Wow good links. I had forgotten how funny they can be, as well as trying to stand up for civil rights. The attack on Sony was a simple DoS on their web site trying to highlight the suppression of OtherOS. Hardly a big deal to a company the size of Sony. The Chanology and HBGary were great reads.
I thought they were just a bunch of jerks, but thanks for educating me. I can see their attraction, they do seem a pretty cool bunch.
You have to turn off the television and get out more. Half the time the 'hardened criminal' is just a teenage kid being opportunist. Even a retired American lady I know here tried fighting off a mugger here last week, and the worst she got was a bruise backside when she was pushed over. I've stopped robberies, and had a number of people arrested. I'm still here, no bloodbath.
However you can be 99% certain that the person with the laptop the next day is not the thief. As soon as they steal it they sell it immediately no matter what the price. The last time I was robbed it was hell getting back my stuff as they'd sold it all within 10 minutes. My 250e shades they sold for 20e. The watch, phone, etc went for similar ridiculous prices. Just ask for the laptop back and the person in possession will give it straight away (as they did in this story). There might be a little initial bluster, to simulate indignation hence innocence, but they know perfectly well they bought a stolen laptop which is a criminal offence.
Just how little do these folks think their lives are worth?
With an attitude like that, you are one sad member of your society and I'm glad you don't live near me.
I can talk about Nice, France. On the way in they will X-ray your bag. They may or may not ask you to remove your belt or your shoes, it's pretty random (they never ask me but I've seen it happen). There is one person for every two lines who will to a cursory pat-down of anybody that gets 'beeped' when walking through the X-ray doorway. It's definitely not intrusive.
England security is awful to the point I avoid going back when possible. It's not just being treated like a potential terrorist, and having to strip off my shoes and belt like some kind of prisoner, but the insane queues this produces. In Nice I bank on about five minutes to go through security, so I allow ten minutes to be sure, but try going through a London airport during the summer...
My sole trip via New York the only thing I found objectionable was the finger-printing. Being an affluent white middle-class male I had no experience of the TSA, only passed a few laid-back quite cool security guards. I broke my US boycott due to a promise to a friend. I really enjoyed the trip, and the people were great, but the security theater is still off-putting.
Give it to Samsung! They are already streets ahead of Nokia when it comes to hardware, give them Meego and I can see them becoming the number one handset manufacturer.
I enjoy xfce4 but am happy with KDE4. It's not a dark horse, just another alternative. On a standard PC I would recommend Kubuntu, but on a netbook it's a trade-off time vs speed. If you want something that just works then install Kubuntu, though it's a bit heavy and slow, but if you have time to tweak (make sure you install ROX) and want the extra horse-power out of it then install Xubuntu. It is not that one is better than the other, it's just a trade-off. They are both great.
Law is only loosely related to justice. Laws can be used to persecute people, and justice can be obtained by going outside of the law. The suffragettes also used civil disobedience, and also had internal warfare from women that believed a woman's place was in the kitchen and out of politics. They still managed to get the vote for women, and in retrospect we now see society as a better place for it.
Not that Anonymous are the suffragettes any more than they are a bunch of anarchist computer network destroyers.
You think shooting Bin Laden sets a precedent of killing somebody on foreign soil??? It's not even a precedent for the USA, let alone the thousands of years we've been doing it here in Europe.
I don't think the USA did it in the name of justice, they did it in the name of security. They took 9/11 as an act of war, and then vowed to pursue Bin Laden and his group until the threat had been neutralised. Taking out their symbolic head was one of their objectives to achieve this.
Admittedly the USA justice system is flawed, for example their pursuit of Assange and perverting the Swedish and English justice system via their influence or arresting Skylarov on behalf of Adobe. It shows they are not above petty vengeance. However in this case I think most people will agree that this particular terrorist group has enough of a track record to show they are a real threat.
It's a shame he couldn't be brought to trial, but they had one helicopter that crashed and limited men on the ground. They only had one chance to get him, dead or alive. If he'd managed to slip out the back then it could be another 10 years before the Americans found him again, especially as he was being sheltered by the Pakistan government.
The list of changes look pretty minimal. Not really interesting unless you use Kopete. Much as I enjoy KDE 4, Unity looks interesting. Give it another couple of months for KDE to release their next version, and for Unity to shake out some of the kinks, and it could be worth upgrading to Natty.
Even your most basic password cracker from the 80's has heuristic rules built in to deal with that. If '3' is only ever used as a substitute for 'E' then that does not add anything significant in the way of strength. The point Piekto is making, however, is that a non-computer literate man in his mid-50's is unlikely to use l33t speak hence reducing the time significantly.
Actually I think Unity looks so good I am tempted to try it. I switched to KDE 4 when it came out, despite initial glitches, as I was fed up with GNOME. Never looked back until now. Still happy with KDE but I love the idea that you can drop files onto the panel to launch, the visual indicators (eg panel icon for chome having a progress meter when doing downloads, or thunderbird showing unread messages), etc.
As soon as the forums show the KDE upgrade to be glitch free, I may have to apt-get unity.
Firstly the things on Facebook about you may not have been put on Facebook by you. It may be your 'friends' posting the information.
Secondly processing power and bandwidth is so cheap now it would be surprising if Facebook data is not being processed. Where would an English computer programmer in his late 30's like yourself emigrate to, by the way, that would be any better? Not only that, if you try and enter a country they may have the same profiling they have built up on their end to determine if you are the kind of person they wish to let in. For instance if you were to post an opinion saying that the hunt for Osama was a waste of time...
Thirdly if you are somebody of interest then they will hoover up all information about you. Being friends on Facebook with somebody of interest might also make you a person of interest. If monitoring your email and facebook requires no warrant and is nearly zero cost, even if you are passingly related why not do it? At the same time might as well build a profile of your political and religious affiliations. Your previous Slashdot posts make you appear knowledgeable on computer security, you'd be first on the list to be investigated if one of your friends committed a cyber-crime.
You get no choice about how your tax money is spent. And I agree it is worthless *on its own* as an intelligence source, however it's such a powerful database it would appear irresistible. It's easy to criticise the US on needing foreign intelligence despite miles of underground computers carrying out surveillance, but we live in a world with hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects. Surveillance on the US and the UK is easy, somewhere like Pakistan more difficult without the requisite number of translators or a sufficiently accurate automated machine translation in place.
I don't think many whistle-blowers are going to be publishing their leaks on Facebook. Anyway, who claims Assange wants all information to be accessible to everyone? That is just made up.
Ok I'll give you one. Be good basis for a movie. Osama has been living in Pakistan for years, imprisoned by American military contractors. They know that once Osama has been captured, operations will be scaled down. To keep the high level of military spending abroad, they keep him hidden from the world. They keep him alive so that at any point they can trot him out as "just captured" and become heroes.
Working within the American military, it is easy to plant false intelligence reports of sightings, which explains why the rest of the American military and the CIA were unable to find him for so long.
The head of the military contractors forces Osama to make some dark threats in a video, which is shown only to the previous American President. He then gets the TSA set up, of course at nice handsome contractors rates. Cue several years of raking in huge amounts of money.
One of the military contractors, normally guarding Osama (dressed as a Taliban in case), has for years been pressing just to kill Osama and collect the reward money. Disenchanted, he gets message to the new President that he knows where Osama is in the hope of reward. The President decides there will be too much scandal if Osama speaks out about what has happened, and so orders the raid. Osama tries to give himself up, but one of the Navy SEALs had a personal order from the President and pulls the trigger.
The behemoths that once lay claim to be innovators are starting to drop. I buy AMD chips over Intel for my desktop, but my next tablet will be ARM. As the next generation are pretty much standardizing on Android for the OS (though Microsoft are working hard to make their OS ARM compatible), speed and battery life are going to be two key differentiators. ARM has the clear advantage here. Of course tablet sales are only a tiny drop in the sea of revenue for a company like AMD, but it does seem short-sighted none the less.
It's beaten out other techs for a reason. ARM is not replacing x86 on the desktop any time soon, thank goodness. Maybe joining it, but not replacing it.
That's upside down. H.264 is safer to use, but you have to pay license fees if your software encodes to H.264. WebM is a hope-for-the-best.. Even Google doesn't guarantee there won't be trouble with patents.
Incorrect, as Skuto also points out. They both run exactly the same risk. MPEG-LA exhort a percentage from anybody that infringes the pool of patents put together to prevent people using h.264, but they do not indemnify a licensee from infringement if a 3rd party has a patent covering h.264 not in that patent pool.
At best you can say h.264 has had more time for the trolls to come out of the woodwork, 2003 as opposed to 2008 for vp8. I would feel just as safe regarding patents using WebM vs h.264. The real question is whether the license fee justifies the extra edge in performance.
Hasn't the BBC always hated SciFi? There is no point having tax payer money and zero accountability if you aren't going to create pretentious crap and sad reality tv. The Python days have long since been over. The last Brit sci-fi I remember that was any good was Red Dwarf back in the '80s, and that was Channel 4. The only long-running TV sci-fi was Babylon 5... and that was Channel 4. Pretty much everything since (Star Trek / Stargate / etc) has all been Sky.
Does anybody watch the BBC any more for anything other than the news and Top Gear?
You mean people no longer want to buy Nokia phones since they cut off life-support to the operating system, and after shafting all the developers you can be sure no new software will be coming out? Not very surprising.
Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.
Exactly. Only tiny nobodies like Philips and Samsung support it.
End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.
Ah Anon Coward doesn't seem to have heard of this new site called "YouTube", where end users now can upload videos as well as download. This makes licensing now a factor for end users.
Apple clearly state they invented black rectangles with rounded corners. Etch-a-sketch was red, therefore did not contain the novel inventive step of making it black.
Presumably playing via the downloadable client, not a web based interface on their site. The client will still work as it undoubtedly uses a different DNS to connect to. It would be foolish for the client to use the same, and make it a single point of failure in a DDoS or DNS attack.
Slashdot Mirror
It's 2011. They should keep it to the size of a 1GB USB stick. Who wants to burn CDs or DVDs any more? Are there still any PCs without USB?
Phillip.
Wow good links. I had forgotten how funny they can be, as well as trying to stand up for civil rights. The attack on Sony was a simple DoS on their web site trying to highlight the suppression of OtherOS. Hardly a big deal to a company the size of Sony. The Chanology and HBGary were great reads.
I thought they were just a bunch of jerks, but thanks for educating me. I can see their attraction, they do seem a pretty cool bunch.
Phillip.
You have to turn off the television and get out more. Half the time the 'hardened criminal' is just a teenage kid being opportunist. Even a retired American lady I know here tried fighting off a mugger here last week, and the worst she got was a bruise backside when she was pushed over. I've stopped robberies, and had a number of people arrested. I'm still here, no bloodbath.
However you can be 99% certain that the person with the laptop the next day is not the thief. As soon as they steal it they sell it immediately no matter what the price. The last time I was robbed it was hell getting back my stuff as they'd sold it all within 10 minutes. My 250e shades they sold for 20e. The watch, phone, etc went for similar ridiculous prices. Just ask for the laptop back and the person in possession will give it straight away (as they did in this story). There might be a little initial bluster, to simulate indignation hence innocence, but they know perfectly well they bought a stolen laptop which is a criminal offence.
Just how little do these folks think their lives are worth?
With an attitude like that, you are one sad member of your society and I'm glad you don't live near me.
Phillip.
I can talk about Nice, France. On the way in they will X-ray your bag. They may or may not ask you to remove your belt or your shoes, it's pretty random (they never ask me but I've seen it happen). There is one person for every two lines who will to a cursory pat-down of anybody that gets 'beeped' when walking through the X-ray doorway. It's definitely not intrusive.
England security is awful to the point I avoid going back when possible. It's not just being treated like a potential terrorist, and having to strip off my shoes and belt like some kind of prisoner, but the insane queues this produces. In Nice I bank on about five minutes to go through security, so I allow ten minutes to be sure, but try going through a London airport during the summer...
My sole trip via New York the only thing I found objectionable was the finger-printing. Being an affluent white middle-class male I had no experience of the TSA, only passed a few laid-back quite cool security guards. I broke my US boycott due to a promise to a friend. I really enjoyed the trip, and the people were great, but the security theater is still off-putting.
Phillip.
Give it to Samsung! They are already streets ahead of Nokia when it comes to hardware, give them Meego and I can see them becoming the number one handset manufacturer.
Phillip.
I enjoy xfce4 but am happy with KDE4. It's not a dark horse, just another alternative. On a standard PC I would recommend Kubuntu, but on a netbook it's a trade-off time vs speed. If you want something that just works then install Kubuntu, though it's a bit heavy and slow, but if you have time to tweak (make sure you install ROX) and want the extra horse-power out of it then install Xubuntu. It is not that one is better than the other, it's just a trade-off. They are both great.
Phillip.
Now now. People were similarly sceptical when Nokia promised to continue to support Symbian and Meego despite the deal with Microsoft.
Phillip.
Law is only loosely related to justice. Laws can be used to persecute people, and justice can be obtained by going outside of the law. The suffragettes also used civil disobedience, and also had internal warfare from women that believed a woman's place was in the kitchen and out of politics. They still managed to get the vote for women, and in retrospect we now see society as a better place for it.
Not that Anonymous are the suffragettes any more than they are a bunch of anarchist computer network destroyers.
Phillip.
You think shooting Bin Laden sets a precedent of killing somebody on foreign soil??? It's not even a precedent for the USA, let alone the thousands of years we've been doing it here in Europe.
Phillip.
I don't think the USA did it in the name of justice, they did it in the name of security. They took 9/11 as an act of war, and then vowed to pursue Bin Laden and his group until the threat had been neutralised. Taking out their symbolic head was one of their objectives to achieve this.
Admittedly the USA justice system is flawed, for example their pursuit of Assange and perverting the Swedish and English justice system via their influence or arresting Skylarov on behalf of Adobe. It shows they are not above petty vengeance. However in this case I think most people will agree that this particular terrorist group has enough of a track record to show they are a real threat.
It's a shame he couldn't be brought to trial, but they had one helicopter that crashed and limited men on the ground. They only had one chance to get him, dead or alive. If he'd managed to slip out the back then it could be another 10 years before the Americans found him again, especially as he was being sheltered by the Pakistan government.
Phillip.
The list of changes look pretty minimal. Not really interesting unless you use Kopete. Much as I enjoy KDE 4, Unity looks interesting. Give it another couple of months for KDE to release their next version, and for Unity to shake out some of the kinks, and it could be worth upgrading to Natty.
Phillip.
Even your most basic password cracker from the 80's has heuristic rules built in to deal with that. If '3' is only ever used as a substitute for 'E' then that does not add anything significant in the way of strength. The point Piekto is making, however, is that a non-computer literate man in his mid-50's is unlikely to use l33t speak hence reducing the time significantly.
Phillip.
Actually I think Unity looks so good I am tempted to try it. I switched to KDE 4 when it came out, despite initial glitches, as I was fed up with GNOME. Never looked back until now. Still happy with KDE but I love the idea that you can drop files onto the panel to launch, the visual indicators (eg panel icon for chome having a progress meter when doing downloads, or thunderbird showing unread messages), etc.
As soon as the forums show the KDE upgrade to be glitch free, I may have to apt-get unity.
Phillip.
Firstly the things on Facebook about you may not have been put on Facebook by you. It may be your 'friends' posting the information.
Secondly processing power and bandwidth is so cheap now it would be surprising if Facebook data is not being processed. Where would an English computer programmer in his late 30's like yourself emigrate to, by the way, that would be any better? Not only that, if you try and enter a country they may have the same profiling they have built up on their end to determine if you are the kind of person they wish to let in. For instance if you were to post an opinion saying that the hunt for Osama was a waste of time...
Thirdly if you are somebody of interest then they will hoover up all information about you. Being friends on Facebook with somebody of interest might also make you a person of interest. If monitoring your email and facebook requires no warrant and is nearly zero cost, even if you are passingly related why not do it? At the same time might as well build a profile of your political and religious affiliations. Your previous Slashdot posts make you appear knowledgeable on computer security, you'd be first on the list to be investigated if one of your friends committed a cyber-crime.
You get no choice about how your tax money is spent. And I agree it is worthless *on its own* as an intelligence source, however it's such a powerful database it would appear irresistible. It's easy to criticise the US on needing foreign intelligence despite miles of underground computers carrying out surveillance, but we live in a world with hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects. Surveillance on the US and the UK is easy, somewhere like Pakistan more difficult without the requisite number of translators or a sufficiently accurate automated machine translation in place.
Phillip.
I don't think many whistle-blowers are going to be publishing their leaks on Facebook. Anyway, who claims Assange wants all information to be accessible to everyone? That is just made up.
Phillip.
Ok I'll give you one. Be good basis for a movie. Osama has been living in Pakistan for years, imprisoned by American military contractors. They know that once Osama has been captured, operations will be scaled down. To keep the high level of military spending abroad, they keep him hidden from the world. They keep him alive so that at any point they can trot him out as "just captured" and become heroes.
Working within the American military, it is easy to plant false intelligence reports of sightings, which explains why the rest of the American military and the CIA were unable to find him for so long.
The head of the military contractors forces Osama to make some dark threats in a video, which is shown only to the previous American President. He then gets the TSA set up, of course at nice handsome contractors rates. Cue several years of raking in huge amounts of money.
One of the military contractors, normally guarding Osama (dressed as a Taliban in case), has for years been pressing just to kill Osama and collect the reward money. Disenchanted, he gets message to the new President that he knows where Osama is in the hope of reward. The President decides there will be too much scandal if Osama speaks out about what has happened, and so orders the raid. Osama tries to give himself up, but one of the Navy SEALs had a personal order from the President and pulls the trigger.
Roll credits.
Phillip.
The behemoths that once lay claim to be innovators are starting to drop. I buy AMD chips over Intel for my desktop, but my next tablet will be ARM. As the next generation are pretty much standardizing on Android for the OS (though Microsoft are working hard to make their OS ARM compatible), speed and battery life are going to be two key differentiators. ARM has the clear advantage here. Of course tablet sales are only a tiny drop in the sea of revenue for a company like AMD, but it does seem short-sighted none the less.
Phillip.
It's beaten out other techs for a reason. ARM is not replacing x86 on the desktop any time soon, thank goodness. Maybe joining it, but not replacing it.
And what do you think this reason is?
Hint: it's not technical superiority.
Phillip.
That's upside down. H.264 is safer to use, but you have to pay license fees if your software encodes to H.264. WebM is a hope-for-the-best.. Even Google doesn't guarantee there won't be trouble with patents.
Incorrect, as Skuto also points out. They both run exactly the same risk. MPEG-LA exhort a percentage from anybody that infringes the pool of patents put together to prevent people using h.264, but they do not indemnify a licensee from infringement if a 3rd party has a patent covering h.264 not in that patent pool.
At best you can say h.264 has had more time for the trolls to come out of the woodwork, 2003 as opposed to 2008 for vp8. I would feel just as safe regarding patents using WebM vs h.264. The real question is whether the license fee justifies the extra edge in performance.
Phillip.
Hasn't the BBC always hated SciFi? There is no point having tax payer money and zero accountability if you aren't going to create pretentious crap and sad reality tv. The Python days have long since been over. The last Brit sci-fi I remember that was any good was Red Dwarf back in the '80s, and that was Channel 4. The only long-running TV sci-fi was Babylon 5... and that was Channel 4. Pretty much everything since (Star Trek / Stargate / etc) has all been Sky.
Does anybody watch the BBC any more for anything other than the news and Top Gear?
Phillip.
You mean people no longer want to buy Nokia phones since they cut off life-support to the operating system, and after shafting all the developers you can be sure no new software will be coming out? Not very surprising.
Phillip.
Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.
Exactly. Only tiny nobodies like Philips and Samsung support it.
End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.
Ah Anon Coward doesn't seem to have heard of this new site called "YouTube", where end users now can upload videos as well as download. This makes licensing now a factor for end users.
Phillip.
You can see a customs official confiscating some iPad knock-offs here, after being commanded by Jobs.
Phillip.
Apple clearly state they invented black rectangles with rounded corners. Etch-a-sketch was red, therefore did not contain the novel inventive step of making it black.
Phillip.
Presumably playing via the downloadable client, not a web based interface on their site. The client will still work as it undoubtedly uses a different DNS to connect to. It would be foolish for the client to use the same, and make it a single point of failure in a DDoS or DNS attack.
Phillip.