Until the FCC is sufficiently emasculated that the ISPs can do some deep packet inspection and slow your encrypted tunnel down to 1 byte per hour, you know, for "QOS",
Wikileaks allegedly leaked the CIA's toolkit. I see nowhere in the leak where that toolkit is being used in the way you claim it is. Now I wouldn't be surprised if that was happening, unfortunately, but at the moment spying on US citizens still requires FISA approval, and so long as these tools are used in that context when spying on US citizens, then no law has been broken.
Why would they do that? Most of what constitutes Windows, even 20 years ago, was portable. If there's a port of the CLR, well that's.NET (and much of Powershell and its toolkit) taken care of, and I'm sure even CMD.EXE and the older NT toolkit having been built on a system intended to be portable between architectures, is still cross-compiliable. I can imagine that some things like many Server components will require some work to run natively on ARM, I cannot imagine MS going to the effort to produce an ARM operating system (which it has already done, BTW) and not port over all the server components and features for an ARM version of Server.
Further to that, it looks like a minimal uClinux install can fit in about 2mb:
The size of a practical bootable image, with Ethernet, TCP/IP and a reasonable set of user-space tools and applications confugured, would be in a 1.5 - 2 MBytes ballpark. With the "two-chips Linux design" concept in mind, a 1.5 MBytes image could possibly fit into internal Flash of today's Cortex-M microcontrollers. One example of a device that can hold an image of the size is the STM32F429 Cortex-M4 microcontroller.
There are no lack of embedded devices which have constraints a lot smaller than that, whether it's due to price point or simply because achieving the smallest possible size with the lowest power consumption is essential. Now maybe it's unfair to suggest that Windows has much of a place in these kinds of devices, the fact is that you can make really really really small Linux distros whose footprints can be below 8-10mb (I think a minimalist OpenWRT install could fit in 2mb).
And yet, as with so many things in human affairs, the baseline is where a lot of people live. I'm sure you don't go into a store, see a gallon of milk cost $3, go up to the teller and offer to pay $5, nor when you're driving down the road on a nicy dry sunny spring day and the maximum speed is posted at 30mph do you instead opt to drive at 20mph. If you want the baseline on anything to be higher (or lower, depending on how you want to place the limit), then that is where, legally, you have to put it. If you want security services to immediately publish vulnerabilities upon discovery, then you need to advocate for the laws to be changed to require it. These are spooks, they're not by the very definition of their jobs in the business of public dissemination of information. And indeed, this has always been recognized as such, which is the Founding Fathers created a government where the Executive branch is constrained and where Congress and the Courts have significant oversight powers.
As to the claim that spies do more harm than good, what do you base that upon? Considering that much of the conduct of spies isn't known until decades later, if at all, how can you possibly assert that claim? It strikes me that what you're really trying to is conflate what is a value judgment with the effectiveness of spies in general. To be sure, I think some kinds of espionage, like hoovering up every bit that is transmitted on the Internet probably is going to create such a horrible signal-to-noise ratio that it may actually be counterproductive, but you cannot tell me that, for instance, gaining control of some Russian mole's cell phone and intercepting his calls, texts and emails, couldn't be of enormous value. What you would really be trying to claim is that espionage is a waste of time, which would be an absurd claim.
Exactly. Not every server is a high-end number crunching machine. The only server I'm running right now that I wouldn't really contemplate moving to ARM if it were available and was more economical than x86 would probably be our RDBMS servers, where cycles mean a helluva lot. But for our web, email, file and print servers, frankly when I look at them, they're spending a helluva lot of time idling, and the reason I don't virtualize all of them on one server is more about redundancy. As it is we have a three virtual server farm that runs all our servers except the database server and one of the Server 2012 DCs which we intentionally keep on separate hardware in case the NAS servers explode.
Considering MS already ported the Windows kernel to ARM a while back, and certainly Windows NT, including the older CLI toolkit were all ported over to multiple architectures back in the day, it may not be all that hard. Obviously there's going to be some recompiling and porting over of a lot of server components, so I'm not saying that porting the entire Server ecosystem to ARM will be trivial, but it's not really a massive leap, just a lot of recompiling and testing. A lot of the admin tools have been moved over to.NET due to Powershell's increased use, so in some cases we're talking not much more than testing on the ARM versions of the CLR.
For mundane tasks, Windows' remote admin is hard to beat, and providing there are no major roadblocks, most (probably 90%+) of the server tasks I've done over the last ten years or so were all done via the MMC remote admin components on my workstation. Some more complicated tasks can be done via remote admin, but can be a bit of a pain (like registry changes), and I end up just logging into the server instead.
To each his own. Maybe it's because I've been using *nix for over a quarter of a century, and simply find the toolkit a lot easier to use and understand, and I've never particular bought into this notion that objects are better, considering anything requiring actually listing data inevitably has to be transformed into strings anyways. I find the object nature of Powershell to be just another irritant.
It isn't a threat currently, but one can be sure that if ARM saw that it could make an in-road into the data center, it might just ponder making chips with greater overall horsepower for a "server line" of ARM CPUs. Just because ARM at the moment is more interested in low power chips doesn't mean they wouldn't ponder a move towards higher performance, and certainly if they could advertise both Windows and Linux as supported platforms, that makes for a pretty compelling argument.
The fact that Microsoft is going this direction clearly indicates to me that there must be some interested at the hardware end to produce server-grade chips.
Server Core can be run without said bloat. It's a pain to use, of course, because PowerShell is horribly verbose and it makes many CLI tasks long-winded and annoying as compared to *nix, but we have some HyperV servers that run that way, and we can actually do remote administration via the Server and HyperV tools so it's not that bad overall. Still lots of other ways it is bloated, and one can find some pretty minimalistic Linux installs that Windows Server could never come close to in small footprint.
That may be unethical conduct, but can you point to where it's actually illegal for any of the US security services to withhold knowledge of vulnerabilities? And really, why would that be their responsibility (okay, I grant you the NSA has played a pro-security role over the years)?
I think people are missing the point that spying has always relied on vulnerabilities in a foreign actor's communications. In ye olden days that would mean cracking ciphers, finding ways of penetrating foreign powers' communications channels, and it has also mean "domestic" espionage, since sometimes a nation's own citizens can, knowingly or unknowingly, be used as conduits of sensitive information to foreign powers. The Lincoln Administration tapped every telegraph line coming into Union territory to catch any Confederate agents, and most certainly during the First and Second World Wars much the same occurred.
Not that I want to defend everything spy agencies do, and certainly some of it appears to violate both legal and constitutional restraints, but the fact remains that electronic vulnerabilities are critical to gaining intel, and one can imagine why they wouldn't want to go around telling Apple or Samsung or anyone else "Hey, guess what, your devices have vulnerabilities that allow us to spy!" Of course, the counter-argument to that is that if the US and its allies know about these vulnerabilities, then almost certainly so do the Russians and Chinese.
At the end of the day, whether we like it or not, national governments, including the government of the United States, have always partaken in espionage, and it is a critical activity of any nation state to guarantee the security of the nation and its citizens. That it can be abused is a given, which is why in general democracies have some sort of legislative and judicial oversight.
Yes, until newer browser features become more common and more and more sites don't render properly. This is like proclaiming "I don't get browser malware because I use links!" Well, yes, but...
Actually there's a bit of irony to that. We have about 30 Dells we had bought that had Vista on them. Last year upgraded them all to Windows 10, which seems to run perfectly fine on hardware that was, at that point, seven years old. Of course there are a lot of other things to dislike about Windows 10, but it actually runs fairly well on those old machines.
In the early 1980s. I got my first RadioShack computer around 1982, and they were hawking their batteries then. Mind you, the price wasn't bad, so I didn't complain. They also asked for contact information, and I remember being 10 or 11 years old and getting the first mail actually addressed to me, a monthly RadioShack flyer! It seems stupid now, but I remember pouring over the computer section of the catalog, salivating over the speech synthesis cartridge for the Color Computer or Brick Out being played on a Model 4.
It's kind of a pity in a way. I remember back in the day that I could literally order anything in their catalog, which was huge. I remember ordering a new keyboard for my Color Computer 1, which hadn't been manufactured in a few years by that point. It seems so odd to me that the companies that already had such an advanced warehouse and shipping network couldn't find a way to get that into the Internet age, but they just floundered, and ended their time selling crappy PC clones, before even the Tandy PCs died off.
I think RadioShack's problems predate turning themselves into a cell phone store. In the 1980s RadioShack was, at least in my town, the center of the community's technical world. The manager was a great guy who would lead teenagers like myself muck around with the latest Model 100 or Model 4, and indeed my first three computers were all Tandy/RadioShack computers. RadioShack was sort of a geek cultural center back in the day, but by the 90s it was trying to transform itself and I remember the stores became a lot more "corporate", with management that was far less friendly. Yes, the slow degradation of the components section of the store had its effect in reducing the hobbyist traffic, but it was also that the soul of the place seemed to die out. Where in the 80s and early 90s you actually had staff who knew something about the products they were selling, by the early 00s, you had kids who could barely read a script.
Slashdot Mirror
Be sure to attach a $50,000 campaign donation, a bag of blow and, this is the really tricky part, three hookers. Hope that web form is a Web 2.0 form!
Until the FCC is sufficiently emasculated that the ISPs can do some deep packet inspection and slow your encrypted tunnel down to 1 byte per hour, you know, for "QOS",
Wikileaks allegedly leaked the CIA's toolkit. I see nowhere in the leak where that toolkit is being used in the way you claim it is. Now I wouldn't be surprised if that was happening, unfortunately, but at the moment spying on US citizens still requires FISA approval, and so long as these tools are used in that context when spying on US citizens, then no law has been broken.
Why would they do that? Most of what constitutes Windows, even 20 years ago, was portable. If there's a port of the CLR, well that's .NET (and much of Powershell and its toolkit) taken care of, and I'm sure even CMD.EXE and the older NT toolkit having been built on a system intended to be portable between architectures, is still cross-compiliable. I can imagine that some things like many Server components will require some work to run natively on ARM, I cannot imagine MS going to the effort to produce an ARM operating system (which it has already done, BTW) and not port over all the server components and features for an ARM version of Server.
Further to that, it looks like a minimal uClinux install can fit in about 2mb:
http://www.emcraft.com/stm32f4...
I was under the impression that you could shut even that GUI off. We still run with the minimalist GUI so we can edit config files and the like.
There are no lack of embedded devices which have constraints a lot smaller than that, whether it's due to price point or simply because achieving the smallest possible size with the lowest power consumption is essential. Now maybe it's unfair to suggest that Windows has much of a place in these kinds of devices, the fact is that you can make really really really small Linux distros whose footprints can be below 8-10mb (I think a minimalist OpenWRT install could fit in 2mb).
And yet, as with so many things in human affairs, the baseline is where a lot of people live. I'm sure you don't go into a store, see a gallon of milk cost $3, go up to the teller and offer to pay $5, nor when you're driving down the road on a nicy dry sunny spring day and the maximum speed is posted at 30mph do you instead opt to drive at 20mph. If you want the baseline on anything to be higher (or lower, depending on how you want to place the limit), then that is where, legally, you have to put it. If you want security services to immediately publish vulnerabilities upon discovery, then you need to advocate for the laws to be changed to require it. These are spooks, they're not by the very definition of their jobs in the business of public dissemination of information. And indeed, this has always been recognized as such, which is the Founding Fathers created a government where the Executive branch is constrained and where Congress and the Courts have significant oversight powers.
As to the claim that spies do more harm than good, what do you base that upon? Considering that much of the conduct of spies isn't known until decades later, if at all, how can you possibly assert that claim? It strikes me that what you're really trying to is conflate what is a value judgment with the effectiveness of spies in general. To be sure, I think some kinds of espionage, like hoovering up every bit that is transmitted on the Internet probably is going to create such a horrible signal-to-noise ratio that it may actually be counterproductive, but you cannot tell me that, for instance, gaining control of some Russian mole's cell phone and intercepting his calls, texts and emails, couldn't be of enormous value. What you would really be trying to claim is that espionage is a waste of time, which would be an absurd claim.
Exactly. Not every server is a high-end number crunching machine. The only server I'm running right now that I wouldn't really contemplate moving to ARM if it were available and was more economical than x86 would probably be our RDBMS servers, where cycles mean a helluva lot. But for our web, email, file and print servers, frankly when I look at them, they're spending a helluva lot of time idling, and the reason I don't virtualize all of them on one server is more about redundancy. As it is we have a three virtual server farm that runs all our servers except the database server and one of the Server 2012 DCs which we intentionally keep on separate hardware in case the NAS servers explode.
Considering MS already ported the Windows kernel to ARM a while back, and certainly Windows NT, including the older CLI toolkit were all ported over to multiple architectures back in the day, it may not be all that hard. Obviously there's going to be some recompiling and porting over of a lot of server components, so I'm not saying that porting the entire Server ecosystem to ARM will be trivial, but it's not really a massive leap, just a lot of recompiling and testing. A lot of the admin tools have been moved over to .NET due to Powershell's increased use, so in some cases we're talking not much more than testing on the ARM versions of the CLR.
For mundane tasks, Windows' remote admin is hard to beat, and providing there are no major roadblocks, most (probably 90%+) of the server tasks I've done over the last ten years or so were all done via the MMC remote admin components on my workstation. Some more complicated tasks can be done via remote admin, but can be a bit of a pain (like registry changes), and I end up just logging into the server instead.
To each his own. Maybe it's because I've been using *nix for over a quarter of a century, and simply find the toolkit a lot easier to use and understand, and I've never particular bought into this notion that objects are better, considering anything requiring actually listing data inevitably has to be transformed into strings anyways. I find the object nature of Powershell to be just another irritant.
If Intel has been such a great success at low power chips, why is it exactly that ARM still dominates in the low power world?
It isn't a threat currently, but one can be sure that if ARM saw that it could make an in-road into the data center, it might just ponder making chips with greater overall horsepower for a "server line" of ARM CPUs. Just because ARM at the moment is more interested in low power chips doesn't mean they wouldn't ponder a move towards higher performance, and certainly if they could advertise both Windows and Linux as supported platforms, that makes for a pretty compelling argument.
The fact that Microsoft is going this direction clearly indicates to me that there must be some interested at the hardware end to produce server-grade chips.
Server Core can be run without said bloat. It's a pain to use, of course, because PowerShell is horribly verbose and it makes many CLI tasks long-winded and annoying as compared to *nix, but we have some HyperV servers that run that way, and we can actually do remote administration via the Server and HyperV tools so it's not that bad overall. Still lots of other ways it is bloated, and one can find some pretty minimalistic Linux installs that Windows Server could never come close to in small footprint.
That may be unethical conduct, but can you point to where it's actually illegal for any of the US security services to withhold knowledge of vulnerabilities? And really, why would that be their responsibility (okay, I grant you the NSA has played a pro-security role over the years)?
I think people are missing the point that spying has always relied on vulnerabilities in a foreign actor's communications. In ye olden days that would mean cracking ciphers, finding ways of penetrating foreign powers' communications channels, and it has also mean "domestic" espionage, since sometimes a nation's own citizens can, knowingly or unknowingly, be used as conduits of sensitive information to foreign powers. The Lincoln Administration tapped every telegraph line coming into Union territory to catch any Confederate agents, and most certainly during the First and Second World Wars much the same occurred.
Not that I want to defend everything spy agencies do, and certainly some of it appears to violate both legal and constitutional restraints, but the fact remains that electronic vulnerabilities are critical to gaining intel, and one can imagine why they wouldn't want to go around telling Apple or Samsung or anyone else "Hey, guess what, your devices have vulnerabilities that allow us to spy!" Of course, the counter-argument to that is that if the US and its allies know about these vulnerabilities, then almost certainly so do the Russians and Chinese.
At the end of the day, whether we like it or not, national governments, including the government of the United States, have always partaken in espionage, and it is a critical activity of any nation state to guarantee the security of the nation and its citizens. That it can be abused is a given, which is why in general democracies have some sort of legislative and judicial oversight.
Yes, until newer browser features become more common and more and more sites don't render properly. This is like proclaiming "I don't get browser malware because I use links!" Well, yes, but...
Actually there's a bit of irony to that. We have about 30 Dells we had bought that had Vista on them. Last year upgraded them all to Windows 10, which seems to run perfectly fine on hardware that was, at that point, seven years old. Of course there are a lot of other things to dislike about Windows 10, but it actually runs fairly well on those old machines.
In the early 1980s. I got my first RadioShack computer around 1982, and they were hawking their batteries then. Mind you, the price wasn't bad, so I didn't complain. They also asked for contact information, and I remember being 10 or 11 years old and getting the first mail actually addressed to me, a monthly RadioShack flyer! It seems stupid now, but I remember pouring over the computer section of the catalog, salivating over the speech synthesis cartridge for the Color Computer or Brick Out being played on a Model 4.
It's kind of a pity in a way. I remember back in the day that I could literally order anything in their catalog, which was huge. I remember ordering a new keyboard for my Color Computer 1, which hadn't been manufactured in a few years by that point. It seems so odd to me that the companies that already had such an advanced warehouse and shipping network couldn't find a way to get that into the Internet age, but they just floundered, and ended their time selling crappy PC clones, before even the Tandy PCs died off.
I think RadioShack's problems predate turning themselves into a cell phone store. In the 1980s RadioShack was, at least in my town, the center of the community's technical world. The manager was a great guy who would lead teenagers like myself muck around with the latest Model 100 or Model 4, and indeed my first three computers were all Tandy/RadioShack computers. RadioShack was sort of a geek cultural center back in the day, but by the 90s it was trying to transform itself and I remember the stores became a lot more "corporate", with management that was far less friendly. Yes, the slow degradation of the components section of the store had its effect in reducing the hobbyist traffic, but it was also that the soul of the place seemed to die out. Where in the 80s and early 90s you actually had staff who knew something about the products they were selling, by the early 00s, you had kids who could barely read a script.
Obama didn't know anything, you idiot.
Don't be ridiculous. That's what we have EMACS for.
Translation: I'm outraged the team I support got caught in bed with the Kremlin! How dare someone catch them?
Please provide citations that show that immigrants are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.