If it's "illegal" for a PRIVATE CITIZEN to write frigging buttons and frames that just LOOK like some corporations' product then maybe what this country needs is a good old fashioned REVOLUTION.
It's not illegal to do that; go ahead and make one for yourself. Just don't distribute it.
I'm a bit baffled why nobody has unveiled basic IP-based telephony. A regular ol' telephone that simply has an Ethernet jack. Great for businesses, and fine for the small percentage of geeks like me that don't have a landline. The phone could be really quite simple -- the telephone equivalent of a computer with a TCP/IP stack, a soundcard and a speaker. I assume that it would have to be tied to a particular service (configuration information burned into the EEPROM), but fancier ones could let you specify the IP of a gateway, I guess. Then, any company with a sufficent number of POPs would be able to eliminate the bulk of long-distance costs, as the calls themselves could simply be routed over the Internet.
I can't say that the plan is flawless -- I leave such details up to much more knowledgable people than myself -- but I still think that this is a pretty basic goal for IP-based telephony, rather than this platform-specific strap-on-some-headphones kind of thing.
In fact, because the Linux networking suite is far more capable than the Windows suite, the average Linux user must be more vigilant in protecting his/her computer against worm attacks.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. With the wonders if the tiered user access system (root vs. others), any user running their system properly (ie, not as root) is at little to no risk. There are always exploits to worry about, but these are not viruses in the sense that Windows users are accustomed to, but simply automated exploits. Further, these are almost invariably contained to limited portions of the system, again, due to the very nature of the Unix user system.
I'll bet you can't think of an anti-virus package for Linux. It's because it's wholly unnecessary.
That press release came out in June. Which means that their fiscal year for 2002 started in March of 2001. If that's accurate, their accountants are smoking so much crack that there's no way they'll ever break even.
Given the statement in this press release, things aren't looking good for next year, either:
The company reported an adjusted net income of $600,000, or break even per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2002, compared to an adjusted net loss of $3.7 million, or $0.02 per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2001.
Employing those psychic accountants must be very lucrative!
I'm not sure I'm ready to tell those kids whose parents didn't come home last week that they and others down the road just have to suck it up because people may be unwilling -- even temporarily -- to lose any measure of privacy.
I'm totally with you here. Absolutely.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them?
Yup. And you used the magic words: "to get warrants." This warrantless-wiretap stuff is scary. It would be one thing if it were windowed (a sunset date, say, 90 days from now), which I think we could tolerate for the purpose of the immediate crisis. But to forever and ever have wiretaps without a court order? That's no good.
But here's the part about your statement that makes me uncomfortable. I assume that by "intercepting" "encrypted files," what you mean is not merely for federal officials to possess the encrypted data, but to be able to decrypt that data. And I can't say that I agree with that. Firstly because of the technical problems: any encryption with a backdoor is much, much easier to crack. (IANAC [I Am Not A Cypherpunk], but this is what I gather to be the case.) Secondly because what that really is, is a law against secrets. "There can be no secrets." And a law against encryption is as worthless as a missle defense shield. If people want to tell secrets, they'll meet in person in a dark alley. But to fatally weaken electronic secrecy for this purpose, I think, is going too far.
I'm willing to give up a lot of privacy on a temporary basis (and some on a long-term basis) to prevent this from happening again. But to permanently surrender electronic secrecy? I think that's asking too much.
I never said that I trust that software. (Though I must admit that, from what I've seen, it looks excellent.) Its efficacy isn't something up for debate: it appears to work quite well. Further, we are not trusting the software over anything else, it's simply used to augment our existing security systems. Ideally.
That said, I'm opposed to such software as I am all such surveillance techniques. The step in the direction of 1984 is offensive both legally and morally, and I refuse to visit any city or business that has such a system in place. Thus far, this consists of Tampa, Virginia Beach (soon) and the Super Bowl, but it won't be long until such a statement has teeth.
Yeah, I bet there will be a huge uproar here on Slashdot in response to his radical suggestion that the suspension of our civil rights might be a bad idea. How brave of him!
Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help.
Um...yeah, see, that's not true. I'm capable of remembering, what, a few thousand faces? Tens of thousands? A facial-recognition system can (reportedly) distinguish millions.
A few months ago we had a discussion here about this quote, and I spent about an hour researching it. Turns out there are dozens of variations on it, and it's variously attributed to any number of proto-American leaders. Every time that I thought I'd found a winner, I discovered some fatal flaw that made that author/version impossible.
No doubt there is an expert greater than I in this topic, but from my limited research, I'm afraid that I can only conclude that greater context is impossible.
The statement that George Bush "fled to various bunkers and seemed to shrink throughout the day" is rather disingenuous and short-sighted.
Which part of that is wrong? He did flee to various locations (which I can only assume contained bunkers for his safety), and he did seem to shrink throughout the day. The first is fact, the second is a statement of opinion backed up widely by popular opinion, buffered by a "seemed by." You've got no gripe here, and nor does anybody else that's been posting and bitching about this statement.
As much as a surprise as this might be, there is no unifying Slashdot ideology. Being as how we're all capable of free thought, some people believe things that others don't.
I can't believe that I've had to state something so blindingly obvious.
Over at nancies.org, we made a Red Cross banner and put it into rotation, which is (IMHO) even better than donating whatever paltry income that sites make from advertising these days.
The United States' sky was blue, perfectly blue. Empty, simple, clear, clean, blue. Throughout the country, millions of people looked up at the sky on Tuesday to see the most perfect, cloudless sky that has existed for many, many years.
Except for over New York City. The sky over Manhattan was obscured by thick, black smoke and dust from the remains of the World Trade Center. They did not share our sky, and we did not share theirs.
The rest of us Americans shared something else, too: television. We spent hours glued to our televisions, placing panicked phones calls every few minutes to friends and family, not to share mutually-known news, but to share the thick silence of horror. Every station broadcast the latest news, without interruption. They all used a common title: "Attack on America," sparing us the usual battle over which network's tragedy-moniker will stick.
By afternoon, many of those that had remained home to watch the news realized that they needed some face time, and headed to the streets for some human contact. Those that had spent the day at work had gotten very little done, finding themselves a part of impromptu television communities in neighboring offices. It was, of course, all that anybody talked about. Strangers gathered on street corners, nodding acquaintances traded news tips, people sobbed and prayed on the sidewalk.
All beneath that perfect blue sky. With every last airplane in the United States resting safely on the tarmac, not a single contrail scarred our endless collective ceiling.
The blood drives started by mid-afternoon, setting up cots in office parks, buses, and abandoned shopping malls. The turnout was so tremendous that crowds of people were turned away, asked to return the next day to give of their blood.
Then there were the American flags. Where happy orange pumpkins and brown ice cream cones had flapped in front of homes and businesses, now crisp new star-spangled banners hung. On Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, four girls bearing carnations walked down the street, offering bright yellow flowers to babies and businessmen, homeless women and waitresses. Nearly everybody in sight bore boutonnieres in their buttonholes, and it was impossible not to cry.
Late afternoon brought perhaps the most surreal event of the day. Congress assembled on the Capital steps and sang a verse of "God Bless America." Republicans, Democrats and Independents sang together, slightly off-key, unaccompanied by music. Under our great blue sky.
I was going to post the same thing. This shows how incredibly foolish and shortsighted that it is of us to believe that this missle defense shield will do us any good. It has often been mentioned that anybody can get a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb into the country, but this shows that it doesn't even take that to entirely shut down the country.
Here we all are -- on Slashdot. I'm at home, and I bet that I won't go to work until late this afternoon. Most of the country is in similar shape. No missle defense shield could help this. In fact, I'm not sure that *anything* could help this. If half a dozen guys decide to hijack airplanes and crash them into major buildings, no defense shield or anything else will help.
ABC News reported (complete with smoke-obscured footage from a distance) about 20 minutes ago that there had been an explosion in the ___ Wing (I must admit that I don't remember which) of the White House. There hasn't been a whisper about t his since their 5-minute-long coverage (quite lengthy, IMHO.)
Slashdot Mirror
If it's "illegal" for a PRIVATE CITIZEN to write frigging buttons and frames that just LOOK like some corporations' product then maybe what this country needs is a good old fashioned REVOLUTION.
It's not illegal to do that; go ahead and make one for yourself. Just don't distribute it.
-Waldo
Because you're on the wrong site to do that. Try k5.
:)
-Waldo
I guess if you think that $20 is a fair amount to pay for shipping then, yeah, it's free.
-Waldo
I'm a genius!
;)
-Waldo
I'm a bit baffled why nobody has unveiled basic IP-based telephony. A regular ol' telephone that simply has an Ethernet jack. Great for businesses, and fine for the small percentage of geeks like me that don't have a landline. The phone could be really quite simple -- the telephone equivalent of a computer with a TCP/IP stack, a soundcard and a speaker. I assume that it would have to be tied to a particular service (configuration information burned into the EEPROM), but fancier ones could let you specify the IP of a gateway, I guess. Then, any company with a sufficent number of POPs would be able to eliminate the bulk of long-distance costs, as the calls themselves could simply be routed over the Internet.
I can't say that the plan is flawless -- I leave such details up to much more knowledgable people than myself -- but I still think that this is a pretty basic goal for IP-based telephony, rather than this platform-specific strap-on-some-headphones kind of thing.
-Waldo
``All the twenty clever kings'' could mean ``attack'' if you were to just look at the first letter of every word.
Only if you spelled badly.
;)
-Waldo
In fact, because the Linux networking suite is far more capable than the Windows suite, the average Linux user must be more vigilant in protecting his/her computer against worm attacks.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. With the wonders if the tiered user access system (root vs. others), any user running their system properly (ie, not as root) is at little to no risk. There are always exploits to worry about, but these are not viruses in the sense that Windows users are accustomed to, but simply automated exploits. Further, these are almost invariably contained to limited portions of the system, again, due to the very nature of the Unix user system.
I'll bet you can't think of an anti-virus package for Linux. It's because it's wholly unnecessary.
-Waldo
That press release came out in June. Which means that their fiscal year for 2002 started in March of 2001. If that's accurate, their accountants are smoking so much crack that there's no way they'll ever break even.
-Waldo
Given the statement in this press release, things aren't looking good for next year, either:
The company reported an adjusted net income of $600,000, or break even per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2002, compared to an adjusted net loss of $3.7 million, or $0.02 per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2001.
Employing those psychic accountants must be very lucrative!
-Waldo
I'd like to see a new survey:
Should you be allowed to have secrets?
I imagine that we'd see considerably different results.
-Waldo
I'm not sure I'm ready to tell those kids whose parents didn't come home last week that they and others down the road just have to suck it up because people may be unwilling -- even temporarily -- to lose any measure of privacy.
I'm totally with you here. Absolutely.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them?
Yup. And you used the magic words: "to get warrants." This warrantless-wiretap stuff is scary. It would be one thing if it were windowed (a sunset date, say, 90 days from now), which I think we could tolerate for the purpose of the immediate crisis. But to forever and ever have wiretaps without a court order? That's no good.
But here's the part about your statement that makes me uncomfortable. I assume that by "intercepting" "encrypted files," what you mean is not merely for federal officials to possess the encrypted data, but to be able to decrypt that data. And I can't say that I agree with that. Firstly because of the technical problems: any encryption with a backdoor is much, much easier to crack. (IANAC [I Am Not A Cypherpunk], but this is what I gather to be the case.) Secondly because what that really is, is a law against secrets. "There can be no secrets." And a law against encryption is as worthless as a missle defense shield. If people want to tell secrets, they'll meet in person in a dark alley. But to fatally weaken electronic secrecy for this purpose, I think, is going too far.
I'm willing to give up a lot of privacy on a temporary basis (and some on a long-term basis) to prevent this from happening again. But to permanently surrender electronic secrecy? I think that's asking too much.
JM2C,
Waldo
That might all be true, but RMS' statement (humans didn't spot terrorists, therefore computers could not) remains false.
-Waldo
I never said that I trust that software. (Though I must admit that, from what I've seen, it looks excellent.) Its efficacy isn't something up for debate: it appears to work quite well. Further, we are not trusting the software over anything else, it's simply used to augment our existing security systems. Ideally.
That said, I'm opposed to such software as I am all such surveillance techniques. The step in the direction of 1984 is offensive both legally and morally, and I refuse to visit any city or business that has such a system in place. Thus far, this consists of Tampa, Virginia Beach (soon) and the Super Bowl, but it won't be long until such a statement has teeth.
-Waldo
Yeah, I bet there will be a huge uproar here on Slashdot in response to his radical suggestion that the suspension of our civil rights might be a bad idea. How brave of him!
-Waldo
Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help.
Um...yeah, see, that's not true. I'm capable of remembering, what, a few thousand faces? Tens of thousands? A facial-recognition system can (reportedly) distinguish millions.
-Waldo
A few months ago we had a discussion here about this quote, and I spent about an hour researching it. Turns out there are dozens of variations on it, and it's variously attributed to any number of proto-American leaders. Every time that I thought I'd found a winner, I discovered some fatal flaw that made that author/version impossible.
No doubt there is an expert greater than I in this topic, but from my limited research, I'm afraid that I can only conclude that greater context is impossible.
-Waldo
Well, the planes did crash! You do the math.
-Waldo
The statement that George Bush "fled to various bunkers and seemed to shrink throughout the day" is rather disingenuous and short-sighted.
Which part of that is wrong? He did flee to various locations (which I can only assume contained bunkers for his safety), and he did seem to shrink throughout the day. The first is fact, the second is a statement of opinion backed up widely by popular opinion, buffered by a "seemed by." You've got no gripe here, and nor does anybody else that's been posting and bitching about this statement.
-Waldo
As much as a surprise as this might be, there is no unifying Slashdot ideology. Being as how we're all capable of free thought, some people believe things that others don't.
I can't believe that I've had to state something so blindingly obvious.
-Waldo
Over at nancies.org, we made a Red Cross banner and put it into rotation, which is (IMHO) even better than donating whatever paltry income that sites make from advertising these days.
f
http://www.nancies.org/images/banners/redcross.gi
Anybody is welcome to use it, of course. We linked it to redcross.org, but the Amazon.com thing may be better.
-Waldo
The United States' sky was blue, perfectly blue. Empty, simple, clear, clean, blue. Throughout the country, millions of people looked up at the sky on Tuesday to see the most perfect, cloudless sky that has existed for many, many years.
Except for over New York City. The sky over Manhattan was obscured by thick, black smoke and dust from the remains of the World Trade Center. They did not share our sky, and we did not share theirs.
The rest of us Americans shared something else, too: television. We spent hours glued to our televisions, placing panicked phones calls every few minutes to friends and family, not to share mutually-known news, but to share the thick silence of horror. Every station broadcast the latest news, without interruption. They all used a common title: "Attack on America," sparing us the usual battle over which network's tragedy-moniker will stick.
By afternoon, many of those that had remained home to watch the news realized that they needed some face time, and headed to the streets for some human contact. Those that had spent the day at work had gotten very little done, finding themselves a part of impromptu television communities in neighboring offices. It was, of course, all that anybody talked about. Strangers gathered on street corners, nodding acquaintances traded news tips, people sobbed and prayed on the sidewalk.
All beneath that perfect blue sky. With every last airplane in the United States resting safely on the tarmac, not a single contrail scarred our endless collective ceiling.
The blood drives started by mid-afternoon, setting up cots in office parks, buses, and abandoned shopping malls. The turnout was so tremendous that crowds of people were turned away, asked to return the next day to give of their blood.
Then there were the American flags. Where happy orange pumpkins and brown ice cream cones had flapped in front of homes and businesses, now crisp new star-spangled banners hung. On Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, four girls bearing carnations walked down the street, offering bright yellow flowers to babies and businessmen, homeless women and waitresses. Nearly everybody in sight bore boutonnieres in their buttonholes, and it was impossible not to cry.
Late afternoon brought perhaps the most surreal event of the day. Congress assembled on the Capital steps and sang a verse of "God Bless America." Republicans, Democrats and Independents sang together, slightly off-key, unaccompanied by music. Under our great blue sky.
I was going to post the same thing. This shows how incredibly foolish and shortsighted that it is of us to believe that this missle defense shield will do us any good. It has often been mentioned that anybody can get a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb into the country, but this shows that it doesn't even take that to entirely shut down the country.
Here we all are -- on Slashdot. I'm at home, and I bet that I won't go to work until late this afternoon. Most of the country is in similar shape. No missle defense shield could help this. In fact, I'm not sure that *anything* could help this. If half a dozen guys decide to hijack airplanes and crash them into major buildings, no defense shield or anything else will help.
ABC News reported (complete with smoke-obscured footage from a distance) about 20 minutes ago that there had been an explosion in the ___ Wing (I must admit that I don't remember which) of the White House. There hasn't been a whisper about t his since their 5-minute-long coverage (quite lengthy, IMHO.)
Anybody in DC that can confirm this?
If so, GET THE FUCK OUT OF DC!
ABC News just said that there's been "an explosion of some kind" at the Capitol Building. No more information available now.
-1 Redundant? At the time of my post, there are two posts in response to this story. This is the first one. How in the world can post #1 be redundant?
-Waldo