Obviously you have very little clue how System Management Mode works on the 80386 and all successors. It's like a Ring -1, BIOSes can use it to interject into a fully running protected mode OS (e.g. translating USB keyboards and mice to appear as PS/2 devices for older OSes or smaller ones with nonexistent USB drivers)
Compile a Linux kernel without any USB support. Plug in a USB keyboard. Enable "legacy USB" in your BIOS. Boot Linux. Watch your keyboard work without absolutely any USB (host) drivers loaded. Why? Because the BIOS, running in system Management Mode, runs it's own USB stack until a OS takes over (if ever), translating USB HID events to PS/2 mouse and AT keyboard events, which it injects into the running OS (or the BIOS's own PS/2 subsystem, if a real-mode OS that uses BIOS input services is running)
Google users are like plasma donors, except instead of plasma and money, it's data and services. Granted, however, you can pay for higher levels of service...
If someone doesn't recognize the name, then they know how to Google, and if they still can't Google, then either the article isn't for them to begin with, or they shouldn't be reading Slashdot to begin with.
B needs to have "legal access" or "officially sanctioned access", not just "access". There's plenty of illegal and/or unsanctioned access to major studio movies available with option A. (If you are wondering how that's an "and/or", consider the point of ripping one's own DVDs to a DRM-free, neutral format to play back on their phone. Legal, but unsanctioned.)
On a number of devices, you cannot flash a new recovery from 'fastboot'. You must use a special OEM flashing program to flash partitons (which then leaves an god-awful reminder of your "sin" of non-OEM software every power up in the form of an annoying yellow warning triangle on your firmware splash) or you must manually flash the firmware with 'dd'. If you don't want your device reminding you that you've voided your warranty on every power up, then root access is needed to 'dd' the recovery.img to the correct partition.
AdBlock Plus on Android can function as a system-wide HTTP proxy on non-rooted devices, or as a 'iptables' front-end on rooted devices. And I believe it's use of iptables is rather advanced.
It's not difficult; The concern is that these government organizations are blantantly, deliberately, and willing violating said law(s), and going ahead with mass spying on the public.
At least Google tell you up front that they're going to collect data on you in some form or another.. At no point do they ever state otherwise.
With the CIA and NSA, all we have is some dodged questions and weak promises that they're actually holding up to the letter of the law. We have no way to properly audit them to ensure that they're actually in compliance, and theircongressionaladmissions are rather concerning that they in all likelihood aren't.
I've got to ask, does not India have local number portability? The article mentions mobile number portability, but clearly your dad wants to hang onto a landline number, not a mobile number.
The majority of individuals here whom speak against Dropbox or other cloud providers are seemingly speaking as individuals. Now, going with the assumption that these are individuals, how many of us would actually detect an active, ongoing exploit on our own workstations? How many of us would actually detect that it's a zero-day and, on top of that, the precise mechanism being exploited, during the exploit window?
Truth be told, I don't think that any of us would notice someone breaking into our PCs. An exploit of NSA sophistication wouldn't have X11 sessions crashing, wouldn't have xterms closing or freezing up, and wouldn't be doing much more that's visible to the end user aside from a few mystery entries in 'ps' and maybe an increase in disk I/O. And how many of us truly worry about exactly what processes are running at all times? I don't, because I'd like to do something other than stare at 'top' 24/7/365.2425. Maybe I want to go do a spreadsheet of my finances. Maybe I want to jerk it to some porn. Maybe I want to make insanely retarded machinima in Garry's Mod, or be the capitalist of Karl Marx's nightmares in OpenTTD. And when I'm doing these things, I don't reserve any of my screenspace to 'top' or any other detailed load monitor. I don't want some crap distracting me from the productive or entertaining task at hand, which generally leads to the dismal lossage of state (sense 2). If, for whatever reason, you do, maybe you should actually consider going pencil-and-paper and skip the computer altogether, or maybe even as far as considering seeing a mental health specialist. The average person, hell, even the average intelligent person's psychology doesn't tend itself to such levels of paranoia. Even in the appearance of total surveillance, after the initial shock of the realization of your current predicament, most of us eventually realize there's fuck-all to be done about it, and resume our lives as normal. And going about a generally mundane life and routine typically doesn't lend itself to the extreme levels of situational awareness needed to be aware of an intrusive surveillance attack.
After all, if we're to talk about the "real world" capability of the NSA, which is to say that it's well overstated, how does the "real world" person mix up with the "potential" NSA? Food for thought, people, food for thought. Simply my understanding of how some 99% or so of Americans behave in regards to the situation considered.
Of course, then the question of "why would the NSA come after me?" has been asked. This is a real simple one. We're all well aware of just how much of a colossal clusterfuck the US Government is. It's not a far stretch to think that in their infinite stupidity, they fungle some intelligence report or even the carrying out of an intelligence operation, and get back erroneous or even just incompetently gathered or generated data that indicates that you are an active threat of some kind.
Delta encoding, LZMA2, need I say more? (Not that I am saying Dropbox currently uses these techniques, but still, their data store API seems to suggest that at least deltas and not full revisions are transferred)
The NSA can get into your local encrypted file stores anyways. Remote code execution exploits + encryption keys are in RAM. Unless you use Gentoo, then all the version mismatch incompatibility leads to security through significant downtime.
The problem with that is not the core OS itself, but the applications you can use on it.
The Wine folks are been busting their balls for 20 years now on a facet of that problem, however, no matter how great your (native) platform is, you cannot force third party developers to support your platform. Look at Symbian OS from 2010 or so 'til this year.
If Microsoft, or Adobe, or EA, or whatever developer, does not think they can get a positive ROI (sales vs. development costs), then they will pass your platform up.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Linux as a desktop OS, even if some people think there is. Most of the issues have been addressed with working solutions, sometimes multiple times over. The rest is simply third-party developer support.
In some situations, Android is being run on actual x86 PCs (we're talking traditional desktops and laptops that most likely shipped from the factory with Windows XP or 7 pre-loaded). There is a port of Android for such PCs lead by a Taiwanese developer over at Android-x86.org - people are even making "distributions" of it, much akin to what CyanogenMod and AOKP are on tablets and phones. In fact, I'm using their second release candidate build of Android 4.0 on a Dell Latitude D430 to make this post.
Screenshot link: http://db.tt/Mx3SQm3Z
If it's a grid of pens, a lot of gestures based on swiping seem slightly risky because it could end up taking off a chunk of skin under a very rare corner case.
Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that... an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold [...]
Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed... to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production.
Congrats, you just said the same thing about gold and Bitcoin. You can only get as much as your mining resources allow for. You just did the Bitcoin bit in negative language to make it look different from that about gold. Failed troll is failed.
I'm in Springfield, Missouri, United States of America. The local time is 09:22 (GMT-06:00DST-05:00).
By the way, in America, April Fool's Day is a free-for-all up until the clock strikes midnight. Except here, for we have replaced "midnight" with "naan", just as we replaced "midday" with "noon".
My mother bought it in the bargain bin at Big Lots and let me play it first. I found it to be an acceptable and entertaining 4X game, and she decided she didn't want to play it at all after discovering it was a 4X. She's not into those
Is it worth noting that Minecraft *does* have online DRM? Although it's essentially nothing; it just puts a persistent and annoying text on the top-left of the screen if it cannot validate your username and account, and the "crack" is nothing more than making this text disappear.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you have very little clue how System Management Mode works on the 80386 and all successors. It's like a Ring -1, BIOSes can use it to interject into a fully running protected mode OS (e.g. translating USB keyboards and mice to appear as PS/2 devices for older OSes or smaller ones with nonexistent USB drivers) Compile a Linux kernel without any USB support. Plug in a USB keyboard. Enable "legacy USB" in your BIOS. Boot Linux. Watch your keyboard work without absolutely any USB (host) drivers loaded. Why? Because the BIOS, running in system Management Mode, runs it's own USB stack until a OS takes over (if ever), translating USB HID events to PS/2 mouse and AT keyboard events, which it injects into the running OS (or the BIOS's own PS/2 subsystem, if a real-mode OS that uses BIOS input services is running)
Google users are like plasma donors, except instead of plasma and money, it's data and services. Granted, however, you can pay for higher levels of service...
If someone doesn't recognize the name, then they know how to Google, and if they still can't Google, then either the article isn't for them to begin with, or they shouldn't be reading Slashdot to begin with.
B needs to have "legal access" or "officially sanctioned access", not just "access". There's plenty of illegal and/or unsanctioned access to major studio movies available with option A. (If you are wondering how that's an "and/or", consider the point of ripping one's own DVDs to a DRM-free, neutral format to play back on their phone. Legal, but unsanctioned.)
On a number of devices, you cannot flash a new recovery from 'fastboot'. You must use a special OEM flashing program to flash partitons (which then leaves an god-awful reminder of your "sin" of non-OEM software every power up in the form of an annoying yellow warning triangle on your firmware splash) or you must manually flash the firmware with 'dd'. If you don't want your device reminding you that you've voided your warranty on every power up, then root access is needed to 'dd' the recovery.img to the correct partition.
And what about UMTS? Please don't go "huh, what's that?". It's the 3G upgrade to GSM that came out around the same time as CDMA2000.
AdBlock Plus on Android can function as a system-wide HTTP proxy on non-rooted devices, or as a 'iptables' front-end on rooted devices. And I believe it's use of iptables is rather advanced.
It's not difficult; The concern is that these government organizations are blantantly, deliberately, and willing violating said law(s), and going ahead with mass spying on the public.
At least Google tell you up front that they're going to collect data on you in some form or another.. At no point do they ever state otherwise.
With the CIA and NSA, all we have is some dodged questions and weak promises that they're actually holding up to the letter of the law. We have no way to properly audit them to ensure that they're actually in compliance, and their congressional admissions are rather concerning that they in all likelihood aren't.
I've got to ask, does not India have local number portability? The article mentions mobile number portability, but clearly your dad wants to hang onto a landline number, not a mobile number.
The majority of individuals here whom speak against Dropbox or other cloud providers are seemingly speaking as individuals. Now, going with the assumption that these are individuals, how many of us would actually detect an active, ongoing exploit on our own workstations? How many of us would actually detect that it's a zero-day and, on top of that, the precise mechanism being exploited, during the exploit window?
Truth be told, I don't think that any of us would notice someone breaking into our PCs. An exploit of NSA sophistication wouldn't have X11 sessions crashing, wouldn't have xterms closing or freezing up, and wouldn't be doing much more that's visible to the end user aside from a few mystery entries in 'ps' and maybe an increase in disk I/O. And how many of us truly worry about exactly what processes are running at all times? I don't, because I'd like to do something other than stare at 'top' 24/7/365.2425. Maybe I want to go do a spreadsheet of my finances. Maybe I want to jerk it to some porn. Maybe I want to make insanely retarded machinima in Garry's Mod, or be the capitalist of Karl Marx's nightmares in OpenTTD. And when I'm doing these things, I don't reserve any of my screenspace to 'top' or any other detailed load monitor. I don't want some crap distracting me from the productive or entertaining task at hand, which generally leads to the dismal lossage of state (sense 2). If, for whatever reason, you do, maybe you should actually consider going pencil-and-paper and skip the computer altogether, or maybe even as far as considering seeing a mental health specialist. The average person, hell, even the average intelligent person's psychology doesn't tend itself to such levels of paranoia. Even in the appearance of total surveillance, after the initial shock of the realization of your current predicament, most of us eventually realize there's fuck-all to be done about it, and resume our lives as normal. And going about a generally mundane life and routine typically doesn't lend itself to the extreme levels of situational awareness needed to be aware of an intrusive surveillance attack.
After all, if we're to talk about the "real world" capability of the NSA, which is to say that it's well overstated, how does the "real world" person mix up with the "potential" NSA? Food for thought, people, food for thought. Simply my understanding of how some 99% or so of Americans behave in regards to the situation considered.
Of course, then the question of "why would the NSA come after me?" has been asked. This is a real simple one. We're all well aware of just how much of a colossal clusterfuck the US Government is. It's not a far stretch to think that in their infinite stupidity, they fungle some intelligence report or even the carrying out of an intelligence operation, and get back erroneous or even just incompetently gathered or generated data that indicates that you are an active threat of some kind.
So get a landline ISP. Not everything has to be done over CDMA2000 1xRTT at 153kbit/s.
Delta encoding, LZMA2, need I say more? (Not that I am saying Dropbox currently uses these techniques, but still, their data store API seems to suggest that at least deltas and not full revisions are transferred)
The NSA can get into your local encrypted file stores anyways. Remote code execution exploits + encryption keys are in RAM. Unless you use Gentoo, then all the version mismatch incompatibility leads to security through significant downtime.
The problem with that is not the core OS itself, but the applications you can use on it.
The Wine folks are been busting their balls for 20 years now on a facet of that problem, however, no matter how great your (native) platform is, you cannot force third party developers to support your platform. Look at Symbian OS from 2010 or so 'til this year.
If Microsoft, or Adobe, or EA, or whatever developer, does not think they can get a positive ROI (sales vs. development costs), then they will pass your platform up.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Linux as a desktop OS, even if some people think there is. Most of the issues have been addressed with working solutions, sometimes multiple times over. The rest is simply third-party developer support.
Simpsons reference, anyone?
In some situations, Android is being run on actual x86 PCs (we're talking traditional desktops and laptops that most likely shipped from the factory with Windows XP or 7 pre-loaded). There is a port of Android for such PCs lead by a Taiwanese developer over at Android-x86.org - people are even making "distributions" of it, much akin to what CyanogenMod and AOKP are on tablets and phones. In fact, I'm using their second release candidate build of Android 4.0 on a Dell Latitude D430 to make this post. Screenshot link: http://db.tt/Mx3SQm3Z
Except the iWidgets use ARM, not x86 processors.
No, I'm not blind. I'm using Slashdot.
If it's a grid of pens, a lot of gestures based on swiping seem slightly risky because it could end up taking off a chunk of skin under a very rare corner case.
Congrats, you just said the same thing about gold and Bitcoin. You can only get as much as your mining resources allow for. You just did the Bitcoin bit in negative language to make it look different from that about gold. Failed troll is failed.
I'm in Springfield, Missouri, United States of America. The local time is 09:22 (GMT-06:00DST-05:00).
By the way, in America, April Fool's Day is a free-for-all up until the clock strikes midnight. Except here, for we have replaced "midnight" with "naan", just as we replaced "midday" with "noon".
My mother bought it in the bargain bin at Big Lots and let me play it first. I found it to be an acceptable and entertaining 4X game, and she decided she didn't want to play it at all after discovering it was a 4X. She's not into those
Honestly, I liked it.
Is it worth noting that Minecraft *does* have online DRM? Although it's essentially nothing; it just puts a persistent and annoying text on the top-left of the screen if it cannot validate your username and account, and the "crack" is nothing more than making this text disappear.
That this is the same weev that took control of the GNAA after 'timecop' fell out?
You replayed that quote through PulseAudio?!