of human thought. Searches, IM, Email, and Voice.
Then Mr. Lesher tracked down comments Officer Ettienne had made on the Internet about video clips of arrests. An officer should not have punched a handcuffed man, Officer Ettienne wrote. "If he wanted to tune him up some, he should have delayed cuffing him."
He added: "If you were going to hit a cuffed suspect, at least get your money's worth 'cause now he's going to get disciplined for" a relatively light punch.
Joking on the Internet? This guy is insane, and should not be allowed in law enforcement. I sure as hell wouldn't want someone like that on the street "protecting and serving" me. The officer was accused of using excessive force, and the victim pointed to comments the officer had made online about how to get away with police brutality. Seems completely fair to me.
I checked on the Internet, and can confirm that this is true.
On a side note, can slashdot have a special place for articles with titles that end in a question mark?
"Someone should build a site called 'Presume', which strips out 2/3rds of the words, knock the reading time down to 15 seconds."
I thought that was what slashdot was for.
What makes you think that every person has the same exact vision for an ideal child?
Analogies suck, but isn't that a bit like saying that if you give people the ability to select their own clothing, everyone is just going to choose the best clothing, which would create a monoculture in the fashion industry? (assuming we come from a world where clothing is randomly assigned and static from birth)
In my opinion, genetic engineering is the best way to encourage diversity. There are some pretty interesting recessive traits out there.
Funny thing..
There really is not much an attacker can do with a bank user/pass.
Email accounts are significantly shittier to lose. Pretty much no matter what you do on the internet, your email ties into everything. From just the email account, they can get into any social networks, hosted servers, code repositories, domain management, paypal, amazon, online games, etc.
It's made even worse when so many of the free email providers (especially google) seem to be allergic to HTTPS, and firefox is more than happy to pass obviously sensitive data over the wire in clear text.
"Wrong. Discriminating against people because they are of African descent is just dumb. Discriminating against someone because they are physically weaker, less intelligent, less emotionally stable, more likely to contract diseases and will generally die younger is a totally different thing."
Watch the movie again. The main character was faster, stronger, and more intelligent than even the genetically pure elite around him. The reason that he was not able to even go to a normal school was that he had a genetic predisposition for many negative things, none of which manifested.
I believe that if he had fought the discrimination in the legal system, instead of turning to fraud, he would have won. It also would have likely set a good precedence, and made it so that others in his situation would not have to turn to the black market to get decent jobs.
Not that it would have made for a better movie, but I think it would have turned out better in the end. Maybe I just have too much faith in humanity.
A lot of people saw gattaca, and pulled out the message that we should abandon all genetic research before it destroys us all.
In the beginning of gattaca, the narrator even mentions that "genoism" laws were passed, but in the movie we see blatant discrimination.
The message that I got out of that movie is less about genetic engineering, and more about discrimination in general. If we as a society just flatly ignore certain discrimination laws, then of course society is going to go to hell in a short amount of time.
It seems like there is this whole branch of scifi designed to terrorize people about the horrors of technology. The creators seem to think that we would all be better off if we abandoned technology and all went back to live in caves.
If I had the opportunity to have children who were smarter, faster, stronger, and with laser eyes, I would do it in a heartbeat. What is the point of life in general without progression of evolution?