There are ways to make systems more secure, starting with strong containment.
There is a better way: to know the source of the programs you are running. To be able to evaluate how they work and rely on a vast community to openly discuss and fix errors.
Linux is obviously better than Windows, but even Windows users can enjoy better security by using open source for code that requires broad file/network privileges (such as a web browser) and then contain code that doesn't.
You are probably correct here although the nature of the data requested wasn't a serious privacy issue. It was data private to Google and the rest, but without the IP addresses, the invasion to personal privacy was minimal. Also it is not certain that MS has provided the data, but I will accept they did as the most probable scenario.
However you are generalizing too much. For example when you say "if you're looking to see which company protects its users" you miss the point by generalization. Yes, it's nice to have a company that protects its users but the issue here is privacy.
Google controls huge amounts of personal data; their success is already a privacy problem because the more Google grows, the more data it can take from me. As Google urges me to sign in for most of its services it can make out a perfect report of what I like, what I watch, what turns me on, what I buy. Microsoft (and really, all the other search services) knows nothing of these. That makes Microsoft and the rest harmless in front of Google.
Thus I believe Mozilla is right. When you control such an amount of data, you have a great responsibility. Schmidt's statement has a huge impact because it gives the message that pursuing privacy (and of course encryption) is a sign of illegal activities which is exactly what oppressive governments dictate.
Google needs to really understand the importance of privacy and the increasing awareness of it; until then, relying on a competitor will be sending them a strong message.
I am not giving a "real bad" status to Google. I do have a problem with the stuff Google knows about me when so many sites use Google analytics, adwords, embedded youtube videos to the point of Google being able to track most of the web pages I visit.
This is too much power.
My dealings with Microsoft are much more restricted. I use XP, I sometimes use Bing and thats it. I have no other relations with them. So, even if they were evil -- they couldn't really compromise my privacy (I keep all operating system components firewalled, BTW).
I understand your example, but I'd say that the role of the other guy is serving fries in a public place and I'd have little problem with that. That professor on the other hand could turn up more dangerous if he wished to...
In matters of security yes. In matters of privacy no. Microsoft isn't running a global network of connected search, advertising and analytics where your every move can be tracked. Ethics aside, Google has far more power to play games with your privacy than Microsoft has.
But then comes the issue of ethics. It is Google who said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- not Microsoft.
Apparently Google does have the appropriate ethics, or lack thereof, to invade your privacy. You'll be more private with Microsoft I think.
IMHO, since the recession the hand that feeds US nerds (the majority and also the management) is getting bitten less. That hand is the US IT industry. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Of course Slashdot is still an interesting read.
It's not merely a matter of dislike. The ribbon eats up valuable horizontal estate while monitors provide less each year. From 4:3 we went to 16:10 and now most laptops are using the 16:9 resolution. Resolutions such as 1366x768 which provide the same horizontal size we've been using in the nineties...
The ribbon is something that made sense a few years ago. It is now outdated. Perhaps a vertical ribbon / menu / toolbar would make sense, but currently OpenOffice and its standard menu is simply more usable.
I believe he means a historic low in a decade range. If we consider Lynx as the first public www browser -- and I don't see why we should not -- we are talking about 18 years of web browser history, so I'd say one is justified in calling a decade "historic" (not an "all-time" of course).
Firefox is not about defaults, it's about freedom and customization. That's how I read your posting. (standard firefox small buttons relocated on the menu bar, tiny menu & tabkit). If you find it huge, it's in your power to change it...
I tried Chrome but I found myself confined it its defaults.
I first caught a virus in 1991. And it was also the last time in personal level. But professionally, I also caught one in 2001. Here is the story:
I was teaching some basic skills to people who had been asking me to help them learn how to surf the Internet, use eMail, and create and print documents. Despite my preference to Lynx/Mosaic/Netscape and then Mozilla, I wanted to give the students the standard experience -- the stuff almost everyone was using: Windows XP, Office XP and IE6.
I had fully updated and secured the systems with a few policies against unsigned activeX and taught the students to avoid clicking OK to messages that would install new software, despite the misleading text saying "the manufacturer asserts that this content is safe" in which YES WAS THE DEFAULT ACTION. I knew dozens of people who had installed dialers on their systems due to that design, but I thought that if no code would be installed, we would be safe.
Yet after a week, one of the systems had its home page changed into a porn site. It was a virus; the process could be killed only to be revived in seconds. Searched the web and found it was one of the worst viruses ever made; it had injected itself on system files of both partitions; no tools existed to remove it, so the entire disk had to be formatted.
I asked some other guys, who were doing this thing at a professional level, if they had the same problem and yes, they all did. But they figured that it wasn't an issue since the students were at the basic level and they wouldn't have important files to lose. They also wanted to conform to the exams who would require an additional process if an "alternate" browser was taught to the student. I found that unacceptable. Teaching basic skills to people should also have included basic principles. And at the time, avoiding Internet Explorer had to be such a principle.
My problem wasn't that some hacker had found their way to run code with IE. That was simply a mistake from Microsoft. But the fact that Microsoft would allow installation of software based on the message I linked above and considering that IE was the defacto browser of new, inexperienced Windows users -- now that was bordering with either malice or stupidity. Of course things must have changed since then, especially with IE8 and sandboxing, but the problem is not that I have simply lost my trust to IE -- it's that I find it counter-productive to try and get it back. Trusting IE again would require effort which I have no reason to make since the alternative (Firefox) is simply great.
Then comes the issue about standards. Yes, like many others here I've wasted time trying to make pages work in IE6 work the same way they do in Mozilla and Opera. Again IE8 is improved, but when I read people in Slashdot saying that IE6 is the only problem, I smell astroturfing. Hey fanboys, did you check IE8 Acid3 scores lately ? It's worse to what Firefox, Opera and Safari had been ages ago!
An important reason behind the increased weight is that the 27x0p line is built with a magnesium alloy frame. It looks great and obviously provides greater durability.
I do agree with your point about the detachable keyboard. I believe the Slate or even perhaps the WePad will fill the blank.
They have made the 2710p, 2730p and 2740p tablets. These are really great. I am not sure if there is any advantage to the slim keyboard, bulky monitor design but besides this difference, these are the TC1100 updated. Highly recommended. I own the 2710p and really enjoying its great ergonomics with all the tablet features.
I agree 100%; I have helped many people upgrade their laptops/netbooks from Vista7 to XP with slipstreamed SATA drivers and updates.
The procedure after installation is easy:
1) Castrate IE6 (don't need to upgrade that because we won't be using it anyway) by securing all Internet Zones to high level, 2) install Firefox and make it default (do install Adblock plus as well for users with children), 3) combine a good HIPS firewall and a heuristics-capable antivirus (Comodo and Avira are both free), 4) disable the Hardware shell detection service (which prevents autorun without causing problems), 5) install XBMC to counter the loss of "wow" as well as Openoffice and Foxit to let them open all kinds of documents quickly
and you get an operating system with security, compatibility and ease of use that will give the user many years of happy and trouble free computing. It's always a nice feeling watching a system that previously took more than a minute to boot, get up and running in 15 seconds while providing greater functionality compared to your typical trialware laptop software suite.
And an added advantage to this goodness is using Firefox and Openoffice which can make the final jump to the freedom of Linux easier in the future...
I disagree. I've been testing OpenOffice since the day it went public on Windows and always went back to Office 2000 frustrated. I really wanted to like OpenOffice but I couldn't... until version 3.1 which finally provided me all that I needed to make the move.
I've never seen OpenOffice crash but of course I am not a seasoned user, yet.
It was the "Norton Utility" in its early days; NDD appeared later and it was great for DOS but didn't catch up with Windows early. Symantec did a good job with Ghost, you have to give them credit for that.
As for PGP, I don't have a problem with them buying the PGP company. Keeping in mind that GnuPG is the real deal, if "Symantec PGP" means more clueless people using good security that's more power to us since it weakens the "if you hide it then its not legal" argument and it also decreases the signal to noise ratio for cryptanalysts.
Slashdot Mirror
There are ways to make systems more secure, starting with strong containment.
There is a better way: to know the source of the programs you are running. To be able to evaluate how they work and rely on a vast community to openly discuss and fix errors.
Linux is obviously better than Windows, but even Windows users can enjoy better security by using open source for code that requires broad file/network privileges (such as a web browser) and then contain code that doesn't.
It's a great device for such computing requirements.
I wish your Macbook Pro a more demanding owner.
No, see the linked video. The quote is exactly as I wrote it.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060119-060352
You are probably correct here although the nature of the data requested wasn't a serious privacy issue. It was data private to Google and the rest, but without the IP addresses, the invasion to personal privacy was minimal. Also it is not certain that MS has provided the data, but I will accept they did as the most probable scenario.
However you are generalizing too much. For example when you say "if you're looking to see which company protects its users" you miss the point by generalization. Yes, it's nice to have a company that protects its users but the issue here is privacy.
Google controls huge amounts of personal data; their success is already a privacy problem because the more Google grows, the more data it can take from me. As Google urges me to sign in for most of its services it can make out a perfect report of what I like, what I watch, what turns me on, what I buy. Microsoft (and really, all the other search services) knows nothing of these. That makes Microsoft and the rest harmless in front of Google.
Thus I believe Mozilla is right. When you control such an amount of data, you have a great responsibility. Schmidt's statement has a huge impact because it gives the message that pursuing privacy (and of course encryption) is a sign of illegal activities which is exactly what oppressive governments dictate.
Google needs to really understand the importance of privacy and the increasing awareness of it; until then, relying on a competitor will be sending them a strong message.
Which company decided to anonymize their logs sooner to protect users? Oh, that would be Google.
In addition to j_l_cgull's posting, also
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/bing-makes-moves-to-comply-with-eu-anonymization-directive-does-google-006505.php
Which company handed over your personal data without a warrant? Oh, that would be Microsoft.
Please cite references.
Which company never objected to censoring results in China? Oh, that would be Microsoft.
That's not a privacy issue.
Which company just secured a new patent to sell your personal data to the highest bidder? Oh, that would be Microsoft.
Until they use it it's not an issue
I am not giving a "real bad" status to Google. I do have a problem with the stuff Google knows about me when so many sites use Google analytics, adwords, embedded youtube videos to the point of Google being able to track most of the web pages I visit.
This is too much power.
My dealings with Microsoft are much more restricted. I use XP, I sometimes use Bing and thats it. I have no other relations with them. So, even if they were evil -- they couldn't really compromise my privacy (I keep all operating system components firewalled, BTW).
I understand your example, but I'd say that the role of the other guy is serving fries in a public place and I'd have little problem with that. That professor on the other hand could turn up more dangerous if he wished to...
In fact, Google's share of the search market is declining while Bing's share is rising.
Yes. And privacy might be one of the reasons.
But then you lose the visible command interface. Full screen editing has been available for years but its functionality is always a problem.
In matters of security yes. In matters of privacy no. Microsoft isn't running a global network of connected search, advertising and analytics where your every move can be tracked. Ethics aside, Google has far more power to play games with your privacy than Microsoft has.
But then comes the issue of ethics. It is Google who said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- not Microsoft.
Apparently Google does have the appropriate ethics, or lack thereof, to invade your privacy. You'll be more private with Microsoft I think.
IMHO, since the recession the hand that feeds US nerds (the majority and also the management) is getting bitten less. That hand is the US IT industry. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Of course Slashdot is still an interesting read.
Outlook 2010 wins the prize for "best e-mail client on windows" by default
Whose default ?
It's not merely a matter of dislike. The ribbon eats up valuable horizontal estate while monitors provide less each year. From 4:3 we went to 16:10 and now most laptops are using the 16:9 resolution. Resolutions such as 1366x768 which provide the same horizontal size we've been using in the nineties...
The ribbon is something that made sense a few years ago. It is now outdated. Perhaps a vertical ribbon / menu / toolbar would make sense, but currently OpenOffice and its standard menu is simply more usable.
Not necessarily. Speech recognition doesn't fail when it can't figure out elaborate grammatical constructs and lexical ambiguities. Speech recognition fails because it can't figure out simple sentences in conditions humans can.
Gothic ?
We are not even using uncompressed images yet, so I'd say "few" goes a long way...
But theora on low compression settings, yes, that's a possibility
I believe he means a historic low in a decade range. If we consider Lynx as the first public www browser -- and I don't see why we should not -- we are talking about 18 years of web browser history, so I'd say one is justified in calling a decade "historic" (not an "all-time" of course).
The default Firefox theme is just huge.
Firefox is not about defaults, it's about freedom and customization. That's how I read your posting. (standard firefox small buttons relocated on the menu bar, tiny menu & tabkit). If you find it huge, it's in your power to change it...
I tried Chrome but I found myself confined it its defaults.
I first caught a virus in 1991. And it was also the last time in personal level. But professionally, I also caught one in 2001. Here is the story:
I was teaching some basic skills to people who had been asking me to help them learn how to surf the Internet, use eMail, and create and print documents. Despite my preference to Lynx/Mosaic/Netscape and then Mozilla, I wanted to give the students the standard experience -- the stuff almost everyone was using: Windows XP, Office XP and IE6.
I had fully updated and secured the systems with a few policies against unsigned activeX and taught the students to avoid clicking OK to messages that would install new software, despite the misleading text saying "the manufacturer asserts that this content is safe" in which YES WAS THE DEFAULT ACTION. I knew dozens of people who had installed dialers on their systems due to that design, but I thought that if no code would be installed, we would be safe.
Yet after a week, one of the systems had its home page changed into a porn site. It was a virus; the process could be killed only to be revived in seconds. Searched the web and found it was one of the worst viruses ever made; it had injected itself on system files of both partitions; no tools existed to remove it, so the entire disk had to be formatted.
I asked some other guys, who were doing this thing at a professional level, if they had the same problem and yes, they all did. But they figured that it wasn't an issue since the students were at the basic level and they wouldn't have important files to lose. They also wanted to conform to the exams who would require an additional process if an "alternate" browser was taught to the student. I found that unacceptable. Teaching basic skills to people should also have included basic principles. And at the time, avoiding Internet Explorer had to be such a principle.
My problem wasn't that some hacker had found their way to run code with IE. That was simply a mistake from Microsoft. But the fact that Microsoft would allow installation of software based on the message I linked above and considering that IE was the defacto browser of new, inexperienced Windows users -- now that was bordering with either malice or stupidity. Of course things must have changed since then, especially with IE8 and sandboxing, but the problem is not that I have simply lost my trust to IE -- it's that I find it counter-productive to try and get it back. Trusting IE again would require effort which I have no reason to make since the alternative (Firefox) is simply great.
Then comes the issue about standards. Yes, like many others here I've wasted time trying to make pages work in IE6 work the same way they do in Mozilla and Opera. Again IE8 is improved, but when I read people in Slashdot saying that IE6 is the only problem, I smell astroturfing. Hey fanboys, did you check IE8 Acid3 scores lately ? It's worse to what Firefox, Opera and Safari had been ages ago!
An important reason behind the increased weight is that the 27x0p line is built with a magnesium alloy frame. It looks great and obviously provides greater durability.
I do agree with your point about the detachable keyboard. I believe the Slate or even perhaps the WePad will fill the blank.
They have made the 2710p, 2730p and 2740p tablets. These are really great. I am not sure if there is any advantage to the slim keyboard, bulky monitor design but besides this difference, these are the TC1100 updated. Highly recommended. I own the 2710p and really enjoying its great ergonomics with all the tablet features.
I agree 100%; I have helped many people upgrade their laptops/netbooks from Vista7 to XP with slipstreamed SATA drivers and updates.
The procedure after installation is easy:
1) Castrate IE6 (don't need to upgrade that because we won't be using it anyway) by securing all Internet Zones to high level,
2) install Firefox and make it default (do install Adblock plus as well for users with children),
3) combine a good HIPS firewall and a heuristics-capable antivirus (Comodo and Avira are both free),
4) disable the Hardware shell detection service (which prevents autorun without causing problems),
5) install XBMC to counter the loss of "wow" as well as Openoffice and Foxit to let them open all kinds of documents quickly
and you get an operating system with security, compatibility and ease of use that will give the user many years of happy and trouble free computing. It's always a nice feeling watching a system that previously took more than a minute to boot, get up and running in 15 seconds while providing greater functionality compared to your typical trialware laptop software suite.
And an added advantage to this goodness is using Firefox and Openoffice which can make the final jump to the freedom of Linux easier in the future...
Neither that, nor he is aware of business relevance outside his borders.
I disagree. I've been testing OpenOffice since the day it went public on Windows and always went back to Office 2000 frustrated. I really wanted to like OpenOffice but I couldn't... until version 3.1 which finally provided me all that I needed to make the move.
I've never seen OpenOffice crash but of course I am not a seasoned user, yet.
No
It was the "Norton Utility" in its early days; NDD appeared later and it was great for DOS but didn't catch up with Windows early. Symantec did a good job with Ghost, you have to give them credit for that.
As for PGP, I don't have a problem with them buying the PGP company. Keeping in mind that GnuPG is the real deal, if "Symantec PGP" means more clueless people using good security that's more power to us since it weakens the "if you hide it then its not legal" argument and it also decreases the signal to noise ratio for cryptanalysts.