Not trolling, but Linux Security is somewhat atrocious these days with the whole security via obscurity approach
In order to qualify as "not trolling," you have to explain which parts of Linux rely on security through obscurity. The source code to Linux is completely out in the open and available to anyone who wants to study how it works. What do you think is hidden?
I find it somewhat surprising that less than half of their money is spent on servers and infrastructure. (On the other hand, it could be a lot less if they were willing to set up a secure mirror system rather than try to serve everything themselves.) Also interesting is that 21% of their total budget ($4.2 million) is planned to be spent on Community Programs. I thought delivering the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia to the masses for free was already something of a community program?
I just get the impression from Wikipedia that they're trying to run this non-profit a little too much like a business. Sure, the company itself doesn't turn a profit in the traditional sense, but I'd be very interested to know how much the staff makes and how that had scaled over time in relation to their annual budget.
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but such a comparison really doesn't hold. In the real world, you can protest or picket in any public space near the organization which you oppose. But you're not allowed to block physical access to the organization.
When you DDoS a site, that's blocking access. It's right there in the acronym: "Denial of Service". Whether you agree or disagree with Anonymous' methods, wilfully participating in a DDoS is illegal in most places.
The whole point of Chrome OS is to shift the application from running natively on the hardware to running in the cloud. You're thinking of the web browser as the application, Google is thinking of GMail as the application.
Not trusting users and going to extraordinary lengths to lock down and DRM your hardware + software are different things entirely.
It's possible to not trust users and still let developers and hackers have access to the innards. Just make the access relatively obscure an put up a big "Here be Dragons" sign.
And, as another commenter pointed out, the Chrome OS laptops will have a way to wipe the system clean should the user get into too much trouble.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
blurry - depends on the monitor, god ones can display high resolution without problems hot, power hungry - not as power hungry as the PC they are connected to huge - at lest on my desk, if I used a LCD monitor, the space behind it would be wasted anyway, since the monitor is on the corner of the desk.
Points taken, if not fully agreed with.:)
However, a CRT monitor can display a lot of resolutions correctly, also, it does not have the long response time that LCDs do (or the lag and image artifacts that LCDs with a short response time have).
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you mean the "ghosting" that plagued earlier LCDs, that hasn't been a problem in years. Even on my four-year-old LCDs, I can move windows, the mouse cursor, play games, watch movies, etc. with no perceivable artifacts or after-image. There were (or are) some LCD monitors on the market that had horrible latency, but this was due to poor controller design rather than a defect of the LCD itself.
I don't have a problem with consumption based billing. I have a problem to the GOTHCA! capitalism of having Wall Street and its corporate minions finding yet another way to fleece the public.
I agreed with everything you said until you deliberately conflated the world's most successful economic system with the anti-consumer actions of a handful of companies. Who, by the way, are granted local monopolies for service and content, which is pretty much the exact opposite of capitalism.
Metered bandwidth is a strike against net neutrality because it forces users to adjust their Internet usage to optimize for a lower bill. This makes streaming content (music, video, games) an unviable market, which would otherwise be able to compete fairly against the incumbent service/content providers who hold legal monopolies in most populated areas.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
Recently, the monitor at my parents failed (a 2 or 3 year old 1280x1024 LCD panel... All CRTs before that lasted way longer. This LCD craze does have its downsides).
You say that like LCDs are some passing fad! Sorry, they're here to stay and good riddance to blurry, hot, huge, power-hungry CRTs.
Was the previous LCD monitor a cheap model? Lower-priced monitors are known to not last very long because they're made with cheap components. The LCD panel itself might be fine, but the backlight inverter and all of the supporting electronics go bad sooner than well-made models. LCD monitors with LED backlights will be the norm soon and they do away with the last two real problems with LCDs: the inverters going bad, and the backlights fading over time.
1) He lived in NYC, where being a humongous dickhead is basically the norm, especially in business. (I know some very nice people from NYC, but I've been there before and I've done business there, so I'm not just reciting a tired stereotype.)
2) I would guess that the demographic of people buying glasses over the internet via their computers are not usually the violent type.
3) When someone this batshit-crazy harasses and threatens you, your self-preservation mechanism tells you to just call it a loss and stay as far away as possible.
Evaluating your security and defenses for vulnerabilities is a good thing to do. However, sitting around all day dreaming about specific terrorist targets and plots is a huge waste of time. Bruce Schneier calls these movie plot threats.
If you're a terrorist, your goal is to inflict the most amount of damage with the least amount of effort. To someone determined to blow up a bomb in or near an American building in the name of jihad, just about any building will do. Even if we could completely secure every single building, the terrorists will easily note that buildings are not really required to cause a lot of death and damage. A terrorist can just carry a briefbase or backpack bomb into any crowded area (shopping mall, city corner, subway, bus) and it's mission accomplished.
I think it's great that you were actively encouraged by your school's faculty to learn about things that you were interested in at an early age. There should be more of this. Understand, however, that your case is the extremely rare exception. The high school that I attended had computers, but it was always made very clear that they were only to be used under direct adult supervision and only for completing assignments in class. That meant no games, no programming, no tinkering of any sort. The computers weren't even networked to each other, let alone the Internet. The only satisfaction I ever got out of my high school computer classes was that after a while, my classmates started asking me for help when stuck on something, even when the teacher was standing right there.
American public schools are quite deliberately modeled after automobile assembly lines. Get the kids in, slap a minimum amount of knowledge on them, and get them out the door. In order for a student to really learn anything, they have to take the initiative do self-directed study on their own time. (Or hire a tutor, but that's not usually a realistic option for low- to middle-income families.)
Good afternoon. In 48 hours we will be submitting a news story about pigs wearing boots to Slashdot. The story will make the front page thanks to agents acting on our behalf within the Geeknet compound. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post a comment beneath the story which establishes a tenuous link between content of the article with nebulous anti-free market sentiment. As always, should your comment be modded down, we will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This comment will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, unity100.
Sure, we found out that an extra 15k Iraqis died than we were officially told; the big banks have laid the foundation for an economic environment in which a lot of people in our own country may very well starve to death before it's all said and done.
Starving versus dead is not really a very water-tight argument.
Because otherwise there wouldn't be anyone to complain about it on Slashdot? Do you read your email in pine over a serial terminal too?
The photographer had minimal electronics experience and simply used what knowledge and equipment he already had on-hand to create a useful hack. The great thing about Arduino is that it's flexible and simple. It allows people to slap together all manner of interesting projects without the benefit of an electronics engineering degree. In fact, it was explicitly designed as a way for artists and non-geeky folks to add basic electronic features to their projects. So what if it's overkill for a purpose like this? For the hobbyist, one Arduino board beats having to stock dozens of common single-purpose ICs.
Again, how does the iPad, which can't connect to a printer, run multiple apps at once, connect to most peripherals easily cannibalize your laptop sales?
Because people who used to buy laptops for casual browsing and content consumption now have a better option. A full-fledged computer is overkill for a lot of people, so of course the iPad is going to cannibalize some laptop sales. But those are more than made up for by the number of consumers who buy both a laptop and and iPad and use them for different purposes.
Windows is a desktop operating system. It has a popularized reputation (warranted or not) for being unwieldy, crashing, being expensive, and mostly dedicated to the accomplishment of boring or undesirable tasks like work, writing papers, using Office, etc.
And yet, every year millions of consumers in search of a fast shiny new computer still actively seek out one that runs Windows. Even though many of them know that the Mac is supposed to be an easier experience out of the box, familiarity and compatibility with their existing setup overrides all other considerations. That's the angle that Microsoft is taking by calling these "Windows" phones. They're trying to capture the part of the market that has held off on smart phones because they weren't sure whether the iPhone, Blackberry, or Android-based phones would integrate well with their computing workflow. Microsoft's marketing is so effective that your average worker drone doesn't know anything about using email outside of Outlook, nor anything about the web besides Internet Explorer, and wouldn't have a clue how to compose a memo in anything but Microsoft Office. But if they were to buy a "Windows" phone, it would surely come with their Outlook, their Internet Explorer, and their Microsoft Office.
Microsoft's market acquisition strategy can be defined as "slow and steady wins the race." With the exception of MS-DOS, there's not a single area where they entered a market and became an overnight leader. They're doing the same with cell phones. Microsoft knows all of the hip technology-savvy early adopters already have an iPhone or Android-based phone. They're not going to flock in droves to a Windows phone which doesn't do anything significantly better than existing phones. However, Microsoft will slowly (and steadily) continue to market the Windows phones, close deals with major carriers, offer bargains to large companies and governments, and the platform will eventually inhabit a sizable chunk of the market. If MS plays their cards right, they can even gradually nudge RIM out of their own playground after a few years.
It's impolite, but the truth. If your job entails running a company's computer systems, you should already know (or be able to Google) the fact that you either have to pony up for SSL certs or generate and distribute your own. There is no in between. In systems administration, the question of "how do we solve this?" is almost always answered by "rolling our own" or "paying someone".
I just have to say, shouldn't the CIA be just a tad bit embarrassed that they can't crack a piece of artwork that they commissioned and sits right in their own damn courtyard?
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, could even be several.
In order to qualify as "not trolling," you have to explain which parts of Linux rely on security through obscurity. The source code to Linux is completely out in the open and available to anyone who wants to study how it works. What do you think is hidden?
Care to link? Were you talking aout this?
I find it somewhat surprising that less than half of their money is spent on servers and infrastructure. (On the other hand, it could be a lot less if they were willing to set up a secure mirror system rather than try to serve everything themselves.) Also interesting is that 21% of their total budget ($4.2 million) is planned to be spent on Community Programs. I thought delivering the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia to the masses for free was already something of a community program?
I just get the impression from Wikipedia that they're trying to run this non-profit a little too much like a business. Sure, the company itself doesn't turn a profit in the traditional sense, but I'd be very interested to know how much the staff makes and how that had scaled over time in relation to their annual budget.
AC is just angry he didn't get one.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but such a comparison really doesn't hold. In the real world, you can protest or picket in any public space near the organization which you oppose. But you're not allowed to block physical access to the organization.
When you DDoS a site, that's blocking access. It's right there in the acronym: "Denial of Service". Whether you agree or disagree with Anonymous' methods, wilfully participating in a DDoS is illegal in most places.
The whole point of Chrome OS is to shift the application from running natively on the hardware to running in the cloud. You're thinking of the web browser as the application, Google is thinking of GMail as the application.
Not trusting users and going to extraordinary lengths to lock down and DRM your hardware + software are different things entirely.
It's possible to not trust users and still let developers and hackers have access to the innards. Just make the access relatively obscure an put up a big "Here be Dragons" sign.
And, as another commenter pointed out, the Chrome OS laptops will have a way to wipe the system clean should the user get into too much trouble.
Points taken, if not fully agreed with. :)
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you mean the "ghosting" that plagued earlier LCDs, that hasn't been a problem in years. Even on my four-year-old LCDs, I can move windows, the mouse cursor, play games, watch movies, etc. with no perceivable artifacts or after-image. There were (or are) some LCD monitors on the market that had horrible latency, but this was due to poor controller design rather than a defect of the LCD itself.
I agreed with everything you said until you deliberately conflated the world's most successful economic system with the anti-consumer actions of a handful of companies. Who, by the way, are granted local monopolies for service and content, which is pretty much the exact opposite of capitalism.
Wait... what?
Metered bandwidth is a strike against net neutrality because it forces users to adjust their Internet usage to optimize for a lower bill. This makes streaming content (music, video, games) an unviable market, which would otherwise be able to compete fairly against the incumbent service/content providers who hold legal monopolies in most populated areas.
You say that like LCDs are some passing fad! Sorry, they're here to stay and good riddance to blurry, hot, huge, power-hungry CRTs.
Was the previous LCD monitor a cheap model? Lower-priced monitors are known to not last very long because they're made with cheap components. The LCD panel itself might be fine, but the backlight inverter and all of the supporting electronics go bad sooner than well-made models. LCD monitors with LED backlights will be the norm soon and they do away with the last two real problems with LCDs: the inverters going bad, and the backlights fading over time.
Three points:
1) He lived in NYC, where being a humongous dickhead is basically the norm, especially in business. (I know some very nice people from NYC, but I've been there before and I've done business there, so I'm not just reciting a tired stereotype.)
2) I would guess that the demographic of people buying glasses over the internet via their computers are not usually the violent type.
3) When someone this batshit-crazy harasses and threatens you, your self-preservation mechanism tells you to just call it a loss and stay as far away as possible.
Evaluating your security and defenses for vulnerabilities is a good thing to do. However, sitting around all day dreaming about specific terrorist targets and plots is a huge waste of time. Bruce Schneier calls these movie plot threats.
If you're a terrorist, your goal is to inflict the most amount of damage with the least amount of effort. To someone determined to blow up a bomb in or near an American building in the name of jihad, just about any building will do. Even if we could completely secure every single building, the terrorists will easily note that buildings are not really required to cause a lot of death and damage. A terrorist can just carry a briefbase or backpack bomb into any crowded area (shopping mall, city corner, subway, bus) and it's mission accomplished.
Perhaps to get organic salt, they infuse the crystals with ashes from cremated unicorns?
I think it's great that you were actively encouraged by your school's faculty to learn about things that you were interested in at an early age. There should be more of this. Understand, however, that your case is the extremely rare exception. The high school that I attended had computers, but it was always made very clear that they were only to be used under direct adult supervision and only for completing assignments in class. That meant no games, no programming, no tinkering of any sort. The computers weren't even networked to each other, let alone the Internet. The only satisfaction I ever got out of my high school computer classes was that after a while, my classmates started asking me for help when stuck on something, even when the teacher was standing right there.
American public schools are quite deliberately modeled after automobile assembly lines. Get the kids in, slap a minimum amount of knowledge on them, and get them out the door. In order for a student to really learn anything, they have to take the initiative do self-directed study on their own time. (Or hire a tutor, but that's not usually a realistic option for low- to middle-income families.)
Good afternoon. In 48 hours we will be submitting a news story about pigs wearing boots to Slashdot. The story will make the front page thanks to agents acting on our behalf within the Geeknet compound. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post a comment beneath the story which establishes a tenuous link between content of the article with nebulous anti-free market sentiment. As always, should your comment be modded down, we will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This comment will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, unity100.
Starving versus dead is not really a very water-tight argument.
Here's Asa's blog post, so that you don't have to click through the "news" article, which is almost entirely a copy-and-paste of Asa's post.
Because otherwise there wouldn't be anyone to complain about it on Slashdot? Do you read your email in pine over a serial terminal too?
The photographer had minimal electronics experience and simply used what knowledge and equipment he already had on-hand to create a useful hack. The great thing about Arduino is that it's flexible and simple. It allows people to slap together all manner of interesting projects without the benefit of an electronics engineering degree. In fact, it was explicitly designed as a way for artists and non-geeky folks to add basic electronic features to their projects. So what if it's overkill for a purpose like this? For the hobbyist, one Arduino board beats having to stock dozens of common single-purpose ICs.
Because people who used to buy laptops for casual browsing and content consumption now have a better option. A full-fledged computer is overkill for a lot of people, so of course the iPad is going to cannibalize some laptop sales. But those are more than made up for by the number of consumers who buy both a laptop and and iPad and use them for different purposes.
Let's face the facts here, the market for paper bags in the technology sector has fallen dramatically since Windows 7 supplanted Vista.
And yet, every year millions of consumers in search of a fast shiny new computer still actively seek out one that runs Windows. Even though many of them know that the Mac is supposed to be an easier experience out of the box, familiarity and compatibility with their existing setup overrides all other considerations. That's the angle that Microsoft is taking by calling these "Windows" phones. They're trying to capture the part of the market that has held off on smart phones because they weren't sure whether the iPhone, Blackberry, or Android-based phones would integrate well with their computing workflow. Microsoft's marketing is so effective that your average worker drone doesn't know anything about using email outside of Outlook, nor anything about the web besides Internet Explorer, and wouldn't have a clue how to compose a memo in anything but Microsoft Office. But if they were to buy a "Windows" phone, it would surely come with their Outlook, their Internet Explorer, and their Microsoft Office.
Microsoft's market acquisition strategy can be defined as "slow and steady wins the race." With the exception of MS-DOS, there's not a single area where they entered a market and became an overnight leader. They're doing the same with cell phones. Microsoft knows all of the hip technology-savvy early adopters already have an iPhone or Android-based phone. They're not going to flock in droves to a Windows phone which doesn't do anything significantly better than existing phones. However, Microsoft will slowly (and steadily) continue to market the Windows phones, close deals with major carriers, offer bargains to large companies and governments, and the platform will eventually inhabit a sizable chunk of the market. If MS plays their cards right, they can even gradually nudge RIM out of their own playground after a few years.
It's impolite, but the truth. If your job entails running a company's computer systems, you should already know (or be able to Google) the fact that you either have to pony up for SSL certs or generate and distribute your own. There is no in between. In systems administration, the question of "how do we solve this?" is almost always answered by "rolling our own" or "paying someone".
I just have to say, shouldn't the CIA be just a tad bit embarrassed that they can't crack a piece of artwork that they commissioned and sits right in their own damn courtyard?