In this US fiscal year that ends next month, total US government revenues will amount to the equivalent of 14.8% of US GDP. That's the lowest percentage since 1950, and back then US Federal Government spending was only 15.6% of GDP, compared with what is expected to be 24.3% of GDP in the current fiscal year.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see fixing the problem requires that 14.6% and 24.3% move towards each other. Both figures are lowish, so it doesn't matter which one moves. Your S&P rating dropped because your politics is so divisive it is looking like neither will. The right wing is welded to the 14.6%, the left the 24.3%. If they both stick to their guns you are well on your way to creating a banana republic.
From my outsider perspective, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that an engineer would do
Well from this engineers perspective it sounds exactly like the sort of thing an engineer wouldn't do. Mameo was their invention, their baby. All their home grown hard work was thrown out, and replaced by something a bunch of outsiders developed.
It had all the hallmarks of a high level business decision. "We need to get closer to Intel - how do we do that? Oh, we could just throw away what our phone engineers have done and use something thing developed by Intel engineers for tablets instead. It's all just Linux right, so it's got to be almost the same." Wrong, wrong, wrong. Back in October 2010, when the N9 was supposed to be shipping, MeeGo was swapping before it got to run a line of UI code.
They eventually fixed the problem by ripping out MeeGo. The N9 that will be shipped next month runs Mameo underneath. That single mistake looks to be the straw that broke the camels back. Ellop joined Nokia in September 2010. The N9 was supposed to be shipping September 2010. Had Nokia been shipping their shiny new OS in September, I think history would have been very different. Instead what Ellop found was a technology company deeply aware it had to ship a new model every 12 months or so because mobile phones had become a fashion item, yet its engineering team hadn't delivered a product to ship.
The story looks to be one of the business managers of an engineering company loosing confidence in the ability of its engineers to deliver. And so now they made another hard headed business decision to fire their engineers, and use someone else's instead - Microsoft's. Yet this failure to deliver - it wasn't because of the decisions of the engineers, it was from the decisions of the people that are now firing them. From where I sit, as an engineer, it is the saddest of stories.
Sorry to mislead you, it's not being dug up. When the fibre is deployed in an area the residents have 18 months before the copper is disconnected, so they operate in parallel for a while. I don't know what the plans for the exchanges are after that, but I don't see any of it being useful for long. You aren't allowed push data over them, they will literally suffer bit rot as all records of what pairs run where are lost, copper needs constant upkeep in the face of water damage, and the block of land they terminate at, ie where the exchanges sit now, will be sold off.
I don't know about the US, but with the completion of the NBN in Australia the PSTN will be history here.
History means all copper land lines gone and all the analogue gear the copper is connected to in the 1200 exchanges becomes land fill, along with all the ISDN based switch gear. The 1200 exchanges will be reduced to 120 point of interconnects. We are talking scorched earth here.
The only thing left will be the analogue phones in the house. They connect to SIP ATA's, so by the time the voice leaves the premises it will already be IP, switched by internet routers, being transmitted in ethernet frames over fibre or fixed wireless. Our resident teloc's will all be become SIP providers.
It might be someone's theory the analogue PSTN will disappear in a decade or so in the US. In Australia govenment lawyers crafted iron clad agreements, the contracts are signed, the opposition has admitted defeat, and the money is committed. They are digging up the ground now. The PSTN's death here is almost a certainty.
Is Sony's network being used as the world's largest public penetration test?"
No more than HB Gary was.
To wit: This is the prescription for being attacked mercilessly, for months on end:
1. Produce an item that is clearly advertised as having feature X, where feature X is useful only to really, really good programmers. You know - the ones who spend their time cracking the hardest problems using array of specialised parallel processors.
2. Sell the item to lots of people, who hand over their money on the basis of having feature X.
3. Some years later, withdraw feature X, so the all the software these people have invested years in creating is blown away.
4. When said programmers then fairly legitimately, extract your secret keys so they can restore feature X, unleash a phalanx of lawyers to peruse them within an inch of their financial lives, until they recant.
At that point you will discover what sort of damage a bunch of really pissed off top notch programmers can do.
With luck all the other psychopathic mega corporations around the world are watching and learning. The lesson is simple: don't poke a hornets nest.
We make not see a Open Source replacement for Skype. But all of the reasons I see given here are just wrong.
Most of them blame SIP for being hard to set up or incompatible with NAT. These things have nothing to do with SIP. SIP is just one part of a rather large tool box needed to build an internet phone. SIP is actually a small part - the bit that handles the negotiation between the two ends over how to send the voice. It does not send actually send the voice - it leaves that job to another protocol, RTP. It doesn't even negotiate the codec - SDP does that. It does not resolve domain names - DNS does that. It does not pierce NAT - STUN does that. It does not do auto-configuration, but any number of SIP based phones out that can pull down their configuration information from a URL. Blaming SIP for not doing these things is like blaming a car engine for not coming with a fuel tank. You are blaming the wrong thing. Blame the person who designed the phone that uses SIP for not providing those things. Don't blame SIP. It has nothing to do with SIP.
I'd bet SIP is used to make far more calls in any given day that Skype is. SIP is used as the basis of all IP phones out there - Cisco, Polycom and so on. IP PABX's are now a common feature in most enterprises. They have gradually replaced the old analogue PABX's, so many business calls have some leg passing over a SIP connection. Also, if an ISP offers VOIP they will invariably do so using SIP. Which just goes to prove what I said above - people are using SIP phones every day, without problems, in fact without even realising it is a SIP phone. They just pick up the handset and dial the number, or more likely touch the softbutton besides the persons name. It's actually easier than using Skype. They can do this because it is possible to set up a SIP phone that just works - just like Skype does.
Which of course proves it is perfectly possible to design a VOIP system based on SIP that is every good as Skype. For people saying "what about Skype's fantastic codec's", Skype has done great work with codec's. But there are free ones out that almost as good, and besides Skype publishes their codec algorithms. To put together a Skype like system that used SIP isn't technically hard. A SIP softphone on all major platforms (including all phones) that automatically downloads its configuration from their servers would be one piece of the puzzle. So would maintaining a set of whitepages of people who use the system - just like Skype does. And a STUN server. And a messaging server. And a call test service. And purchase connectivity to all the existing telco's out there, so you can interact with the real phone system. The list goes on and on.
But that probably isn't going to happen on the scale Skype has done it. The reason is simple: sure open source can provide the software for free, but it takes real money to set up and run the rest of the infrastructure. So far it everyone who has done it has lost money, Skype being the leading example. It has bleed money since its inception, so much so that the media has had a field day questioning Microsoft's sanity for paying $8 billion for it. Given its history, what sane person would want to go try and build a new Skype ecosystem? The answer is no one - which is why there won't be an open source equivalent of Skype any time soon.
EC: Are you in possession of that iPad?
BG: Yep.
EC: You are? All right, is there anything else you wish to say?
Well, that seals it for me. TheRegister conjectured they arrested him to get his iPad. Looks like they were right. If something isn't on your person they need a warrant, or your permission. If it is on your person they can seize it if they arrest you.
It's a direct attack on the free press.
Well yeah, but I hope you aren't too concerned for the journalists here. This isn't going to be anything like a fair fight. The police arrested an assistant editor from one of the biggest newspapers in the country, and confiscated his equipment. They did this when he was doing his job, reporting on a mildly controversial topic. Journo's here are like journo's everywhere - they consider themselves a protected species when reporting the news. They're outraged, and are striking back in force. First they set up a web cam, capturing the department chief claiming "copying a picture is just like stealing a TV". Now stories appearing in every major Australian news outlet using that quote to the Queensland Police look like a mob of country bumpkins. Sadly that ain't hard. They are dredging up past mistakes like the Queensland Police trying to prosecute a man for paedophilia because he posted "child abuse" movie of a fully clothed man playfully swinging his fully clothed son through the air. Give them 24 hours and they will have column feet of this stuff over the country.
There ain't no question our police here can be as dumb as some of the dumbest on the planet, and this is yet more proof of that - if we needed any. Hell - it's entirely possible the guy who had his photo's shown to a crowd of 12 or so of his mates won't give a shit. But you know, in this case the police were just implementing the law without fear or favour. Hacking into a computer system to steal data is a crime in their jurisdiction. This guy they were collecting evidence about was undeniably doing that. Yes, they should have realised they were looking at the equivalent of a lock smith talking shop to other lock smiths and cut everybody a bit a slack. But were apparently didn't have a clue and so just followed the rule book. Normally this would be fixed as it moved though the system - just as the child swinging case was. Instead they going to be mauled in public for doing what I think is roughly the right thing - when you don't know what's going on just enforce the law as you understand it.
The Prize, by Daniel Yergin gives a good a breakdown as any. It's worth a read just to expand your general knowledge of how global politics and the energy economy works.
But you don't need to look that far back. The GFC provides an excellent example. The trigger for that was a bunch of Neo-con academics (think economists who share the quasi religious faith in libertarian principles displayed in the posts above) who said "if we just get rid of the rules impeding bankers the world would be a better place". They found willing converts in Regan administration. To Regan's credit they didn't do much then, but in during succeeding Republican administrations that got a whole pile of government regulations on the banking sector ditched. These were principally rules on disclosure and transparency. The result has been a series of crises triggered by fraud in the banking sectors. We called the latest of these crises the GFC.
This paper by some criminologists spells it out pretty well, although the paper is obviously an inter-disciplinary swipe at the economists by the criminologists. Not that I blame them. The economists were saying "it we get rid of all ways of detecting fraud, the economy will run better". The criminologists thought they were insane - because in their world if you get rid of oversight crime inevitability rises. But back in the day (all this started before the Savings and Loans and precipitated it) the criminologists were ignored and the libertarian economists were promoted and paid well. This paper reeks of the criminologists coming back after the shit has hit the fan, and saying as loudly as they can "I told you so". Can't say I blame them.
It's odd how the discussion is always about safety. The anti-nukes say nuclear shouldn't be deployed because it's very unsafe. The nuclear proponents say if the anti-nukes got out of the way, we would could all have cheap, safe, plentiful power. Both arguments are wrong. Complete bullshit in fact. In fact just about every nuclear discussion I see a torrent of bullshit, and not much else.
So to put it plainly nuclear power is as you say very safe put Chernobyl aside, and deaths caused by nuclear is below the noise flaw. In fact in terms of deaths the safest form of electric power generation we have. End of discussion on safety. Or is it?
Turn out how many people nuclear has killed hasn't nothing to do with why nuclear power production is declining as a fraction of power produced. It never, ever was. That's the bullshit story from the pro nuclear side. The nuclear plant building industry died in the arse about 4 years before Three Mile Island. Why? Because it too dammed expensive, and too unreliable.
Now I'm not saying it's unreliable in the normal sense of the word. Its far more reliable than wind, or solar, or even coal. The problem is when it does break, it does so in a really, really big way. As in, it takes out the entire plant. So if a windmill dies, you just replace the wind mill. Hell if a boiler in a coal fired plant blows up you just pay the funeral bills and build a new one. But if a nuclear power plant looses power for just a couple of days so it can't cool itself, it's fucked. Which is a problem, because the almost entire the cost of the electricity from that plant is actually interest payments on the plant, not the fuel. Nuclear power plants are insanely complex and expensive things. In order to get the interest payments anything like reasonable the loans have to be over a 30 or 40 year life. But making something run fault free for 40 years is dammed hard. You can be completely certain that in 20 years a bunch of accountants will be running it, and squeezing every last drop out of the maintenance bill.
Worse, although the safety record is good in that no one gets killed, by another important measure its a disaster. Nuclear only accounts for something like 20% of the world electricity production, but guess what? Cleaning up after its accidents chews up 50% of the world's electricity production accident costs. The fact that it doesn't kill anyone is actually a problem. Unlike hydro. Hydro often kills people in large numbers. When a dam broke in China 30 or so years ago it killed 170,000 people. But dead people don't sue. The 11 million displaced weren't happy, but they were able to go back to their homes within the month. It will cost Tepco billions (literally) by the time it has got Fukushima under control. We will be hearing about it for decades to come. As the first nuclear GE engineers said, nuclear can break in such a spectacular way, rendering tracts of land unusable for centuries, that no company or insurer can bear the cost. And it can do all that without killing a single person, and indeed that may be the outcome at Fukushima.
Besides, I can guarantee that capitalism being what it is, if was really possible for nuclear to produce cheap power the bloody things would be dotted all around the planet regardless of the whining of a few greenies. But it isn't. That is why when Obama asked the nuclear industry to save us from Global Warming, the industry asked Obama for 100 billion in loan guarantees. Loan guarantees means the bankers can ignore the risk, so that keeps the interest down, which makes nuclear competitive. Even then they manage to externalise the cost of cleaning up any resulting messes, and in all probability disposing of the waste for centuries to come. Uncle Sam has already been stung for $9 billion for the Yukka Mountain disposal area, which ultimately failed. It wonder how many more $9 billions have to be spent, as tax payers expense, before a workable sol
'd say the REAL goal is a slow but sure march towards TiVoization
Careful. That tin foil hat is effecting your thinking. TiVoization is where the code is released, but you can't run it because the hardware is locked down. I personally don't see that as a huge problem, but then I think the anti-TiViozation clause in GPLv3 is a mistake.
The problem here is potentially much larger. Google hasn't released the code. That is a direct convention of every copyleft licence I know of. If you want to piss off RMS/FSF style advocates, this is a sure fire way to do it.
Back to your tin-foil hat. You really need a better one. Google has made it plain they will release the source once its done - meaning releasing doesn't risk tarnishing their image in the market pace. They are clearly not moving toward closing the source. They are violating certain principles, and as RMS has shown sometimes principles are more important that pragmatism, but from a pragmatic point of view there is nothing to see here - move along.
If you want to see a company moving towards closing the source goes about it, look at Apple. Nearly all of WebKit was originally GPL'ed. Now less than 1/2 of it is, because Apple rips out the GPL'ed bits a replaces them with a BSD style licence which doesn't require them to contribute it back. Ditto Objective-C, which that are moving from GPL to CLang, CLang being BSD licensed. Naturally once its BSD licensed they contribute bugger all back - BSD itself being the stand out example.
A more-correct analogy would be viewing a snuff film...I'm not going to delve into the conclusions that can be drawn from that... as this topic is too loaded with emotion and pseudo-psychology to actually have a rational discussion.
Pity, because there is one interesting aspect to it. Despite violent films featuring death being hugely popular and profitable, there are bugger all snuff films. If that snopes article is to believed this isn't because fake violence satisfies demand, as cinematographically poor movies were nonetheless popular if the public were hood winked into thinking there were real snuff films.
So snuff films are a counter example to the oft repeated claims here that supply always follows demand. And guess what - we didn't need to delve into any pseudo-psychology to reason about it.
Well you should. Because ultimately it is only the opinion of the copyright holder that counts. So even if you are right and merely running a program on the kernel makes is subject to the GPL, it doesn't matter, as you have no say in the matter. The normal law enforcement agencies aren't interested as it is civil case, and you can't sue anyone because you aren't a copyright holder.
As you say, there are a whole pile of people who hold copyright over the kernel. But as far as I can tell, they are to the man prepared to follow Linus's lead on the matter. If there is renegade out there that disagrees, they will have to contend with the repeated public statements from the kernel community over the decades that user land programs are not derivatives of the kernel. Worse, since the rest of the kernel developer community seems to place a great deal of importance on the principle I'd guess anyone who threatened to upset the status quo would have their code removed.
So you are also wrong when you say this:
he doesn't define what the GPL means
Linus does get to define what the GPL means for the areas he and his mates hold copyright over. He can't make it stronger than a court of law would, but he can weaken it. Whether he has in fact weakened it is debatable, but he has made the boundaries very clear with repeated public statements on the matter. I'd wager his boundaries are now effectively law when it comes interpreting the GPL with respect to the kernel.
Ironically it is your opinion here that doesn't count. No one is effected so no one cares, which makes the boundaries you proclaiming irrelevant. At best your words here are part of the background noise on the internet. If you want have a say on how the GPL is to be interpreted go and write some software someone does care about.
As the blurb says, this is about "Enterprise security features". Ergo, this is not about protecting the user. It is about protecting the corporation that gave the user the phone.
Their three laws are just the usual sugar coated spin to help the medicine go down. To make that obvious just re-word the law with enterprise substituted appropriately: The device must protect the enterprise, protect itself, and obey the user, in that order. And of course it should. Presumably the enterprise is paying for the phone, so how could it be otherwise?
What's more, it is possible to do this without inconveniencing Mr "it's mine, so I'll do with it whatever I bloody well want to". Symbian does it via its MS Exchange add on. Add it, and allow your Exchange sysadmin to set some policy bits and you loose control of your phone. Ditto for iPhone via their Enterprise Deployment Tool, although arguably Apply has already sold your control to the carriers for the sake of a few bucks. There is no reason Android / Motorola could not do it is a similar way. I don't know about Motorola, but Google will almost certainly do it that way. Doing it any other way would piss off far too many people.
However, it doesn't have separate number keys which can be a pain if you're typing a lot of numbers.
This is what amazed me with the N900 and its predecessors. It is a highly specialised phone. It looks more like a trial run for the technology in fact, with no real attempt to make it appealing to the mass market. Nonetheless, even without the pretties that technology made it highly appealing to a particular group - 'nix user who dutifully started churning out apps for it. And what killer hardware feature does a every 'nix user want? A really good 5 row keyboard. We type a lot into really finicky programs like vi, were one mistake can kill an entire file. We happily bought them without a GPS, and without a phone in fact. But geezz, I'd kill for a good keyboard on the thing, and I gather everybody else would as well.
And now it looks like the N9 won't have one either. It will get the pretties, but still won't have 5 row keyboard. What are you thinking, Nokia?
Yes, it was. It isn't any more. In fact it is actually touch screen friendly now. It can even recognise gestures and translate them into arbitrary keystrokes. Swiping up and having vi scroll a page up is actually rather cool.
not to mention typing via T9 is NOT fun
I am amazed you preserved with it. Assuming you have an ssh that works (and once you got past the clunky UI putty did work well) the single biggest bugbear with ssh on phones is the keyboard. I have a Symbian phone with a 5 row keyboard. It isn't a modern phone and so has a small screen, but nonetheless works very, very well with Putty. As soon as you start having to use a shift button to access a substantial part of the character set (eg numbers on a 4 row keyboard) things go downhill. I am amazed you could use it at all with T9.
My biggest beef with PuTTY was I couldn't store the key on the phone and import it into PuTTY.
You could always load a key directly onto the phone and use it. It had to be in Putty format of course, but putty provides a windows/linux program that converts keys into its format. This isn't unusual behaviour, SecurtCrt has its own format, as do many other ssh implementations. Having to convert key formats between ssh implementations is a pain of course, but it has been a pain for many, many years now. Even ssh-keygen has an (undocumented) option that converts between openssh's key format and others.
What I love about TouchTerm is that I can generate an SSH key from within TouchTerm then place it in my authorized_keys file.
Given the number of machines I manage, installing a separate key form each device I might want to access them from creates a key management nightmare. I tried using iSSH on an iPhone, and what I hated about it the method you describe was the only method that was usable. You could enter a ssh key, but manually typing in a 2048 bit key is obviously insane and copy & pasting large blocks of text on an iPhone is an exercise in frustration. Worse, it could only have remember 1 key. If TouchTerm has the same limitations I'd say it doesn't have a full ssh implementation. I don't view being able to use multiple keys as an optional feature.
Just legalizing something like that is really not very safe.
Experience in Portugal, who did legalise it, suggests otherwise. Usage rates didn't change overly after legalisation, but the number of people dying from the harder drugs dropped spectacularly as they were able to seek treatment without fear of being jailed.
Having watched past failed attempts at government attempts to eliminate the harms caused by thing like alcohol and prostitution, I'd say it does more hard than good. Discouraging it, via taxation, education and ostracism (eg only allowing smoking it certain places) does seem to have a positive effect. Anything beyond that doesn't. It seems if people are determined to do something that harms them threatening with more harm has no effect.
Well no effect on usage rates. It does effect other things, usually in the wrong way. Law enforcement is dammed expensive, doubly so as it forgoes the tax revenues that could be obtained through legalisation, triply so because we have to pay for the house, board and guarding of someone who who was housing and feeding themselves without supervision.
A prime example of this is smokers. Because smoking is legal and is taxed, they are actually revenue positive even after taking into account of the increased expenditure they cause because of health and public education costs. This could be true for all drugs and everybody would be better off if we did it, including the drug users because we could afford to much more in helping them. It is only people like you who loudly and wrongly complain there would be an explosion drug use that prevent it.
I read that as enterprises can have their own internal app store for internally developed apps.
That is news to me, so thanks. But does change anything? I don't see that would necessarily lift the restrictions on the applications you can install.
I'm genuinely courious, so I went looking. Turns out you can lift those restrictions. In fact I always knew they were partially lifted for a normal developer, because with your $100/yr developer's licence you get to install any application you develop on up to 10 phones. That's Apple's version of open source I guess. Pay Apple $100/yr, and any who also pays the same $100/yr apple tax can re-use your source.
Anyway they have a scheme for enterprises, which is described in chapter 5 here. Pay Apple a tax of $300/yr and you get to put your application on all of your enterprises phones, without having to pay a cent more. It seems to come with all come with all sorts of restrictions, I presume to prevent normal apps from by-passing Apple's app store.
On of those restrictions is only an Enterprise can get this type of developer license, so I guess the original poster is correct - Enterprises are more equal normal users.
An enterprise or private user can pay the fee and write all the code they want for their own device(s).
Not quite. The Apple Developer kit allows you to install stuff you develop on a number (10?) devices. An enterprise is likely to own far more than 10. If you want to install it on more than 10, you need to go through the App store.
An early comment on LWN captured the technical
argument best, I think, which I guess illustrates both the quality of the
articles and posters on LWN.
The background to this is we are discussing CPU scheduling.
If you don't know what CPU scheduling is, think of it as form of mind reading.
I'll illustrate.
Lets say you have asked your computer to do several things, in fact so many
that if it follows the usual method of simply dividing its time equally between
them it is going to annoy you.
The video you watching might start flickering,
or the music you are listening will drop out.
So obviously the computer must now give more CPU time to playing your movie
and less to whatever background task you started,
such as that MP3 transcode of your 20,000 song library.
Except how is the computer is supposed to know this?
This is how we get to mind reading.
The hack we are discussing is essentially the discovery of a way
to read the minds of one particular type of computer user -
the Linux Kernel developer.
The Linux Kernel developer is in the habit of starting huge background jobs
called kernel compiles.
These kernel compiles take a looong while, so the kernel developers,
being very clever people,
have invented all sorts of ways of speeding them up.
One of those ways is to divide the task into lots of little bits,
and then fire off separate tasks to do each.
This takes maximum advantage of available CPU cores,
soaking up every skerrick of available CPU time.
This naturally enough leaves none left over for other important tasks like
watching a movie while waiting your kernel compile.
In this particular case the default CPU scheduling strategy
of giving each task an equal share of CPU is woefully poor,
because there might be 20 kernel compile tasks and
just one movie watching task,
so the movie player ends up with 1/20 of the available CPU time.
This isn't enough to play a movie.
The mind reading trick discovered boils down to this:
Linux Kernel developers use the linux command line interface
to fire off the kernel compile.
And it turns out that for years now
the kernel has been able group the tasks started from a command line
and give that group a single portion of CPU time,
as opposed to a equal portion to each task in the group.
Thus you only have to split up the CPU time into 2,
one portion going to the kernel compiler group
and the other going to the movie player.
Naturally enough the movie player works real well with a 50%
allocation of CPU, and so we have a happy kernel developer.
Now we come to the merits of the two hacks.
They both do the job I just described equally well.
The difference between them is that one, the kernel patch, is automagic,
meaning it happens automatically without anybody having to lift a finger.
But it comes at the expense of bloating linux kernel a tiny bit, even for users who won't benefit from it.
The other way currently has to be done applied manually
using a process the vast majority of Linux users will at best
find difficult, tedious and error prone.
Seems like a simple decision eh - lets take the tiny bloat hit
and not inflict our long suffering desktop users
with yet another Linux user-unfriendly idiosyncrasy.
But here is the rub: it doesn't help them.
In fact, for some it might have a negative impact
(a gstreamer pipeline started from the command line strings to mind).
The people who will benefit from this are the ones that use the command line
heavily and regularly.
People like Linus.
Which is why he liked it so much I guess.
But these are precisely the people who will have no absolutely no
trouble doing it the manual way.
I went and re-read that paper, and you are right. Done correctly, CBC does generate random looking data. My only excuse is I read it years ago, missed the rather plain statement in the very paper I quoted that it did, and have been relying on memory since. Somehow the pretty ECB pictures stuck in my mind.
Anyway I guess on the positive side this discussion has fixed a misapprehension I have been labouring under for years. Thanks for taking the time to point it out.
I understand your logic. I also understand the flaw in it.
No you don't, unfortunately. My logic is not some nicely chained line of reasoning like yours. It was more of an observation really. You are claiming that trading of child porn in the internet causes more children to be abused. At least that I what I think you are claiming, otherwise you would not want it to be kept illegal. I say that from what I observe, it is almost certain trading of child porn on the internet does not cause more children to be abused, and I say that because we there has been very little change in the number of abused children since the introduction of the internet.
You are saying regardless of there being no change, there must be one because of this lovely line of logic you have put together. We just can't see it for some reason. As you know, I think your emperor has no clothes. We can't see it because it is not there.
So how could your logic be sooo wrong? Well, if the logic is internally correct it may be the starting premises. You logic evidently assumes children are abused to make child porn and child porn is made to make money. But how do you know this? There are any number of alternative explanations. How about this one: some people like abusing children, and then discover they can make money on the side from their little hobby. Or this: people who abuse kids what like all of us to feel accepted, to be part of a group the won't outcast them for abusing children. But how to find like minded child abusers? Well, you could produce pictures of yourself abusing kids, and then use those pictures as an entry ticket to the group. I know from police reports that entering such groups is very hard for obviously reasons. They literally demand pictures of you doing something illegal as the price for entry.
Notice that in both these explanations the trading of pictures did not cause the children to be abused. The children were already being abused. The trading pictures was just a side effect. A fairly unfortunately side effect from the child abusers point of view, because spreading photos of themselves committing crimes around like confetti leads to a fair few of them getting caught. By the way, there is some small justification for the second explanation. Despite what you hear about money trails, I gather most pictures in these rings aren't traded for money. They are traded for other pictures. The prosecutors here where I live seem to believe money has very little to do with it.
I have read other explanations from psychologists on why people trade porn. Like yours, the rational they have put together sounds very reasonable. Flawless, in fact. But I am nonetheless suspicious of them. I have never seen any of them follow up with a hypothesis and then some attempt to test it with real data. They were just some neat train of logic that happened to fit the existing data. As least they had that going for them - they did fit the existing data. Yours doesn't.
In case you are wondering, I don't have a clue why people abuse kids, or why they trade pictures of themselves doing it. Nor do I have a favourite theory. I've tried for some while to figure it out, and failed miserably. That is why I just look at the underlying stats now.
The previous post of yours you linked to was a gem.
There is another side to this. Here in Australia a fair number of child abuse rings are tracked down using the money trail. I am digressing a bit, but the money trail is another difference that belongs in your then and now post. Back then, everything was paid for with cash. There was no money trail. Now people pay with credit cards. Which means it abuser is paid for his pictures and someone is caught with the picture, the person doing the abusing will likely by locked away.
Anyway, the perverse outcome of all this is allowing, or more reasonably reducing the penalties for trading in child porn makes it easier to find those doing the abusing. Think of how nice it would be if every criminal took pictures of themselves committing a crime, then sold those pictures to many others around the world and in doing so left a trail of money pointing straight back to them. It would be some sort of law enforcement heaven.
Now the really weird thing about this is our Conroy (who is the polly who is the driving force behind filter) accepts this. So a few months ago, after relentlessly pounding the drum about child porn being so corrupting it must be filtered so it can not scar all who see it, he back-flipped. He now says child porn (but not other filtered stuff as far as I know) will be left unfiltered for a while, so the police can do their stuff.
As for the effects of the restrictions on child porn, there was one country (Denmark?) where they decided they would be more tolerant of it. I think the idea was more along the lines of your original post - the current stance is causing so much collateral damage they decided toning it down was worth a shot. They watched the child abuse figures like a hawk after that of course. They were hoping for no change, but in fact there was a slight drop. Not a terribly significant drop - you certainly would not go around claiming that allowing the trade in child porn protects children. But it was certainly more evidence that in the current environment the level trading in child porn has no causal to relationship child abuse.
Furthermore, the article you linked to doesn't say what you think it does.
Gezzz, you should at least take the time to read beyond the first few paragrahps before making such a comment, but then I guess this is slashdot.
He dismisses LUKS and TrueCrypt because they don't offer plausible deniability - because of the headers, as you say. He then moves onto Linux's loopback device in crypto mode. It doesn't write headers. He then comes up with a technique of comparing the raw encrypted data with random text. Turns out using his techniques it is easy to spot the difference. And that is the point of the paper: even without headers or any other tell tale signs, there is no way to hide the fact that you have encrypted data on your disk.
Ergo, there is no plausible deniability when you have great gobs of encrypted data on your disk - which is to say you won't be able to deny it is there. if you are going to avoid the rubber hose, you are going to have to use some social engineering trick to explain it away.
However, if you read the grandparent post, "encrypted data looks like random data" is precisely what I claimed. Nothing more, nothing less.
Here you are playing with words. "Encrypted data looks like random data" in this case means in this case "looks identical to the novice, but an expert will find it easy to distinguish the two". But no one would take that meaning from your post. It was poor communication at best.
I don't really have anything to say in response to this, but I thought I'd quote it just the same.
Yes, it was pretty clear, wasn't it? I think your original post was too, by the way.
You are claiming there is no link between child porn and kids being harmed.
Obviously not. If you are going to take pictures of kids being harmed, then somebody must have been harmed.
What I am claiming is no link between pictures being traded and kids being harmed. The evidence for this is pretty strong. The statistics we have show no correlation between the amount of trading going on, and the amount of abuse.
Since you appear to be having trouble understanding this, let me put it for you in a different way. The evidence suggests that is you somehow waved a magic want and got rid of all child porn travelling over the internet, the number of kids abused would not change. The evidence for this is pretty simple and straightforward: there has been no change in child abuse figures since the introduction of the internet, so its removal is unlikely to have any effect.
Since I happen to think the only proper basis for banning something is that it causes harm to someone, that means banning the trade of child porn is the wrong thing to do.
Since you have had a bit of trouble understanding the bit of logic above, I spell the rest of it out for you as well. I don't like child porn, and I don't think it would be particularly missed if we could wave some magic wands to banish it from the planet. The problem is we don't have any magic wands. All the wands we have do harm when we wave them: they put people in jail, they split up families, and like all justice they cost our society a huge amount of money. So the question becomes: do we want those wands and do those harms for no other reason that people like you find child porn disgusting?
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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see fixing the problem requires that 14.6% and 24.3% move towards each other. Both figures are lowish, so it doesn't matter which one moves. Your S&P rating dropped because your politics is so divisive it is looking like neither will. The right wing is welded to the 14.6%, the left the 24.3%. If they both stick to their guns you are well on your way to creating a banana republic.
Well from this engineers perspective it sounds exactly like the sort of thing an engineer wouldn't do. Mameo was their invention, their baby. All their home grown hard work was thrown out, and replaced by something a bunch of outsiders developed.
It had all the hallmarks of a high level business decision. "We need to get closer to Intel - how do we do that? Oh, we could just throw away what our phone engineers have done and use something thing developed by Intel engineers for tablets instead. It's all just Linux right, so it's got to be almost the same." Wrong, wrong, wrong. Back in October 2010, when the N9 was supposed to be shipping, MeeGo was swapping before it got to run a line of UI code.
They eventually fixed the problem by ripping out MeeGo. The N9 that will be shipped next month runs Mameo underneath. That single mistake looks to be the straw that broke the camels back. Ellop joined Nokia in September 2010. The N9 was supposed to be shipping September 2010. Had Nokia been shipping their shiny new OS in September, I think history would have been very different. Instead what Ellop found was a technology company deeply aware it had to ship a new model every 12 months or so because mobile phones had become a fashion item, yet its engineering team hadn't delivered a product to ship.
The story looks to be one of the business managers of an engineering company loosing confidence in the ability of its engineers to deliver. And so now they made another hard headed business decision to fire their engineers, and use someone else's instead - Microsoft's. Yet this failure to deliver - it wasn't because of the decisions of the engineers, it was from the decisions of the people that are now firing them. From where I sit, as an engineer, it is the saddest of stories.
Sorry to mislead you, it's not being dug up. When the fibre is deployed in an area the residents have 18 months before the copper is disconnected, so they operate in parallel for a while. I don't know what the plans for the exchanges are after that, but I don't see any of it being useful for long. You aren't allowed push data over them, they will literally suffer bit rot as all records of what pairs run where are lost, copper needs constant upkeep in the face of water damage, and the block of land they terminate at, ie where the exchanges sit now, will be sold off.
I don't know about the US, but with the completion of the NBN in Australia the PSTN will be history here.
History means all copper land lines gone and all the analogue gear the copper is connected to in the 1200 exchanges becomes land fill, along with all the ISDN based switch gear. The 1200 exchanges will be reduced to 120 point of interconnects. We are talking scorched earth here.
The only thing left will be the analogue phones in the house. They connect to SIP ATA's, so by the time the voice leaves the premises it will already be IP, switched by internet routers, being transmitted in ethernet frames over fibre or fixed wireless. Our resident teloc's will all be become SIP providers.
It might be someone's theory the analogue PSTN will disappear in a decade or so in the US. In Australia govenment lawyers crafted iron clad agreements, the contracts are signed, the opposition has admitted defeat, and the money is committed. They are digging up the ground now. The PSTN's death here is almost a certainty.
No more than HB Gary was.
To wit: This is the prescription for being attacked mercilessly, for months on end:
At that point you will discover what sort of damage a bunch of really pissed off top notch programmers can do.
With luck all the other psychopathic mega corporations around the world are watching and learning. The lesson is simple: don't poke a hornets nest.
We make not see a Open Source replacement for Skype. But all of the reasons I see given here are just wrong.
Most of them blame SIP for being hard to set up or incompatible with NAT. These things have nothing to do with SIP. SIP is just one part of a rather large tool box needed to build an internet phone. SIP is actually a small part - the bit that handles the negotiation between the two ends over how to send the voice. It does not send actually send the voice - it leaves that job to another protocol, RTP. It doesn't even negotiate the codec - SDP does that. It does not resolve domain names - DNS does that. It does not pierce NAT - STUN does that. It does not do auto-configuration, but any number of SIP based phones out that can pull down their configuration information from a URL. Blaming SIP for not doing these things is like blaming a car engine for not coming with a fuel tank. You are blaming the wrong thing. Blame the person who designed the phone that uses SIP for not providing those things. Don't blame SIP. It has nothing to do with SIP.
I'd bet SIP is used to make far more calls in any given day that Skype is. SIP is used as the basis of all IP phones out there - Cisco, Polycom and so on. IP PABX's are now a common feature in most enterprises. They have gradually replaced the old analogue PABX's, so many business calls have some leg passing over a SIP connection. Also, if an ISP offers VOIP they will invariably do so using SIP. Which just goes to prove what I said above - people are using SIP phones every day, without problems, in fact without even realising it is a SIP phone. They just pick up the handset and dial the number, or more likely touch the softbutton besides the persons name. It's actually easier than using Skype. They can do this because it is possible to set up a SIP phone that just works - just like Skype does.
Which of course proves it is perfectly possible to design a VOIP system based on SIP that is every good as Skype. For people saying "what about Skype's fantastic codec's", Skype has done great work with codec's. But there are free ones out that almost as good, and besides Skype publishes their codec algorithms. To put together a Skype like system that used SIP isn't technically hard. A SIP softphone on all major platforms (including all phones) that automatically downloads its configuration from their servers would be one piece of the puzzle. So would maintaining a set of whitepages of people who use the system - just like Skype does. And a STUN server. And a messaging server. And a call test service. And purchase connectivity to all the existing telco's out there, so you can interact with the real phone system. The list goes on and on.
But that probably isn't going to happen on the scale Skype has done it. The reason is simple: sure open source can provide the software for free, but it takes real money to set up and run the rest of the infrastructure. So far it everyone who has done it has lost money, Skype being the leading example. It has bleed money since its inception, so much so that the media has had a field day questioning Microsoft's sanity for paying $8 billion for it. Given its history, what sane person would want to go try and build a new Skype ecosystem? The answer is no one - which is why there won't be an open source equivalent of Skype any time soon.
Well, that seals it for me. TheRegister conjectured they arrested him to get his iPad. Looks like they were right. If something isn't on your person they need a warrant, or your permission. If it is on your person they can seize it if they arrest you.
Well yeah, but I hope you aren't too concerned for the journalists here. This isn't going to be anything like a fair fight. The police arrested an assistant editor from one of the biggest newspapers in the country, and confiscated his equipment. They did this when he was doing his job, reporting on a mildly controversial topic. Journo's here are like journo's everywhere - they consider themselves a protected species when reporting the news. They're outraged, and are striking back in force. First they set up a web cam, capturing the department chief claiming "copying a picture is just like stealing a TV". Now stories appearing in every major Australian news outlet using that quote to the Queensland Police look like a mob of country bumpkins. Sadly that ain't hard. They are dredging up past mistakes like the Queensland Police trying to prosecute a man for paedophilia because he posted "child abuse" movie of a fully clothed man playfully swinging his fully clothed son through the air. Give them 24 hours and they will have column feet of this stuff over the country.
There ain't no question our police here can be as dumb as some of the dumbest on the planet, and this is yet more proof of that - if we needed any. Hell - it's entirely possible the guy who had his photo's shown to a crowd of 12 or so of his mates won't give a shit. But you know, in this case the police were just implementing the law without fear or favour. Hacking into a computer system to steal data is a crime in their jurisdiction. This guy they were collecting evidence about was undeniably doing that. Yes, they should have realised they were looking at the equivalent of a lock smith talking shop to other lock smiths and cut everybody a bit a slack. But were apparently didn't have a clue and so just followed the rule book. Normally this would be fixed as it moved though the system - just as the child swinging case was. Instead they going to be mauled in public for doing what I think is roughly the right thing - when you don't know what's going on just enforce the law as you understand it.
The Prize, by Daniel Yergin gives a good a breakdown as any. It's worth a read just to expand your general knowledge of how global politics and the energy economy works.
But you don't need to look that far back. The GFC provides an excellent example. The trigger for that was a bunch of Neo-con academics (think economists who share the quasi religious faith in libertarian principles displayed in the posts above) who said "if we just get rid of the rules impeding bankers the world would be a better place". They found willing converts in Regan administration. To Regan's credit they didn't do much then, but in during succeeding Republican administrations that got a whole pile of government regulations on the banking sector ditched. These were principally rules on disclosure and transparency. The result has been a series of crises triggered by fraud in the banking sectors. We called the latest of these crises the GFC.
This paper by some criminologists spells it out pretty well, although the paper is obviously an inter-disciplinary swipe at the economists by the criminologists. Not that I blame them. The economists were saying "it we get rid of all ways of detecting fraud, the economy will run better". The criminologists thought they were insane - because in their world if you get rid of oversight crime inevitability rises. But back in the day (all this started before the Savings and Loans and precipitated it) the criminologists were ignored and the libertarian economists were promoted and paid well. This paper reeks of the criminologists coming back after the shit has hit the fan, and saying as loudly as they can "I told you so". Can't say I blame them.
It's odd how the discussion is always about safety. The anti-nukes say nuclear shouldn't be deployed because it's very unsafe. The nuclear proponents say if the anti-nukes got out of the way, we would could all have cheap, safe, plentiful power. Both arguments are wrong. Complete bullshit in fact. In fact just about every nuclear discussion I see a torrent of bullshit, and not much else.
So to put it plainly nuclear power is as you say very safe put Chernobyl aside, and deaths caused by nuclear is below the noise flaw. In fact in terms of deaths the safest form of electric power generation we have. End of discussion on safety. Or is it?
Turn out how many people nuclear has killed hasn't nothing to do with why nuclear power production is declining as a fraction of power produced. It never, ever was. That's the bullshit story from the pro nuclear side. The nuclear plant building industry died in the arse about 4 years before Three Mile Island. Why? Because it too dammed expensive, and too unreliable.
Now I'm not saying it's unreliable in the normal sense of the word. Its far more reliable than wind, or solar, or even coal. The problem is when it does break, it does so in a really, really big way. As in, it takes out the entire plant. So if a windmill dies, you just replace the wind mill. Hell if a boiler in a coal fired plant blows up you just pay the funeral bills and build a new one. But if a nuclear power plant looses power for just a couple of days so it can't cool itself, it's fucked. Which is a problem, because the almost entire the cost of the electricity from that plant is actually interest payments on the plant, not the fuel. Nuclear power plants are insanely complex and expensive things. In order to get the interest payments anything like reasonable the loans have to be over a 30 or 40 year life. But making something run fault free for 40 years is dammed hard. You can be completely certain that in 20 years a bunch of accountants will be running it, and squeezing every last drop out of the maintenance bill.
Worse, although the safety record is good in that no one gets killed, by another important measure its a disaster. Nuclear only accounts for something like 20% of the world electricity production, but guess what? Cleaning up after its accidents chews up 50% of the world's electricity production accident costs. The fact that it doesn't kill anyone is actually a problem. Unlike hydro. Hydro often kills people in large numbers. When a dam broke in China 30 or so years ago it killed 170,000 people. But dead people don't sue. The 11 million displaced weren't happy, but they were able to go back to their homes within the month. It will cost Tepco billions (literally) by the time it has got Fukushima under control. We will be hearing about it for decades to come. As the first nuclear GE engineers said, nuclear can break in such a spectacular way, rendering tracts of land unusable for centuries, that no company or insurer can bear the cost. And it can do all that without killing a single person, and indeed that may be the outcome at Fukushima.
Besides, I can guarantee that capitalism being what it is, if was really possible for nuclear to produce cheap power the bloody things would be dotted all around the planet regardless of the whining of a few greenies. But it isn't. That is why when Obama asked the nuclear industry to save us from Global Warming, the industry asked Obama for 100 billion in loan guarantees. Loan guarantees means the bankers can ignore the risk, so that keeps the interest down, which makes nuclear competitive. Even then they manage to externalise the cost of cleaning up any resulting messes, and in all probability disposing of the waste for centuries to come. Uncle Sam has already been stung for $9 billion for the Yukka Mountain disposal area, which ultimately failed. It wonder how many more $9 billions have to be spent, as tax payers expense, before a workable sol
Careful. That tin foil hat is effecting your thinking. TiVoization is where the code is released, but you can't run it because the hardware is locked down. I personally don't see that as a huge problem, but then I think the anti-TiViozation clause in GPLv3 is a mistake.
The problem here is potentially much larger. Google hasn't released the code. That is a direct convention of every copyleft licence I know of. If you want to piss off RMS/FSF style advocates, this is a sure fire way to do it.
Back to your tin-foil hat. You really need a better one. Google has made it plain they will release the source once its done - meaning releasing doesn't risk tarnishing their image in the market pace. They are clearly not moving toward closing the source. They are violating certain principles, and as RMS has shown sometimes principles are more important that pragmatism, but from a pragmatic point of view there is nothing to see here - move along.
If you want to see a company moving towards closing the source goes about it, look at Apple. Nearly all of WebKit was originally GPL'ed. Now less than 1/2 of it is, because Apple rips out the GPL'ed bits a replaces them with a BSD style licence which doesn't require them to contribute it back. Ditto Objective-C, which that are moving from GPL to CLang, CLang being BSD licensed. Naturally once its BSD licensed they contribute bugger all back - BSD itself being the stand out example.
Pity, because there is one interesting aspect to it. Despite violent films featuring death being hugely popular and profitable, there are bugger all snuff films. If that snopes article is to believed this isn't because fake violence satisfies demand, as cinematographically poor movies were nonetheless popular if the public were hood winked into thinking there were real snuff films.
So snuff films are a counter example to the oft repeated claims here that supply always follows demand. And guess what - we didn't need to delve into any pseudo-psychology to reason about it.
Well you should. Because ultimately it is only the opinion of the copyright holder that counts. So even if you are right and merely running a program on the kernel makes is subject to the GPL, it doesn't matter, as you have no say in the matter. The normal law enforcement agencies aren't interested as it is civil case, and you can't sue anyone because you aren't a copyright holder.
As you say, there are a whole pile of people who hold copyright over the kernel. But as far as I can tell, they are to the man prepared to follow Linus's lead on the matter. If there is renegade out there that disagrees, they will have to contend with the repeated public statements from the kernel community over the decades that user land programs are not derivatives of the kernel. Worse, since the rest of the kernel developer community seems to place a great deal of importance on the principle I'd guess anyone who threatened to upset the status quo would have their code removed.
So you are also wrong when you say this:
Linus does get to define what the GPL means for the areas he and his mates hold copyright over. He can't make it stronger than a court of law would, but he can weaken it. Whether he has in fact weakened it is debatable, but he has made the boundaries very clear with repeated public statements on the matter. I'd wager his boundaries are now effectively law when it comes interpreting the GPL with respect to the kernel.
Ironically it is your opinion here that doesn't count. No one is effected so no one cares, which makes the boundaries you proclaiming irrelevant. At best your words here are part of the background noise on the internet. If you want have a say on how the GPL is to be interpreted go and write some software someone does care about.
As the blurb says, this is about "Enterprise security features". Ergo, this is not about protecting the user. It is about protecting the corporation that gave the user the phone.
Their three laws are just the usual sugar coated spin to help the medicine go down. To make that obvious just re-word the law with enterprise substituted appropriately: The device must protect the enterprise, protect itself, and obey the user, in that order. And of course it should. Presumably the enterprise is paying for the phone, so how could it be otherwise?
What's more, it is possible to do this without inconveniencing Mr "it's mine, so I'll do with it whatever I bloody well want to". Symbian does it via its MS Exchange add on. Add it, and allow your Exchange sysadmin to set some policy bits and you loose control of your phone. Ditto for iPhone via their Enterprise Deployment Tool, although arguably Apply has already sold your control to the carriers for the sake of a few bucks. There is no reason Android / Motorola could not do it is a similar way. I don't know about Motorola, but Google will almost certainly do it that way. Doing it any other way would piss off far too many people.
This is what amazed me with the N900 and its predecessors. It is a highly specialised phone. It looks more like a trial run for the technology in fact, with no real attempt to make it appealing to the mass market. Nonetheless, even without the pretties that technology made it highly appealing to a particular group - 'nix user who dutifully started churning out apps for it. And what killer hardware feature does a every 'nix user want? A really good 5 row keyboard. We type a lot into really finicky programs like vi, were one mistake can kill an entire file. We happily bought them without a GPS, and without a phone in fact. But geezz, I'd kill for a good keyboard on the thing, and I gather everybody else would as well.
And now it looks like the N9 won't have one either. It will get the pretties, but still won't have 5 row keyboard. What are you thinking, Nokia?
Yes, it was. It isn't any more. In fact it is actually touch screen friendly now. It can even recognise gestures and translate them into arbitrary keystrokes. Swiping up and having vi scroll a page up is actually rather cool.
I am amazed you preserved with it. Assuming you have an ssh that works (and once you got past the clunky UI putty did work well) the single biggest bugbear with ssh on phones is the keyboard. I have a Symbian phone with a 5 row keyboard. It isn't a modern phone and so has a small screen, but nonetheless works very, very well with Putty. As soon as you start having to use a shift button to access a substantial part of the character set (eg numbers on a 4 row keyboard) things go downhill. I am amazed you could use it at all with T9.
You could always load a key directly onto the phone and use it. It had to be in Putty format of course, but putty provides a windows/linux program that converts keys into its format. This isn't unusual behaviour, SecurtCrt has its own format, as do many other ssh implementations. Having to convert key formats between ssh implementations is a pain of course, but it has been a pain for many, many years now. Even ssh-keygen has an (undocumented) option that converts between openssh's key format and others.
Given the number of machines I manage, installing a separate key form each device I might want to access them from creates a key management nightmare. I tried using iSSH on an iPhone, and what I hated about it the method you describe was the only method that was usable. You could enter a ssh key, but manually typing in a 2048 bit key is obviously insane and copy & pasting large blocks of text on an iPhone is an exercise in frustration. Worse, it could only have remember 1 key. If TouchTerm has the same limitations I'd say it doesn't have a full ssh implementation. I don't view being able to use multiple keys as an optional feature.
Experience in Portugal, who did legalise it, suggests otherwise. Usage rates didn't change overly after legalisation, but the number of people dying from the harder drugs dropped spectacularly as they were able to seek treatment without fear of being jailed.
Having watched past failed attempts at government attempts to eliminate the harms caused by thing like alcohol and prostitution, I'd say it does more hard than good. Discouraging it, via taxation, education and ostracism (eg only allowing smoking it certain places) does seem to have a positive effect. Anything beyond that doesn't. It seems if people are determined to do something that harms them threatening with more harm has no effect.
Well no effect on usage rates. It does effect other things, usually in the wrong way. Law enforcement is dammed expensive, doubly so as it forgoes the tax revenues that could be obtained through legalisation, triply so because we have to pay for the house, board and guarding of someone who who was housing and feeding themselves without supervision.
A prime example of this is smokers. Because smoking is legal and is taxed, they are actually revenue positive even after taking into account of the increased expenditure they cause because of health and public education costs. This could be true for all drugs and everybody would be better off if we did it, including the drug users because we could afford to much more in helping them. It is only people like you who loudly and wrongly complain there would be an explosion drug use that prevent it.
That is news to me, so thanks. But does change anything? I don't see that would necessarily lift the restrictions on the applications you can install.
I'm genuinely courious, so I went looking. Turns out you can lift those restrictions. In fact I always knew they were partially lifted for a normal developer, because with your $100/yr developer's licence you get to install any application you develop on up to 10 phones. That's Apple's version of open source I guess. Pay Apple $100/yr, and any who also pays the same $100/yr apple tax can re-use your source.
Anyway they have a scheme for enterprises, which is described in chapter 5 here. Pay Apple a tax of $300/yr and you get to put your application on all of your enterprises phones, without having to pay a cent more. It seems to come with all come with all sorts of restrictions, I presume to prevent normal apps from by-passing Apple's app store.
On of those restrictions is only an Enterprise can get this type of developer license, so I guess the original poster is correct - Enterprises are more equal normal users.
Not quite. The Apple Developer kit allows you to install stuff you develop on a number (10?) devices. An enterprise is likely to own far more than 10. If you want to install it on more than 10, you need to go through the App store.
An early comment on LWN captured the technical argument best, I think, which I guess illustrates both the quality of the articles and posters on LWN. The background to this is we are discussing CPU scheduling. If you don't know what CPU scheduling is, think of it as form of mind reading. I'll illustrate.
Lets say you have asked your computer to do several things, in fact so many that if it follows the usual method of simply dividing its time equally between them it is going to annoy you. The video you watching might start flickering, or the music you are listening will drop out. So obviously the computer must now give more CPU time to playing your movie and less to whatever background task you started, such as that MP3 transcode of your 20,000 song library. Except how is the computer is supposed to know this? This is how we get to mind reading.
The hack we are discussing is essentially the discovery of a way to read the minds of one particular type of computer user - the Linux Kernel developer. The Linux Kernel developer is in the habit of starting huge background jobs called kernel compiles. These kernel compiles take a looong while, so the kernel developers, being very clever people, have invented all sorts of ways of speeding them up. One of those ways is to divide the task into lots of little bits, and then fire off separate tasks to do each. This takes maximum advantage of available CPU cores, soaking up every skerrick of available CPU time. This naturally enough leaves none left over for other important tasks like watching a movie while waiting your kernel compile. In this particular case the default CPU scheduling strategy of giving each task an equal share of CPU is woefully poor, because there might be 20 kernel compile tasks and just one movie watching task, so the movie player ends up with 1/20 of the available CPU time. This isn't enough to play a movie.
The mind reading trick discovered boils down to this: Linux Kernel developers use the linux command line interface to fire off the kernel compile. And it turns out that for years now the kernel has been able group the tasks started from a command line and give that group a single portion of CPU time, as opposed to a equal portion to each task in the group. Thus you only have to split up the CPU time into 2, one portion going to the kernel compiler group and the other going to the movie player. Naturally enough the movie player works real well with a 50% allocation of CPU, and so we have a happy kernel developer.
Now we come to the merits of the two hacks. They both do the job I just described equally well. The difference between them is that one, the kernel patch, is automagic, meaning it happens automatically without anybody having to lift a finger. But it comes at the expense of bloating linux kernel a tiny bit, even for users who won't benefit from it. The other way currently has to be done applied manually using a process the vast majority of Linux users will at best find difficult, tedious and error prone.
Seems like a simple decision eh - lets take the tiny bloat hit and not inflict our long suffering desktop users with yet another Linux user-unfriendly idiosyncrasy. But here is the rub: it doesn't help them. In fact, for some it might have a negative impact (a gstreamer pipeline started from the command line strings to mind). The people who will benefit from this are the ones that use the command line heavily and regularly. People like Linus. Which is why he liked it so much I guess. But these are precisely the people who will have no absolutely no trouble doing it the manual way.
I doubt that, but in any case it is probably beside the point. Even if it is against the law it requires someone in power in Australia to follow it through. Given that Australian intelligence warned Assange that something was up just before the rape allegations that seems unlikely at this point. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/australian_intelligence_warned_wikileaks_9YIoc83Fq9VyPJ2FsujU8I
Gawd, I hate this part.
I went and re-read that paper, and you are right. Done correctly, CBC does generate random looking data. My only excuse is I read it years ago, missed the rather plain statement in the very paper I quoted that it did, and have been relying on memory since. Somehow the pretty ECB pictures stuck in my mind.
Anyway I guess on the positive side this discussion has fixed a misapprehension I have been labouring under for years. Thanks for taking the time to point it out.
No you don't, unfortunately. My logic is not some nicely chained line of reasoning like yours. It was more of an observation really. You are claiming that trading of child porn in the internet causes more children to be abused. At least that I what I think you are claiming, otherwise you would not want it to be kept illegal. I say that from what I observe, it is almost certain trading of child porn on the internet does not cause more children to be abused, and I say that because we there has been very little change in the number of abused children since the introduction of the internet.
You are saying regardless of there being no change, there must be one because of this lovely line of logic you have put together. We just can't see it for some reason. As you know, I think your emperor has no clothes. We can't see it because it is not there.
So how could your logic be sooo wrong? Well, if the logic is internally correct it may be the starting premises. You logic evidently assumes children are abused to make child porn and child porn is made to make money. But how do you know this? There are any number of alternative explanations. How about this one: some people like abusing children, and then discover they can make money on the side from their little hobby. Or this: people who abuse kids what like all of us to feel accepted, to be part of a group the won't outcast them for abusing children. But how to find like minded child abusers? Well, you could produce pictures of yourself abusing kids, and then use those pictures as an entry ticket to the group. I know from police reports that entering such groups is very hard for obviously reasons. They literally demand pictures of you doing something illegal as the price for entry.
Notice that in both these explanations the trading of pictures did not cause the children to be abused. The children were already being abused. The trading pictures was just a side effect. A fairly unfortunately side effect from the child abusers point of view, because spreading photos of themselves committing crimes around like confetti leads to a fair few of them getting caught. By the way, there is some small justification for the second explanation. Despite what you hear about money trails, I gather most pictures in these rings aren't traded for money. They are traded for other pictures. The prosecutors here where I live seem to believe money has very little to do with it.
I have read other explanations from psychologists on why people trade porn. Like yours, the rational they have put together sounds very reasonable. Flawless, in fact. But I am nonetheless suspicious of them. I have never seen any of them follow up with a hypothesis and then some attempt to test it with real data. They were just some neat train of logic that happened to fit the existing data. As least they had that going for them - they did fit the existing data. Yours doesn't.
In case you are wondering, I don't have a clue why people abuse kids, or why they trade pictures of themselves doing it. Nor do I have a favourite theory. I've tried for some while to figure it out, and failed miserably. That is why I just look at the underlying stats now.
The previous post of yours you linked to was a gem.
There is another side to this. Here in Australia a fair number of child abuse rings are tracked down using the money trail. I am digressing a bit, but the money trail is another difference that belongs in your then and now post. Back then, everything was paid for with cash. There was no money trail. Now people pay with credit cards. Which means it abuser is paid for his pictures and someone is caught with the picture, the person doing the abusing will likely by locked away.
Anyway, the perverse outcome of all this is allowing, or more reasonably reducing the penalties for trading in child porn makes it easier to find those doing the abusing. Think of how nice it would be if every criminal took pictures of themselves committing a crime, then sold those pictures to many others around the world and in doing so left a trail of money pointing straight back to them. It would be some sort of law enforcement heaven.
Now the really weird thing about this is our Conroy (who is the polly who is the driving force behind filter) accepts this. So a few months ago, after relentlessly pounding the drum about child porn being so corrupting it must be filtered so it can not scar all who see it, he back-flipped. He now says child porn (but not other filtered stuff as far as I know) will be left unfiltered for a while, so the police can do their stuff.
As for the effects of the restrictions on child porn, there was one country (Denmark?) where they decided they would be more tolerant of it. I think the idea was more along the lines of your original post - the current stance is causing so much collateral damage they decided toning it down was worth a shot. They watched the child abuse figures like a hawk after that of course. They were hoping for no change, but in fact there was a slight drop. Not a terribly significant drop - you certainly would not go around claiming that allowing the trade in child porn protects children. But it was certainly more evidence that in the current environment the level trading in child porn has no causal to relationship child abuse.
Gezzz, you should at least take the time to read beyond the first few paragrahps before making such a comment, but then I guess this is slashdot.
He dismisses LUKS and TrueCrypt because they don't offer plausible deniability - because of the headers, as you say. He then moves onto Linux's loopback device in crypto mode. It doesn't write headers. He then comes up with a technique of comparing the raw encrypted data with random text. Turns out using his techniques it is easy to spot the difference. And that is the point of the paper: even without headers or any other tell tale signs, there is no way to hide the fact that you have encrypted data on your disk.
Ergo, there is no plausible deniability when you have great gobs of encrypted data on your disk - which is to say you won't be able to deny it is there. if you are going to avoid the rubber hose, you are going to have to use some social engineering trick to explain it away.
Here you are playing with words. "Encrypted data looks like random data" in this case means in this case "looks identical to the novice, but an expert will find it easy to distinguish the two". But no one would take that meaning from your post. It was poor communication at best.
Yes, it was pretty clear, wasn't it? I think your original post was too, by the way.
Obviously not. If you are going to take pictures of kids being harmed, then somebody must have been harmed.
What I am claiming is no link between pictures being traded and kids being harmed. The evidence for this is pretty strong. The statistics we have show no correlation between the amount of trading going on, and the amount of abuse.
Since you appear to be having trouble understanding this, let me put it for you in a different way. The evidence suggests that is you somehow waved a magic want and got rid of all child porn travelling over the internet, the number of kids abused would not change. The evidence for this is pretty simple and straightforward: there has been no change in child abuse figures since the introduction of the internet, so its removal is unlikely to have any effect.
Since I happen to think the only proper basis for banning something is that it causes harm to someone, that means banning the trade of child porn is the wrong thing to do.
Since you have had a bit of trouble understanding the bit of logic above, I spell the rest of it out for you as well. I don't like child porn, and I don't think it would be particularly missed if we could wave some magic wands to banish it from the planet. The problem is we don't have any magic wands. All the wands we have do harm when we wave them: they put people in jail, they split up families, and like all justice they cost our society a huge amount of money. So the question becomes: do we want those wands and do those harms for no other reason that people like you find child porn disgusting?