"However, the 90 day extension of the holding powers was stopped by parliament in Blair's first Commons defeat;"
You make it sound like a success for freedom and democracy, that they didn't get the 90 days that even the Home Secretary was embarassed about asking for.
Yet, you can still spend a month in police cells in the UK without having done anything wrong - the original 14 day limit was absurdly draconian (especially when the police aren't using more than a day or so of that time to investigate), and they've just doubled it.
So innocent law-abiding people are spending the whole month cooped up in freezing cells in the London police stations, with unimaginable effects on their health, their job, their finances, and their sanity, because despite having ubiquitous surveillance (CCTV + antiprivacy laws + money-laundering laws + special forces surveillance units working fulltime) they're still unable to piece together enough evidence to arrest someone "properly", i.e. knowing they've done something illegal.
It worries me that people see the "only" 28 days reported, and see this as a good thing.
Give me Word 5.1a for the Mac any day. It got words on a page in a neat and presentable format, and did pretty much nothing else. It was perfect.
You'd probably like LyX or LaTeX for getting the document written without any formatting distractions, then finding it well laid-out when you view the rendered version.
Personally I use HTML for documents, especially now that CSS is so powerful. "<h2>" is a good substitute for "selecting the header 2 style from a dropdown list", and "h2{color:darkblue}" is way faster than doing the same thing in a word processor.
"Some people just want to get their work done."... without having to get their credit card out each time to try out a piece of software, or have to call tech-support if an API they're using is undocumented.
Some people just want to get their work done without having to count how many machines they've installed ProTax2007 on, or document it when the vendor says they're coming round for an audit. Some people just want to get their work done without having to trawl through a 25-page EULA for every piece of software they install, that's different for each program.
Some people just want to get their work done without having to add code in the programs they write, to try and stop people copying it. Some people just want to get their work done without having to deal with support queries from someone whose license key doesn't work.
Some people just want to get their work done even when the license server fails, or the internet is down, or Microsoft is taking too long on the phone to "activate" the program they're trying to use. Some people just want to get their work done even if the DRM insists that they're not allowed to do it.
Some people just want to get their work done without restricting the freedoms of others.
"That's very funny. When a ubervirus thrashes a couple of corporate networks to the tune of a billion dollars apiece, we hear "Stupid admins - the patch was available - they weren't keeping up". Now it's "They should have tested before rolling them out." (paraphrased)"
Which neatly highlights the problem with this internet-connected "built to a budget" software that we're all using -- every time there's a patch, it reveals that we've all been running massive security risks for years, which the programmers only just discovered.
It's even worse with people who rely on adware scanners, or virus scanners -- they've allowed security threats right into their core systems, and are hoping that the latest virus list will somehow save them.
I know this is all because there's too much software for us to review individually, but we could at least trust someone more reliable (FreeBSD, Debian and GNU being the obvious choices) with all this "checking our software isn't going to do something really stupid", rather than a company whose interest is limited to selling you the software and letting you figure out what the problems with it are...
"Besides, the military has earth-watching satellites for their own private use to watch for such things. They need not rely on a civilian tool for it."
Well-funded militaries like the US army might. Plenty of others don't have satellites of their own (esp. local militia such as the Iraqi resistance)
Careful - it only saves some settings (e.g. the dock) when you shutdown, so if you always use sleep, and then let the battery run out (on laptop) or have a power cut (on desktop), MacOS will forget a load of changes you made to the settings.
Sleep is great though [the computer sort aswell] - having the Mac start up in less than a second, whilst the linux computer is still in BIOS, checking its memory...
If the government wants you to join the military, they will import immigrant workers to compete for the civilian jobs at lower cost, so the US citizens have to join the army. Simple, effective, has worked in the past.
Not that your government is selling you out or anything... just making sure the jobs are fully staffed during times of conflict.
"Actually, I guess any military has neither of those [freedom and democracy]"
Weren't the overseas military (postal) votes not counted in the last presidential election? So it's possibly worse than a "normal" army in terms of how much democracy you can participate in?
Of course, the most "democratic" army would be somewhere like the Congo, where if you get enough soldiers with similar political views, they have a coup, form a government and implement those ideas...
Making, suppling, adapting, or offering to supply something which is designed for, or adapted for allowing someone to cause a computer do anything with the intention of accessing any program or data that they (person using the program) know is unauthorised.
I'm having trouble even parsing what they're trying to say, let alone what it means -- this will probably be something which is interpreted differently by everyone who reads it.
After all, it's easier to define "accessing stuff without permission" than it is to define "creating a tool for use by someone who intends to access stuff without permission" -- does it cover general purpose tools? general purpose security tools?
Does anyone here know how they defined "unauthorised" in the original? (1990 computer misuse act) e.g. do you implicitly give someone permission to access a computer by configuring your software with a security hole left in it?
"This study would be extremely valuable if they had submitted BZilla bugs for each and every defect they encountered."
The article seems to suggest that the authors want to help with processes, rather than individual bugs.
That seems like a much better long-term idea, especially if (and this seems likely) they analysed a sample of code.
If someone analyses 1000 lines of code from a 100000 line project, then they'll have a fairly good idea of what processes (e.g. audits, code reviews, patterns) can help the team, whereas simply reporting the bugs they found would mean that 99% of the total bugs would remain undiscovered until someone conducted an equally thorough analysis of the rest of the code.
"There is so little margin for error during the last couple hundred feet of a low vis autoland that we don't need proof that a device is harmful - we need proof that it's safe."
At those heights, I imagine you'd want to ban all electronic equipment within a few miles of the airport, since cellphones on the ground will likely have as good a transmission path to the GPS antenna as those in the cabin?
(Starting with the airport's radar of course, since we're talking about S/N ratio of radio receivers)
Of course, it raises the age-old question of, if the navigation is so sensitve to accidental interference, what happens when someone deliberately transmits an NDB signal from near the runway?
Over the years, we've had several anomalous nav indications that were cleared up after flight attendants had all passengers shut down electronic devices
Ah yes, intermittant problems that mysteriously go away.
Normal engineers spend months instrumenting and debugging those sort of problems, rather than picking the first correlation they notice and announcing that that was the solution.
"just for fun, show me where microsoft is mentioned on their root page?"
How about "Dell recommends Windows XP Professional" in big bold text at the top of every single page on the Dell website (other than, as you spotted, the homepage itself)
Because the core of any startup is its first product idea, rather than the people working there?
Who cares if there are 10 companies competing for the first "method for selling carrots... on the web!", when in Paul's opinion, the lisp hackers will run rings around their competition no matter what niche they're persuing...
"I don't use Safari because it doesn't render pages as well as a mozilla based browser"
More to the point, it can't block Flash, videos, animated images, and other such annoyances.
I sometimes use "alternative browsers" such as Safari or Konqueror on the web, but after a few pages you always get the "this feels weird... I don't normally see flashing images" with anything non-Firefox.
"PDF does a lot more. It provides bookmark navigation"
Can you bookmark pages using Adobe reader? I've been searching for a way of marking the pages I'm reading (in a 5000-page PDF, ugh!), but the "bookmarks" tab just seems to be a non-editable list of headings.
You forgot some requirements:
- must require zooming in lots of times to be readable, until the page doesn't fit on your screen
- must support two-column text, so you read down, up/across, and down again
- must behave differently near pagebreaks, so the scrollwheel suddenly skips 3 pages while the down-cursor stops responding
- should ideally make your browser crash or stop responding
- support DRM and ebook features, such as "being viewable only in a browser which displays adverts constantly", "requires connecting to the internet for no good reason", and "uses all your bandwidth downloading lists of people that it shouldn't show the book to"
Other than that, yeah, I agree that we should ignore it on the assumption that it doesn't support vector graphics, and even if it did, PDF would be better than either it or SVG, because it's written by Adobe, and as we all know, professionals only use Adobe software, and anything free is for losers
Sorry, couldn't resist. The pro-Adobe guys on slashdot are becoming a bit of a standing joke nowadays. Get back to your powerful, enterprise-level industry-standard bitmap editor you slackers, stop reading slashdot when you're being paid $450,000 per hour for your elite photography skills!
"wake me when any of this affects mass market sales."
This is slashdot, home of tecchies. When family and friends buy computers, they ask us which one. And everyone here seems to know an awful lot about the digital restrictions management in certain companies' software.
Slashdot Mirror
"However, the 90 day extension of the holding powers was stopped by parliament in Blair's first Commons defeat;"
You make it sound like a success for freedom and democracy, that they didn't get the 90 days that even the Home Secretary was embarassed about asking for.
Yet, you can still spend a month in police cells in the UK without having done anything wrong - the original 14 day limit was absurdly draconian (especially when the police aren't using more than a day or so of that time to investigate), and they've just doubled it.
So innocent law-abiding people are spending the whole month cooped up in freezing cells in the London police stations, with unimaginable effects on their health, their job, their finances, and their sanity, because despite having ubiquitous surveillance (CCTV + antiprivacy laws + money-laundering laws + special forces surveillance units working fulltime) they're still unable to piece together enough evidence to arrest someone "properly", i.e. knowing they've done something illegal.
It worries me that people see the "only" 28 days reported, and see this as a good thing.
Give me Word 5.1a for the Mac any day. It got words on a page in a neat and presentable format, and did pretty much nothing else. It was perfect.
You'd probably like LyX or LaTeX for getting the document written without any formatting distractions, then finding it well laid-out when you view the rendered version.
Personally I use HTML for documents, especially now that CSS is so powerful. "<h2>" is a good substitute for "selecting the header 2 style from a dropdown list", and "h2{color:darkblue}" is way faster than doing the same thing in a word processor.
"Some people just want to get their work done." ... without having to get their credit card out each time to try out a piece of software, or have to call tech-support if an API they're using is undocumented.
Some people just want to get their work done without having to count how many machines they've installed ProTax2007 on, or document it when the vendor says they're coming round for an audit. Some people just want to get their work done without having to trawl through a 25-page EULA for every piece of software they install, that's different for each program.
Some people just want to get their work done without having to add code in the programs they write, to try and stop people copying it. Some people just want to get their work done without having to deal with support queries from someone whose license key doesn't work.
Some people just want to get their work done even when the license server fails, or the internet is down, or Microsoft is taking too long on the phone to "activate" the program they're trying to use. Some people just want to get their work done even if the DRM insists that they're not allowed to do it.
Some people just want to get their work done without restricting the freedoms of others.
"That's very funny. When a ubervirus thrashes a couple of corporate networks to the tune of a billion dollars apiece, we hear "Stupid admins - the patch was available - they weren't keeping up". Now it's "They should have tested before rolling them out." (paraphrased)"
Which neatly highlights the problem with this internet-connected "built to a budget" software that we're all using -- every time there's a patch, it reveals that we've all been running massive security risks for years, which the programmers only just discovered.
It's even worse with people who rely on adware scanners, or virus scanners -- they've allowed security threats right into their core systems, and are hoping that the latest virus list will somehow save them.
I know this is all because there's too much software for us to review individually, but we could at least trust someone more reliable (FreeBSD, Debian and GNU being the obvious choices) with all this "checking our software isn't going to do something really stupid", rather than a company whose interest is limited to selling you the software and letting you figure out what the problems with it are...
"Besides, the military has earth-watching satellites for their own private use to watch for such things. They need not rely on a civilian tool for it."
Well-funded militaries like the US army might. Plenty of others don't have satellites of their own (esp. local militia such as the Iraqi resistance)
"I never boot my Mac"
Careful - it only saves some settings (e.g. the dock) when you shutdown, so if you always use sleep, and then let the battery run out (on laptop) or have a power cut (on desktop), MacOS will forget a load of changes you made to the settings.
Sleep is great though [the computer sort aswell] - having the Mac start up in less than a second, whilst the linux computer is still in BIOS, checking its memory...
"Attach a PIN to every credit card, which the user must know."
And which everyone else in the shop knows, after the first time you type it into the keypad which is visible from all around...
It's called "chip and pin", it's not even slightly secure, it's been used in Europe for years, and just introduced in the UK.
"What's more American than peanut butter and jelly?"
Sure you want to know?
"And there are plenty of other jobs you can have"
If the government wants you to join the military, they will import immigrant workers to compete for the civilian jobs at lower cost, so the US citizens have to join the army. Simple, effective, has worked in the past.
Not that your government is selling you out or anything... just making sure the jobs are fully staffed during times of conflict.
"Actually, I guess any military has neither of those [freedom and democracy]"
Weren't the overseas military (postal) votes not counted in the last presidential election? So it's possibly worse than a "normal" army in terms of how much democracy you can participate in?
Of course, the most "democratic" army would be somewhere like the Congo, where if you get enough soldiers with similar political views, they have a coup, form a government and implement those ideas...
What constitutes a hacking tool?
Making, suppling, adapting, or offering to supply something which is designed for, or adapted for allowing someone to cause a computer do anything with the intention of accessing any program or data that they (person using the program) know is unauthorised.
I'm having trouble even parsing what they're trying to say, let alone what it means -- this will probably be something which is interpreted differently by everyone who reads it.
After all, it's easier to define "accessing stuff without permission" than it is to define "creating a tool for use by someone who intends to access stuff without permission" -- does it cover general purpose tools? general purpose security tools?
Does anyone here know how they defined "unauthorised" in the original? (1990 computer misuse act) e.g. do you implicitly give someone permission to access a computer by configuring your software with a security hole left in it?
"They would've had to look at at least 50,000 lines of code"
;-)
Big deal - at work, we use more code than that to display a dialog box
"This study would be extremely valuable if they had submitted BZilla bugs for each and every defect they encountered."
The article seems to suggest that the authors want to help with processes, rather than individual bugs.
That seems like a much better long-term idea, especially if (and this seems likely) they analysed a sample of code.
If someone analyses 1000 lines of code from a 100000 line project, then they'll have a fairly good idea of what processes (e.g. audits, code reviews, patterns) can help the team, whereas simply reporting the bugs they found would mean that 99% of the total bugs would remain undiscovered until someone conducted an equally thorough analysis of the rest of the code.
"There is so little margin for error during the last couple hundred feet of a low vis autoland that we don't need proof that a device is harmful - we need proof that it's safe."
At those heights, I imagine you'd want to ban all electronic equipment within a few miles of the airport, since cellphones on the ground will likely have as good a transmission path to the GPS antenna as those in the cabin?
(Starting with the airport's radar of course, since we're talking about S/N ratio of radio receivers)
Of course, it raises the age-old question of, if the navigation is so sensitve to accidental interference, what happens when someone deliberately transmits an NDB signal from near the runway?
Over the years, we've had several anomalous nav indications that were cleared up after flight attendants had all passengers shut down electronic devices
Ah yes, intermittant problems that mysteriously go away.
Normal engineers spend months instrumenting and debugging those sort of problems, rather than picking the first correlation they notice and announcing that that was the solution.
"...cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers"
Good thing no major superpower is reserving the right to jam or destroy Galileo satellites then, if airliners are so sensitive to GPS interference...
"just for fun, show me where microsoft is mentioned on their root page?"
How about "Dell recommends Windows XP Professional" in big bold text at the top of every single page on the Dell website (other than, as you spotted, the homepage itself)
The government uses encryption. They must have something illegal to hide.
"If black projects cant get funding in public view, they work behind the scenes and find money elsewhere."
So who decides where to spend the money?
"AND they won't sign an NDA"
Because the core of any startup is its first product idea, rather than the people working there?
Who cares if there are 10 companies competing for the first "method for selling carrots... on the web!", when in Paul's opinion, the lisp hackers will run rings around their competition no matter what niche they're persuing...
"Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this exploit can only affect items that the user has rights to"
Yeah, only your documents, your photos, and the internet. What could possibly go wrong?
"I don't use Safari because it doesn't render pages as well as a mozilla based browser"
More to the point, it can't block Flash, videos, animated images, and other such annoyances.
I sometimes use "alternative browsers" such as Safari or Konqueror on the web, but after a few pages you always get the "this feels weird... I don't normally see flashing images" with anything non-Firefox.
"PDF does a lot more. It provides bookmark navigation"
Can you bookmark pages using Adobe reader? I've been searching for a way of marking the pages I'm reading (in a 5000-page PDF, ugh!), but the "bookmarks" tab just seems to be a non-editable list of headings.
You forgot some requirements:
- must require zooming in lots of times to be readable, until the page doesn't fit on your screen
- must support two-column text, so you read down, up/across, and down again
- must behave differently near pagebreaks, so the scrollwheel suddenly skips 3 pages while the down-cursor stops responding
- should ideally make your browser crash or stop responding
- support DRM and ebook features, such as "being viewable only in a browser which displays adverts constantly", "requires connecting to the internet for no good reason", and "uses all your bandwidth downloading lists of people that it shouldn't show the book to"
Other than that, yeah, I agree that we should ignore it on the assumption that it doesn't support vector graphics, and even if it did, PDF would be better than either it or SVG, because it's written by Adobe, and as we all know, professionals only use Adobe software, and anything free is for losers
Sorry, couldn't resist. The pro-Adobe guys on slashdot are becoming a bit of a standing joke nowadays. Get back to your powerful, enterprise-level industry-standard bitmap editor you slackers, stop reading slashdot when you're being paid $450,000 per hour for your elite photography skills!
"wake me when any of this affects mass market sales."
This is slashdot, home of tecchies. When family and friends buy computers, they ask us which one. And everyone here seems to know an awful lot about the digital restrictions management in certain companies' software.