RTFA. This is about drives that they don't want to use again. They're being thrown out. They just want to make sure no dumpster-diving hacker gets all their data.
Isn't it ironic that western governments are developing systems to circumvent Internet censorship, while at the same time deploying censorship infrastructure and laws?
Might as well at least try to make the article worth reading.
Not if my two hours of work get wiped out within minutes of me posting them.
Less people outside an "in group" participating is almost always a sign that it has become too difficult to contribute. Just that those who could change things are usually in the "in group" and don't notice, because for them it's not difficult.
Or in other words: When you don't allow outside perspectives anymore, you've started dissolving from within, with incest and three-apes symptoms.
More importantly, I think: They've been in lots of movies that the "inner circle" has actually seen and/or can be downloaded via bittorrent.
Try creating a wikipedia page for a non-american theatre star with just as many viewers as the official sales of the porn starlet's flicks. Good luck. My bet is it won't survive the week, because none of the core editors has ever heard of that theatre.
If it is cited, the legitimacy of the citation can be challenged, and tracked down to verify that the entry correctly interprets the cited source.
In theory, yes. In at least my personal Wikipedia experience, I've not seen it once that a deletionist actually tracked down a source. On the contrary, as I said in another comment already, I've seen whole articles disappear even though that had listed citations. But apparently, not being on the bookshelf of one of the core editors is enough to not count as a source.
A book (even one of his own) would be completely acceptable, even preferred if the only alternative is a blog.
Nonsense. I've seen whole articles disappear along with their citations because those were books that the deletionists "could not verify" (aka were too lazy to rent out from a library, deleting is so much easier).
It probably works for Stephen because he and his books are well known. It doesn't work for less famous things. Oh, it also works for porn stars. For some reason, pretty much every porn star has a wikipedia page. Go figure.
Almost all of the serious problems we have these days are implementation bugs. Buffer overflows, race conditions, code injection, etc.
A couple of the "IE quirks" are intentional design bugs, for example, where the browser does not behave correctly (e.g. box model), but it does behave according to its specification.
There are unintentional design bugs as well, but I can't come up with one by heart.
Ssh to servers is not the usual use case (although it works in a pinch), but E-mail, web browsing, file downloading, Word/Excel/Powerpoint access, text messaging, mapping, and IM are. Modern phones are faster than powerful desktop machines from a few years ago, and you can hook up reasonable keyboards to them.
E-Mail and web - I much prefer the desktop, though it's useable (barely) on a phone. Word/etc. - been there, done that, hated it. As I said, I'm reasonably sure that I can do in seconds on a desktop what takes you minutes on a phone. Messaging/IM - same thing, though not quite as bad. Yes, a phone is great for a quick on-the-run message. For anything resembling a conversation, I prefer an actual keyboard. And once you hook up a keyboard to your phone, why not use a netbook?
(Of course, as an iPhone user, you have already outed yourself as a lover of gimmicks; if you actually want to get work done, get a Symbian phone.)
My other phone is one, thank you very much. For almost everything, I prefer the iPhone. Especially for stuff like ssh or large documents, where it gives me at least something resembling screen space.
And that's one of the insane concepts that many experts hate about Wikipedia.
They say that democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's a simplified metaphor to point out a crucial flaw of majority voting.
In the same way, one could say that Wikipedia is where an anonymous blog posting (which can be linked to) is the more trustworthy authority on spacetime than a direct edit by Stephen Hawking himself.
Protest all you want, reason all you want, the simple truth is that that's how it is.
Add something that you don't have documentation for, and its likely to get reverted.
The really stupid rules are all about what wikipedia will accept as "documentation" and what not.
People have tried to correct their own birth dates and were reverted, because they could not provide a citation. I know of one case who offered to send in a scanned copy of his passport, which was rejected as not WP-whatever.
Of course, if you put a fake birthday up on a MySpace page, you can cite that and voila, successful edit.
Most importantly: You can't write about anything that the deletionist crowd doesn't know about. They're like republicans: "Please, oh mighty god, let there not be a world outside my windows".
I've had quite a few articles deleted on subjects that are considerably more notable - but less geeky or important to the in-crowd - than lots of the articles that remain.
I've taken to sarcasm since. Every minor porn starlet has her own wikipedia page, but lots of non-porn movies, games, books that were seen by a lot more people don't. What does that tell you about wikipedia and the people that run it?:-)
Excellent study. Lots of people have felt this way for a few years now, but this is what science is for: Replacing "gut feeling" with hard facts.
The next step, of course, will be the most interesting: Research into what one can do, how one has to build a community to avoid these problems, and keep it running along the successful path.
Firefox crashing means your userland memory is fucked up and can't be trusted anymore. No problem, kill it, clean it and restart the application.
A kernel crash leads to undefined behaviour on the ring 0 level. You don't want that, it's where root exploits live.
Furthermore, we have a lot of really, really strong kernel-level security extensions, like SELinux, whose only two vulnerable spots are kernel-level exploits and weak security policies. If you can remove one of them, you've done a lot to improve security.
How can you prove that that program is bug-free? How about conceptual bugs?
Formal verification does not tackle conceptual bugs. What it does is prove that the implementation conforms to the specification. If your specification is false, then it is false, but the implementation will correctly implement the false behaviour. In other words, this checks whether the house and the building plan are identical. If the plan has a window where there shouldn't be one, then that window will be there, because it's on the plan.
What overhead does this approach have? Are the benefits worth it?
RTFA. The amount of work required is staggering (four years, 200,000 theorems to prove) but since it's a verification of code, not additional testing code, there is zero overhead when the system is running.
They can still make a difference, especially in a 2-party system.
Yes, the two major parties will not fear losing to them. But they might fear losing enough votes to the pirates so that the other major party prevails. Once the pirate party gets a considerable number of voters, the other parties will take up their ideas, in order to win back those voters.
Been there, done that. I've owned one of the first Palms and I own an iPhone now. I've had notebooks since before they were cool.
Yes, 10 years ago I sometimes ssh'ed into our servers from a Palm III using IR connection to a mobile phone and dialin from that. It worked, it was geeky - and things that take me seconds on a desktop took me minutes on that setup.
If you have to do work while you're on travel, take a notebook. People who really have actual work to do use notebooks. People who just want the feeling of importance use their phones to do nonsense work where quality doesn't matter.
So what you need is a document viewer, not an office app.
Wow, big deal. Last I checked (i.e. yesterday), the iPhone had that ability built-in, and from what I've heard, about every other smartphone does as well.
Uh? Who in their right mind would even want to use office on a mobile phone? The UI is bad as it is on a full-size PC.
Seriously, a lot of these "tools" are just crap for middle management that for some reason feels empowered when they can do the secretaries job, just worse.
That's what it is called plausible deniability. Nobody in this discussion ever heard that term before?
The point is that you can say "I don't use that feature. I know it exists, but I have no use for it. I use TrueCrypt because it's good for what I use it for."
They can't prove you wrong.
Yes, if torture is what you're worried about, then no encryption will save you and no hiding away will save you. They'll just beat it out of you, no matter what it is.
TrueCrypt is exactly what we need - an encryption tool that offers hidden volumes, but not as the only feature, and you can quite well claim that you're using it for the others. Try that lie convincingly with Rubberhose (as much as I like it, technologically).
The point of plausible deniability isn't that it is perfectly hidden (that's what stego's for).
The point is that you can say "there is no hidden volume, I don't use that feature" and they can't prove that you're lying.
If your scenario is torture, then no encryption in the world can save you, because they can always torture the secret out of you. Shared keys would work in theory, in reality they would only multiply the number of people tortured.
I do wonder what cache files and other evidence may be sitting around on the unencrypted drive prior to transfer to the encrypted drive.
You don't "transfer to" an encrypted drive. You work off that. And set your/tmp to be auto-wiped on shutdown and startup (plausible deniability: Cleanup and space-savings).
So I wonder if a valid solution would be to use a hidden OS,
Sure, just but a vmware volume on the encrypted drive. Whatever. As I said: Modify for your requirements.
The point is that complicated technological solutions rarely work best. Smart, low-tech solutions are almost always better. A high-tech solution only makes them more suspicious.
I know of a real-world high-risk scenario in a 3rd world country where human rights workers who live under actual threat of torture and death use things like wireless drives - built into a car parked nearby or even embedded into the walls. WLAN is the only high-tech component here, the other is plain old hiding the stuff where they're unlikely to find it.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA. This is about drives that they don't want to use again. They're being thrown out. They just want to make sure no dumpster-diving hacker gets all their data.
On one hand, it's fun to see Microsoft getting punished, on the other, I happen to agree with Microsoft's argument with regard to patent trolls.
Yes, but if you want a law changed, the proper venue is through your lobbyists in Washington DC, not in the courtroom.
As you said, the MS lawyers could have argued on a broader scale, but chose not to. Guess why.
Isn't it ironic that western governments are developing systems to circumvent Internet censorship, while at the same time deploying censorship infrastructure and laws?
There's probably a good joke somewhere in there.
Might as well at least try to make the article worth reading.
Not if my two hours of work get wiped out within minutes of me posting them.
Less people outside an "in group" participating is almost always a sign that it has become too difficult to contribute. Just that those who could change things are usually in the "in group" and don't notice, because for them it's not difficult.
Or in other words: When you don't allow outside perspectives anymore, you've started dissolving from within, with incest and three-apes symptoms.
More importantly, I think: They've been in lots of movies that the "inner circle" has actually seen and/or can be downloaded via bittorrent.
Try creating a wikipedia page for a non-american theatre star with just as many viewers as the official sales of the porn starlet's flicks. Good luck. My bet is it won't survive the week, because none of the core editors has ever heard of that theatre.
If it is cited, the legitimacy of the citation can be challenged, and tracked down to verify that the entry correctly interprets the cited source.
In theory, yes.
In at least my personal Wikipedia experience, I've not seen it once that a deletionist actually tracked down a source. On the contrary, as I said in another comment already, I've seen whole articles disappear even though that had listed citations. But apparently, not being on the bookshelf of one of the core editors is enough to not count as a source.
A book (even one of his own) would be completely acceptable, even preferred if the only alternative is a blog.
Nonsense. I've seen whole articles disappear along with their citations because those were books that the deletionists "could not verify" (aka were too lazy to rent out from a library, deleting is so much easier).
It probably works for Stephen because he and his books are well known. It doesn't work for less famous things.
Oh, it also works for porn stars. For some reason, pretty much every porn star has a wikipedia page. Go figure.
If your filesystem task running on top of a proven kernel has a bug, it can still corrupt your disk.
Yes. So?
Firefox can corrupt your browsing history, Mail.app can corrupt your stored mails.
What's that got to do with higher kernel reliability?
You're saying we don't need fences around our military bases because the oil drums inside could still explode. It doesn't make any sense.
Almost all of the serious problems we have these days are implementation bugs. Buffer overflows, race conditions, code injection, etc.
A couple of the "IE quirks" are intentional design bugs, for example, where the browser does not behave correctly (e.g. box model), but it does behave according to its specification.
There are unintentional design bugs as well, but I can't come up with one by heart.
You may have missed that part, but this is not a research kernel, it's an embedded kernel that's actually being used in production.
Yes, it took a long time. It always does, the first time around.
Ssh to servers is not the usual use case (although it works in a pinch), but E-mail, web browsing, file downloading, Word/Excel/Powerpoint access, text messaging, mapping, and IM are. Modern phones are faster than powerful desktop machines from a few years ago, and you can hook up reasonable keyboards to them.
E-Mail and web - I much prefer the desktop, though it's useable (barely) on a phone.
Word/etc. - been there, done that, hated it. As I said, I'm reasonably sure that I can do in seconds on a desktop what takes you minutes on a phone.
Messaging/IM - same thing, though not quite as bad. Yes, a phone is great for a quick on-the-run message. For anything resembling a conversation, I prefer an actual keyboard. And once you hook up a keyboard to your phone, why not use a netbook?
(Of course, as an iPhone user, you have already outed yourself as a lover of gimmicks; if you actually want to get work done, get a Symbian phone.)
My other phone is one, thank you very much. For almost everything, I prefer the iPhone. Especially for stuff like ssh or large documents, where it gives me at least something resembling screen space.
And that's one of the insane concepts that many experts hate about Wikipedia.
They say that democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's a simplified metaphor to point out a crucial flaw of majority voting.
In the same way, one could say that Wikipedia is where an anonymous blog posting (which can be linked to) is the more trustworthy authority on spacetime than a direct edit by Stephen Hawking himself.
Protest all you want, reason all you want, the simple truth is that that's how it is.
Add something that you don't have documentation for, and its likely to get reverted.
The really stupid rules are all about what wikipedia will accept as "documentation" and what not.
People have tried to correct their own birth dates and were reverted, because they could not provide a citation. I know of one case who offered to send in a scanned copy of his passport, which was rejected as not WP-whatever.
Of course, if you put a fake birthday up on a MySpace page, you can cite that and voila, successful edit.
Most importantly: You can't write about anything that the deletionist crowd doesn't know about. They're like republicans: "Please, oh mighty god, let there not be a world outside my windows".
I've had quite a few articles deleted on subjects that are considerably more notable - but less geeky or important to the in-crowd - than lots of the articles that remain.
I've taken to sarcasm since. Every minor porn starlet has her own wikipedia page, but lots of non-porn movies, games, books that were seen by a lot more people don't. What does that tell you about wikipedia and the people that run it? :-)
Excellent study. Lots of people have felt this way for a few years now, but this is what science is for: Replacing "gut feeling" with hard facts.
The next step, of course, will be the most interesting: Research into what one can do, how one has to build a community to avoid these problems, and keep it running along the successful path.
Yes, it gains you a lot.
Firefox crashing means your userland memory is fucked up and can't be trusted anymore. No problem, kill it, clean it and restart the application.
A kernel crash leads to undefined behaviour on the ring 0 level. You don't want that, it's where root exploits live.
Furthermore, we have a lot of really, really strong kernel-level security extensions, like SELinux, whose only two vulnerable spots are kernel-level exploits and weak security policies. If you can remove one of them, you've done a lot to improve security.
How can you prove that that program is bug-free? How about conceptual bugs?
Formal verification does not tackle conceptual bugs. What it does is prove that the implementation conforms to the specification. If your specification is false, then it is false, but the implementation will correctly implement the false behaviour. In other words, this checks whether the house and the building plan are identical. If the plan has a window where there shouldn't be one, then that window will be there, because it's on the plan.
What overhead does this approach have? Are the benefits worth it?
RTFA. The amount of work required is staggering (four years, 200,000 theorems to prove) but since it's a verification of code, not additional testing code, there is zero overhead when the system is running.
This should once and for all silence the people who claim that it's impossible to formally verify any non-trivial code.
Oh, what am I dreaming. They won't shut up, but maybe now they'll die out.
They can still make a difference, especially in a 2-party system.
Yes, the two major parties will not fear losing to them. But they might fear losing enough votes to the pirates so that the other major party prevails. Once the pirate party gets a considerable number of voters, the other parties will take up their ideas, in order to win back those voters.
Been there, done that. I've owned one of the first Palms and I own an iPhone now. I've had notebooks since before they were cool.
Yes, 10 years ago I sometimes ssh'ed into our servers from a Palm III using IR connection to a mobile phone and dialin from that. It worked, it was geeky - and things that take me seconds on a desktop took me minutes on that setup.
If you have to do work while you're on travel, take a notebook. People who really have actual work to do use notebooks. People who just want the feeling of importance use their phones to do nonsense work where quality doesn't matter.
So what you need is a document viewer, not an office app.
Wow, big deal. Last I checked (i.e. yesterday), the iPhone had that ability built-in, and from what I've heard, about every other smartphone does as well.
Uh? Who in their right mind would even want to use office on a mobile phone? The UI is bad as it is on a full-size PC.
Seriously, a lot of these "tools" are just crap for middle management that for some reason feels empowered when they can do the secretaries job, just worse.
That's what it is called plausible deniability. Nobody in this discussion ever heard that term before?
The point is that you can say "I don't use that feature. I know it exists, but I have no use for it. I use TrueCrypt because it's good for what I use it for."
They can't prove you wrong.
Yes, if torture is what you're worried about, then no encryption will save you and no hiding away will save you. They'll just beat it out of you, no matter what it is.
TrueCrypt is exactly what we need - an encryption tool that offers hidden volumes, but not as the only feature, and you can quite well claim that you're using it for the others. Try that lie convincingly with Rubberhose (as much as I like it, technologically).
The point of plausible deniability isn't that it is perfectly hidden (that's what stego's for).
The point is that you can say "there is no hidden volume, I don't use that feature" and they can't prove that you're lying.
If your scenario is torture, then no encryption in the world can save you, because they can always torture the secret out of you. Shared keys would work in theory, in reality they would only multiply the number of people tortured.
I do wonder what cache files and other evidence may be sitting around on the unencrypted drive prior to transfer to the encrypted drive.
You don't "transfer to" an encrypted drive. You work off that. And set your /tmp to be auto-wiped on shutdown and startup (plausible deniability: Cleanup and space-savings).
So I wonder if a valid solution would be to use a hidden OS,
Sure, just but a vmware volume on the encrypted drive. Whatever. As I said: Modify for your requirements.
The point is that complicated technological solutions rarely work best. Smart, low-tech solutions are almost always better. A high-tech solution only makes them more suspicious.
I know of a real-world high-risk scenario in a 3rd world country where human rights workers who live under actual threat of torture and death use things like wireless drives - built into a car parked nearby or even embedded into the walls. WLAN is the only high-tech component here, the other is plain old hiding the stuff where they're unlikely to find it.