Falun Gong/Falun Dafa have been brutalized by the Chinese government for years for doing nothing more than practicing a mental and physical discipline.
From what I read about the Fulun Gong is that they are pretty similar to Scientology in beliefs and certain "practices". Now even though Scientologists can be a bit shady with their cult, I would still argue that it would be wrong to throw them in jail and beat their members much like the Chinese did to the FG.
The point here is that if you are going to cast things like having a CD key and using a central matching service in the same category as SecuROM and such, then you are effectively making you definition of DRM meaningless and running off in to zealot territory. The reason you should, as a gamer, be anti-DRM is because it makes games not work. Like you take these recent games with SecuROM that you can only install 3 times, ever. After that, you are done. THAT is DRM and that is a problem. Wanting you to have an account on their online play service to play online is not DRM.
Ummm... If you can't play online without central matching services then it is DRM? Same thing about CD keys.
Take Paradox Interactive games (or at least the new ones) as games that have no DRM.
Yes you have CD keys for forum registration and for a centralized matching service but you aren't required to use those to install or play directly with other players.
In fact (if I wanted to) I zip up my install directory and copy it to any machine in the world without ever having to bother with a serial key.
But I don't simply because they make great games and the developers really interact with the community like no other and I have spent more money on their games than pretty much any other company.
So yes, CD keys and required centralized servers for online play are DRM because some companies out there do it without it.
Copying is a fact of nature, and we will never get everyone to agree not to do it, nor would we want to. Seek out another business model, or suck it up and live with the current awful one.
I don't know why you were modded redundant because you made a different point than most others.
And I agree as a person who firmly believes in reductionism of the world around me.
What is the difference between being killed by a mugger, a grizzly bear, or lightning bolt.
There is really none in the end result because I'm dead. People could get made at the mugger, bear, and even the lightning bolt but that doesn't change anything.
You can say that mugger had free will in order to choose so it makes you mad, but is he really no different than the bear or the lightning bolt.
In all reality, I cannot control what they do or appear to choose to do and being mad doesn't help anything. What I can do is buy a gun and shoot the mugger or bear.
Or ideally not put myself in situations where I am faced by either because some phenomenon (like lightning) can't be dealt with.
I mean... How silly it is to be mad at lightning. The same thing goes for pirates because yelling at them is just as effective as yelling at a grizzly bear or lightning.
Do something to mitigate them or avoid the situation.
According to US law, theft is simply depriving of use of property and has a completely different set of rules and punishment than copyright violations. Sort of like the difference between murder of the 1st degree, 2nd degree, homicidal negligence, and manslaughter.
Each type of crime has a different set of laws and punishments.
If you were before a judge and said "But it this dictionary gives a different definition of the law I broke!", he'd probably laugh at you before throwing the book at you.
I say this because copyright violations tend to get you more jail time than actual theft of property.
Essentially he says that patent thickets are not a problem, because they resolve themselves eventually. I suppose it was a good ending for those who owned the patents, but maybe not for those who wanted to do research in the field of sewing machine invention.
Yeah. Of course patents resolve themselves eventually because they have a 17 (or so) year time limitation them.
A free market is one where there is no significant barrier to entry into that market, as well as relatively level footing within that market, thereby allowing for free competition. Of course, this is nothing like the ISP industry that we have today.
One thing that is overlooked by most economists on both side of the fence of free market versus regulation is that perhaps it isn't free market that is what make the capitalism tick, but rather competition and low barriers to market entry.
Logically there is little difference between the central government setting employee wages and product prices than a private business monopoly doing the same thing.
Lack of competition means that the business (regardless of government or privately owned) is not motivated to innovate or even bother to please its customers. It will never update its products, build more infrastructure, or put a dime into R&D.
Now, people might point at someone like Microsoft as being the exception, but you have to remember that they know their limits on pushing their monopoly.
They didn't buy Apple back in 1999. They didn't buy Netscape. They don't seem hell bent on buying up all the Linux developers even though they probably have enough money to do like Standard oil bought up all its competitors back in the 1890's.
Imagine if there were no threat of government intervention and Microsoft could have bought up everyone back in 1995?
Would they have even bothered making anything past IE4 and Windows 95?
Maybe, but I doubt it.
If nothing else, government regulation should be inductive to creating competition and low entries to market so that it forces businesses out of the monopolies and actually innovate a stagnating business.
With this development in China, suddenly playing god might not sound so bad.
Actually, immortality has always been a big deal in Chinese mythology and history. Many real life Chinese Emperors tried everything from drinking mercury to sending out massive expeditions searching for mythical islands or legendary items in hopes to live forever.
What if you don't know the program's name ("Writer" comes to mind) but you know it's a part of Open Office? What if you don't know anything about the program but would recognize it if you saw it?
If you don't know what you are looking for and you don't know what it was called, then do you really need to use it?;)
Many residential ISPs Block port 80, No-IP Free DNS enables you to run a webserver on a non-standard port, yet users accessing your site never have to enter a port number. For example http://yourname.no-ip.com/ can redirect to http://yourname.no-ip.com:8833/
I'm almost certain that running a server would be against the ToS, and yes it is fairly easy to detect. Hmmm...incoming Port 80/443 traffic...
I don't think it was DynDNS that let you do this, but there are services around that let you host a server on a different and possibly including dynamic port other than port 80/443 traffic between you and the the gateway.
You still violate your TOS, but it can be done... *coughs* not that I know anything about that.
See, this would be good, except that say I start a virtual business that somehow generates millions in real income, having to pay taxes on this would be insane
I don't see the problem here. You can pay your taxes in virtual money.
And not everything on the internet is true or pertinent to the person applying.
If someone goggled my name for example but used my middle initial instead of typing it out, they might get someone on the "Do not fly" list. Its annoying enough to be detained at the airport while they try to figure out I'm not that guy, but to be mistaken for him in applying for a job would just take the cake.
Anyone who has ever hired someone has googled him/her. It's almost inevitable not to land on a person's social networking page, if this person uses her own name online.
This is why you have two social networking pages.
One with your real name showing photoshopped pictures of you volunteering at animal shelters and the second one with the name of the other people applying for the job with your spring break pictures.
I'm confused as to why anyone needs to provide ANY reason why someone didn't get hired.
There are city, state, and federal laws that specifically say you cannot not hire someone based on certain reasons such as but not limited too race, religion, sex, age, and in some places credit history or prior contracts and so on.
There is a slew of legislation on this and varies from state to state.
When you do not hire someone, in truth you have to have a valid reason or the person you didn't hire can sue you for violating on of those conditions.
This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact...
I think the problem is that the administrators and moderator of the sites can subvert the process. Yes, you can go somewhere else if they ban you, but if the community is large enough, a small set of persons can control the projected opinion of many.
I mean, how would you know if kdawson is giving out mod points to creationists? I highly doubt it, but you would never know with private sites.
A true democratic internet would have it so the 1st amendment applies to everyone and not just the government. But I don't know how practical it is to outlaw administration and moderation.
Maybe the rule is that if you talk about politics then you can't moderate dissenting opinions, but then you would get DOS'd by opposing view points sites who you can ban.
There is no good answer, but the author is right that since internet communities are privately owned that they generally lean towards the political viewpoint of their administrators and community leaders or their followers.
In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy.
I think its main point (or at least the one I got) is that people who lead internet communities tend to be able to drown out opposition simply by their viewership base and also represses dissent on their own websites.
In a sense, a large internet community can have many voices but the administers of the community (if not inclined to do so) can repress the voices they choose and even though those voices can go to other communities, those who remained are de facto living in a repressed medium.
Like the mod points I could have used... I could in theory with like minded individual repress and censor those voices who would otherwise be heard if there were no moderation.
Since the 1st amendment only applies the government, then administrators and moderators, and large groups who can spam message boards into oblivion can basically do the same thing.
Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"
It was originally defined as such in Greek and Roman times. In that respect, some classes in Roman society actually got more freedom when Roman Emperors disbanded the republic and prevented the patricians (rich guys) from abusing the plebs (poor guys).
And the US founding fathers new this because they knew a democracy by itself doesn't mean the people elected are going to respect everyone rights (like they had with the English parliament).
The idea was to create a representative democracy with limited powers with checks and balances simply so that the rich and wealth wouldn't take advantage of government to enforce their will on others or a nasty poor majority inflicting its views on the minority.
Given to its own, a pure democracy will strip the rights of the minorities simply because it can.
That said... Money and power tends to help in getting elected so it was generally accepted that those in government tended to be people who could afford to campaign.
I think the hardest plagiarism to spot is one where you copy the main idea but you put everything into your own sentence. The main reason is that semantics is still an open problem in AI.
I really never understood this in paper writing for most college students. I don't know about you, but I never came up with any radically new idea while going to college. I may have wrote papers explaining an opinion or an idea and then showing facts that back that up, but over all, everything I wrote was basically (in the end) other people's ideas and books which though I did not plagiarism, used to "regurgitate" ideas that pre-existed before me.
And to that end, I have a hunch that the majority of people who do write papers on topics do the same thing or we would all be amazing in the fact we created new ideas without any help from any other source.
In fact, I would dare say anyone who wrote a paper with no sources other than the authors own ideas and experimentation and even though he might have hit on something amazingly unique, new and correct, that he would be failed for lack of citing previous sources.
The entire research world basically is built on the works of people prior and it is almost impossible these days (except those in theoretical research with the tools to create the experiments themselves)
Most preliminary tests are filmed (and everyone so far flunked the preliminaries badly) and looking at some of them, the requests weren't unreasonable, the test setup wasn't stacked against the claimant in any way, etc. I haven't seen any where it would even matter whether he's set to disprove those claims or not. Either you see auras through walls, or you don't. Either you can tell the history of an object by touch, or you don't. Either you can dowse or you don't. Those people just plain old didn't have the powers they claimed to have.
I have a personal theory to why you will never able to video tape either physic phenomenon, spiritual miracles, or supernatural events even when witnessed by large groups of people.
There are ways to simulate a "religious experience" through electromagnetic waves (also I suppose you can do that with LSD as well). Some say this could also be caused by genetic problems. I have personally experienced visual effects by meditation once a few times by staring at something for long enough or perhaps it was because I was hung over?
Anyways... Neither meditation, LSD, or genetics explains why large groups experience something unexplainable and see things that are not recorded by cameras.
I think the only possibly explanation is that there are electromagnetic, gravitational, or a combination of weak forces that are hard to measure. One correlation is the history of ghosts in Japan and its seismic activity and low gravity when compared to other places.
Of course it is pure speculation on my part and does not explain how people seem to be able to affect other people.
You act as if security is easy, and MS could accomplish it if only it tried a little harder. That's not the reality.
I disagree with this statement simply because security is easy if you disable needless functionality, stupid tricks, and increase transparency of applications can and cannot do.
You simply have to separate the OS from the user, their files, and the programs it installs to mitigate damage.
The KEY problem to windows is the inherit problem with the registry and dll system. It was thought at the design on Windows NT and 95 that developers would act in good faith and intelligently when it came to modifying the OS to meet the needs of their application.
So if the application needed something done on start up it would modify the registry and then maybe modify or overwrite dlls within the OS to enable the application to run as the developers wanted.
First (and this was a major problem in the late 90's) developers didn't know what they were doing and even if they did they often did not consider that other applications would be modifying the OS and registry and overwriting dlls with their own dlls which breaks your application.
Or that a user isn't using the same windows updates or didn't patch direct X or open GL etc etc.
This (without even the malware writers) was a major headache for developers, support, and of course the users (NT 4 was a nightmare back then)
(Actually i hear one of my coworkers cursing about mismatched dll file in one of our applications right now)
Now when you get people who actually write software to do nefarious things, they have the whole open system of registry entries and dlls to bury their nasty software in.
If they wrote the whole OS from the ground up and followed something similar to the Mac OS in which the idea is that the application you install never modify the OS and keep their preferences in a separate preference file in a user folder and all the files required to run the application were embedded into a single file, then it would be a lot harder for malware to go masquerading inside the OS.
I know some windows developers are attached to the whole idea that their babies should be allowed to modify the OS (and I got into a fight with another developer over the issue back when I was at a job where we were still supporting NT servers because the user had mission critical stuff on his box and refused to boot the servers just so our software could update the OS dll)
If Microsoft put forth this "extra effort" and redesigned the OS so that applications could not longer modify the OS and system registry and put them into sandboxes, the majority of windows security problems would be resolved.
Of course this doesn't resolve the issue about user doing dumb things and running malware that wipes their user directory, but if the system is truly secure than you will prevent the malware (or any application) from modifying the OS or even being allowed to run on startup.
Yes... Even OS X has this problem, but perhaps if the OS was designed so that you have to log into administration mode to add a program to start up, it may make the user think twice about putting a random program in the startup folder.
They can't but they can log it and beat the keys out of you later.
Which is why you have a self-destruct decrypt key that you feed your torturers which destroys the data and makes it unrecoverable.
Of course they'll probably keep beating you after they suspect what you did, but its what they have on most nuclear weapons systems. If you put in the wrong code, it immediately mechanically locks the system permanently rendering it useless. After they keep torturing you, I'm sure you'll give them the real password but at that point it doesn't do them any good because the self destruct key destroyed the real encryption key.
As far as stuff that the public can use hasn't really been invented yet (I surprised true crypt doesn't have a self destruct option) but you could in theory have OS profile that keeps an encrypted copy of your key's key and when you automatically logs into that profile it immediately starts writing zeros over that file over and over again till the person who logs in become wise to what you just did. (To make them wait you could have a dialog box to pop up that says "Decrypting... Please wait... 60 minutes to go"
Of course if you captors were smart they would have imaged the drive before attempting to follow your instructions in which case you need something more complex such as an on board device that prevents I/O if you attempt to remove the drive or wipes itself if they attempt to remove the platters if they valued your data that much. I guess you could re-rewrite the firmware on the drive to have encryption key and another chip on your MB had the check for it so if it powers on and can't read the key it attempts to wipe the remaining encryption key on itself.
Though, chances are you are going to lose your own data which such a system trying to repair your computer when you swap out the hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Falun Gong/Falun Dafa have been brutalized by the Chinese government for years for doing nothing more than practicing a mental and physical discipline.
From what I read about the Fulun Gong is that they are pretty similar to Scientology in beliefs and certain "practices". Now even though Scientologists can be a bit shady with their cult, I would still argue that it would be wrong to throw them in jail and beat their members much like the Chinese did to the FG.
The point here is that if you are going to cast things like having a CD key and using a central matching service in the same category as SecuROM and such, then you are effectively making you definition of DRM meaningless and running off in to zealot territory. The reason you should, as a gamer, be anti-DRM is because it makes games not work. Like you take these recent games with SecuROM that you can only install 3 times, ever. After that, you are done. THAT is DRM and that is a problem. Wanting you to have an account on their online play service to play online is not DRM.
Ummm... If you can't play online without central matching services then it is DRM? Same thing about CD keys.
Take Paradox Interactive games (or at least the new ones) as games that have no DRM.
Yes you have CD keys for forum registration and for a centralized matching service but you aren't required to use those to install or play directly with other players.
In fact (if I wanted to) I zip up my install directory and copy it to any machine in the world without ever having to bother with a serial key.
But I don't simply because they make great games and the developers really interact with the community like no other and I have spent more money on their games than pretty much any other company.
So yes, CD keys and required centralized servers for online play are DRM because some companies out there do it without it.
Copying is a fact of nature, and we will never get everyone to agree not to do it, nor would we want to. Seek out another business model, or suck it up and live with the current awful one.
I don't know why you were modded redundant because you made a different point than most others.
And I agree as a person who firmly believes in reductionism of the world around me.
What is the difference between being killed by a mugger, a grizzly bear, or lightning bolt.
There is really none in the end result because I'm dead. People could get made at the mugger, bear, and even the lightning bolt but that doesn't change anything.
You can say that mugger had free will in order to choose so it makes you mad, but is he really no different than the bear or the lightning bolt.
In all reality, I cannot control what they do or appear to choose to do and being mad doesn't help anything. What I can do is buy a gun and shoot the mugger or bear.
Or ideally not put myself in situations where I am faced by either because some phenomenon (like lightning) can't be dealt with.
I mean... How silly it is to be mad at lightning. The same thing goes for pirates because yelling at them is just as effective as yelling at a grizzly bear or lightning.
Do something to mitigate them or avoid the situation.
Dictionary.com doesn't a legal argument make.
According to US law, theft is simply depriving of use of property and has a completely different set of rules and punishment than copyright violations. Sort of like the difference between murder of the 1st degree, 2nd degree, homicidal negligence, and manslaughter.
Each type of crime has a different set of laws and punishments.
If you were before a judge and said "But it this dictionary gives a different definition of the law I broke!", he'd probably laugh at you before throwing the book at you.
I say this because copyright violations tend to get you more jail time than actual theft of property.
Essentially he says that patent thickets are not a problem, because they resolve themselves eventually. I suppose it was a good ending for those who owned the patents, but maybe not for those who wanted to do research in the field of sewing machine invention.
Yeah. Of course patents resolve themselves eventually because they have a 17 (or so) year time limitation them.
Copyright on the other hand...
A free market is one where there is no significant barrier to entry into that market, as well as relatively level footing within that market, thereby allowing for free competition. Of course, this is nothing like the ISP industry that we have today.
One thing that is overlooked by most economists on both side of the fence of free market versus regulation is that perhaps it isn't free market that is what make the capitalism tick, but rather competition and low barriers to market entry.
Logically there is little difference between the central government setting employee wages and product prices than a private business monopoly doing the same thing.
Lack of competition means that the business (regardless of government or privately owned) is not motivated to innovate or even bother to please its customers. It will never update its products, build more infrastructure, or put a dime into R&D.
Now, people might point at someone like Microsoft as being the exception, but you have to remember that they know their limits on pushing their monopoly.
They didn't buy Apple back in 1999. They didn't buy Netscape. They don't seem hell bent on buying up all the Linux developers even though they probably have enough money to do like Standard oil bought up all its competitors back in the 1890's.
Imagine if there were no threat of government intervention and Microsoft could have bought up everyone back in 1995?
Would they have even bothered making anything past IE4 and Windows 95?
Maybe, but I doubt it.
If nothing else, government regulation should be inductive to creating competition and low entries to market so that it forces businesses out of the monopolies and actually innovate a stagnating business.
With this development in China, suddenly playing god might not sound so bad.
Actually, immortality has always been a big deal in Chinese mythology and history. Many real life Chinese Emperors tried everything from drinking mercury to sending out massive expeditions searching for mythical islands or legendary items in hopes to live forever.
What if you don't know the program's name ("Writer" comes to mind) but you know it's a part of Open Office? What if you don't know anything about the program but would recognize it if you saw it?
If you don't know what you are looking for and you don't know what it was called, then do you really need to use it? ;)
And I forgot the link:
http://www.no-ip.com/services/managed_dns/free_dynamic_dns.html
*coughs*
Don't know nothing about doing this either...
I'm almost certain that running a server would be against the ToS, and yes it is fairly easy to detect. Hmmm...incoming Port 80/443 traffic...
I don't think it was DynDNS that let you do this, but there are services around that let you host a server on a different and possibly including dynamic port other than port 80/443 traffic between you and the the gateway.
You still violate your TOS, but it can be done... *coughs* not that I know anything about that.
What I fail to understand is why anyone worth a damn would keep playing a game that openly allows buying their way to the top.
Like politics?
See, this would be good, except that say I start a virtual business that somehow generates millions in real income, having to pay taxes on this would be insane
I don't see the problem here. You can pay your taxes in virtual money.
Why is it bad to google people?
Because it is the internet.
And not everything on the internet is true or pertinent to the person applying.
If someone goggled my name for example but used my middle initial instead of typing it out, they might get someone on the "Do not fly" list. Its annoying enough to be detained at the airport while they try to figure out I'm not that guy, but to be mistaken for him in applying for a job would just take the cake.
You say it's easy to convince a courtroom that you were the subject of discrimination, but I disagree.
If the case is heard in Utah.. *coughs*
Anyone who has ever hired someone has googled him/her. It's almost inevitable not to land on a person's social networking page, if this person uses her own name online.
This is why you have two social networking pages.
One with your real name showing photoshopped pictures of you volunteering at animal shelters and the second one with the name of the other people applying for the job with your spring break pictures.
I'm confused as to why anyone needs to provide ANY reason why someone didn't get hired.
There are city, state, and federal laws that specifically say you cannot not hire someone based on certain reasons such as but not limited too race, religion, sex, age, and in some places credit history or prior contracts and so on.
There is a slew of legislation on this and varies from state to state.
When you do not hire someone, in truth you have to have a valid reason or the person you didn't hire can sue you for violating on of those conditions.
This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact ...
I think the problem is that the administrators and moderator of the sites can subvert the process. Yes, you can go somewhere else if they ban you, but if the community is large enough, a small set of persons can control the projected opinion of many.
I mean, how would you know if kdawson is giving out mod points to creationists? I highly doubt it, but you would never know with private sites.
A true democratic internet would have it so the 1st amendment applies to everyone and not just the government. But I don't know how practical it is to outlaw administration and moderation.
Maybe the rule is that if you talk about politics then you can't moderate dissenting opinions, but then you would get DOS'd by opposing view points sites who you can ban.
There is no good answer, but the author is right that since internet communities are privately owned that they generally lean towards the political viewpoint of their administrators and community leaders or their followers.
In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy.
I think its main point (or at least the one I got) is that people who lead internet communities tend to be able to drown out opposition simply by their viewership base and also represses dissent on their own websites.
In a sense, a large internet community can have many voices but the administers of the community (if not inclined to do so) can repress the voices they choose and even though those voices can go to other communities, those who remained are de facto living in a repressed medium.
Like the mod points I could have used... I could in theory with like minded individual repress and censor those voices who would otherwise be heard if there were no moderation.
Since the 1st amendment only applies the government, then administrators and moderators, and large groups who can spam message boards into oblivion can basically do the same thing.
Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"
It was originally defined as such in Greek and Roman times. In that respect, some classes in Roman society actually got more freedom when Roman Emperors disbanded the republic and prevented the patricians (rich guys) from abusing the plebs (poor guys).
And the US founding fathers new this because they knew a democracy by itself doesn't mean the people elected are going to respect everyone rights (like they had with the English parliament).
The idea was to create a representative democracy with limited powers with checks and balances simply so that the rich and wealth wouldn't take advantage of government to enforce their will on others or a nasty poor majority inflicting its views on the minority.
Given to its own, a pure democracy will strip the rights of the minorities simply because it can.
That said... Money and power tends to help in getting elected so it was generally accepted that those in government tended to be people who could afford to campaign.
I think the hardest plagiarism to spot is one where you copy the main idea but you put everything into your own sentence. The main reason is that semantics is still an open problem in AI.
I really never understood this in paper writing for most college students. I don't know about you, but I never came up with any radically new idea while going to college. I may have wrote papers explaining an opinion or an idea and then showing facts that back that up, but over all, everything I wrote was basically (in the end) other people's ideas and books which though I did not plagiarism, used to "regurgitate" ideas that pre-existed before me.
And to that end, I have a hunch that the majority of people who do write papers on topics do the same thing or we would all be amazing in the fact we created new ideas without any help from any other source.
In fact, I would dare say anyone who wrote a paper with no sources other than the authors own ideas and experimentation and even though he might have hit on something amazingly unique, new and correct, that he would be failed for lack of citing previous sources.
The entire research world basically is built on the works of people prior and it is almost impossible these days (except those in theoretical research with the tools to create the experiments themselves)
Most preliminary tests are filmed (and everyone so far flunked the preliminaries badly) and looking at some of them, the requests weren't unreasonable, the test setup wasn't stacked against the claimant in any way, etc. I haven't seen any where it would even matter whether he's set to disprove those claims or not. Either you see auras through walls, or you don't. Either you can tell the history of an object by touch, or you don't. Either you can dowse or you don't. Those people just plain old didn't have the powers they claimed to have.
I have a personal theory to why you will never able to video tape either physic phenomenon, spiritual miracles, or supernatural events even when witnessed by large groups of people.
There are ways to simulate a "religious experience" through electromagnetic waves (also I suppose you can do that with LSD as well). Some say this could also be caused by genetic problems. I have personally experienced visual effects by meditation once a few times by staring at something for long enough or perhaps it was because I was hung over?
Anyways... Neither meditation, LSD, or genetics explains why large groups experience something unexplainable and see things that are not recorded by cameras.
I think the only possibly explanation is that there are electromagnetic, gravitational, or a combination of weak forces that are hard to measure. One correlation is the history of ghosts in Japan and its seismic activity and low gravity when compared to other places.
Of course it is pure speculation on my part and does not explain how people seem to be able to affect other people.
You act as if security is easy, and MS could accomplish it if only it tried a little harder. That's not the reality.
I disagree with this statement simply because security is easy if you disable needless functionality, stupid tricks, and increase transparency of applications can and cannot do.
You simply have to separate the OS from the user, their files, and the programs it installs to mitigate damage.
The KEY problem to windows is the inherit problem with the registry and dll system. It was thought at the design on Windows NT and 95 that developers would act in good faith and intelligently when it came to modifying the OS to meet the needs of their application.
So if the application needed something done on start up it would modify the registry and then maybe modify or overwrite dlls within the OS to enable the application to run as the developers wanted.
First (and this was a major problem in the late 90's) developers didn't know what they were doing and even if they did they often did not consider that other applications would be modifying the OS and registry and overwriting dlls with their own dlls which breaks your application.
Or that a user isn't using the same windows updates or didn't patch direct X or open GL etc etc.
This (without even the malware writers) was a major headache for developers, support, and of course the users (NT 4 was a nightmare back then)
(Actually i hear one of my coworkers cursing about mismatched dll file in one of our applications right now)
Now when you get people who actually write software to do nefarious things, they have the whole open system of registry entries and dlls to bury their nasty software in.
If they wrote the whole OS from the ground up and followed something similar to the Mac OS in which the idea is that the application you install never modify the OS and keep their preferences in a separate preference file in a user folder and all the files required to run the application were embedded into a single file, then it would be a lot harder for malware to go masquerading inside the OS.
I know some windows developers are attached to the whole idea that their babies should be allowed to modify the OS (and I got into a fight with another developer over the issue back when I was at a job where we were still supporting NT servers because the user had mission critical stuff on his box and refused to boot the servers just so our software could update the OS dll)
If Microsoft put forth this "extra effort" and redesigned the OS so that applications could not longer modify the OS and system registry and put them into sandboxes, the majority of windows security problems would be resolved.
Of course this doesn't resolve the issue about user doing dumb things and running malware that wipes their user directory, but if the system is truly secure than you will prevent the malware (or any application) from modifying the OS or even being allowed to run on startup.
Yes... Even OS X has this problem, but perhaps if the OS was designed so that you have to log into administration mode to add a program to start up, it may make the user think twice about putting a random program in the startup folder.
They didn't have to deal with running virus scan and firewall software within the virtual machine.
Huh? I've ran AVG within Parallels on my Mac. I bet I could run Symantec if I could tolerate it.
Secondly, you could in theory have an anti virus that runs in Windows 7 which scans the WinXp partition. Don't see how this is complicated.
Yes, this will be a support nightmare but we simply cannot write of the biggest heap of legacy software ever.
I hate to be a naysayer about the importance of backwards compatibility but a lot of software that ran in Win95 will not run in WinXp much less Vista.
However, I'm not that bothered by this fact.
It was Windows 95 after all.
They can't but they can log it and beat the keys out of you later.
Which is why you have a self-destruct decrypt key that you feed your torturers which destroys the data and makes it unrecoverable.
Of course they'll probably keep beating you after they suspect what you did, but its what they have on most nuclear weapons systems. If you put in the wrong code, it immediately mechanically locks the system permanently rendering it useless. After they keep torturing you, I'm sure you'll give them the real password but at that point it doesn't do them any good because the self destruct key destroyed the real encryption key.
As far as stuff that the public can use hasn't really been invented yet (I surprised true crypt doesn't have a self destruct option) but you could in theory have OS profile that keeps an encrypted copy of your key's key and when you automatically logs into that profile it immediately starts writing zeros over that file over and over again till the person who logs in become wise to what you just did. (To make them wait you could have a dialog box to pop up that says "Decrypting... Please wait... 60 minutes to go"
Of course if you captors were smart they would have imaged the drive before attempting to follow your instructions in which case you need something more complex such as an on board device that prevents I/O if you attempt to remove the drive or wipes itself if they attempt to remove the platters if they valued your data that much. I guess you could re-rewrite the firmware on the drive to have encryption key and another chip on your MB had the check for it so if it powers on and can't read the key it attempts to wipe the remaining encryption key on itself.
Though, chances are you are going to lose your own data which such a system trying to repair your computer when you swap out the hard drive.