Good luck.
As my younger brother knows, the computer is only secure if you can't get physical access to it. My parents experimented with setting bios passwords, removing power cables, and the like. None of it worked. Eventually, they bought one of these. My brother picked the crappy lock on the cabinet with a coathanger. So, they got a great, thick chain to keep the thing shut, as well as a real lock. But even a good lock won't do you any good if you can't keep the keys secure. And so on.
And, frankly, I don't see how you could block porn effectively in software. Sure, you can block IPs, URLs, and web content. But what about IRC, ssh tunneling, proxies, and that sort of thing? Or do you just plan to setup firefox in kiosk mode and firewall the crap out of everything else?
Yeah. Forget "becoming gods" after the singularity. More likely, the world will become a spam wasteland, dominated by AIs trying to take each other out, both online and in real life. Imagine people with their brains hacked running down the street harassing you, screaming about viagra, and killing the other viagra peddlers.
On the other hand, it would be really easy to get pr0n and warez...
Yeah, I know. You may be able to blunder through a problem in your room, in an hour. But, you don't really know the stuff until you can work it on a paper towel in lab, in only five minutes.
I've been given to understand that most nanny software is hideously insecure, poorly programmed, and blatantly obvious. For example, some software simply takes screen captures every five minutes or so, causing the screen to lock up briefly. Anyone who was serious about circumventing that sort of thing probably would not have a problem with it.
Of course, I doubt that many kids are actually that serious. It would be far easier to just go to the library.
Since when did an age requirement stop anyone? Do you think myspace really cares how old their users are?
As a goatse site said, "this site contains adult material. So, if you're under 18, don't look!"
I'd rather do the opposite, seeing as I'm probably going to be dead before global warming starts getting serious. By "serious", I mean something that's likely to actually affect me, like california sinking into the pacific, unbreathable air, widespread famine, or global nuclear war.
Sorry to double post, but I remembered another underutilised installation method: bootstrap from existing install. That's right, an installer that runs as an ordinary program on the host system. I know debian has something like this, but it's not a foolproof process; you have to make a chroot jail. I'm surprised somebody hasn't ported the debian installer over to mingw or cygwin. It would certainly make the installation easier; I remember when I got into linux, downlaoding and burning the CD was actually the hardest part of the whole process. "What, you mean burning the ISO to disk as a file won't work? Crap." Of course, having users that dumb trying to use linux might be a serious problem, but it WOULD increase marketshare.
I'm really surprised that they don't have bittorrent package managers already. apt-get already uses gpg-signing to verify the authenticity of packages. Furthermore, if set up properly, it could blur the distinctions between distros, and between "upstream" and "downstream". You would define the "distro" by whoever signed the package.
To install Ubuntu, for example, you would install the "ubuntu-main-desktop" (or whatever it is) package (signed by ubuntu), which would then try to grab a bunch of other ubuntu-signed packages.
To install "Bob's Very Own Ubuntu Mod", you would install "bobs-ubuntu-desktop" (signed by bob himself). bobs-ubuntu-desktop would depend on a bunch of ubuntu packages, as well as some of Bob's packages. The installer would first try to find packages signed by bob. then, it would look for packages signed by someone trusted by bob. Most of the packages in Bob's distro would probably fall into this second category. Then, as a last resort, it would look for any old shit.
The big advantage with this is that ideological and legal annoyances would pretty much disappear. Want a package for Opera? No problem -- at most, you would just have to add a key. At least, the opera package would be signed by ubuntu or by someone trusted by ubuntu. Want libdvdcss2? win32 codecs? SubSeven? Pirate packages of commercial games for linux? Same thing. It all depends on how much you trusted the guy who signed the package. Essentially, you would combine the convenience of a central repository with the availability of plain binaries.
You could even take it to extremes and border on abuse of the package system. You could have packages for individual wallpapers, for example, or for firefox plugins, or window manager themes, or whatever.
The good news is that there would be plenty of seeders. About one for every installation, in fact. You would probably want to set the default install to activate btpd at night via a cronjobb. Of course, the user could easily turn this off, but that's his choice. Also, you could use QOS to deprioritize bittorrent packets (they could do this already, they just don't bother).
The bad news is that dialup users would be pretty much screwed. Of course, to some degree they already are -- I know that simply trying to keep abreast with the latest ubuntu beta over dialup can be like bailing out a leaking boat, especially if you have gnome and kde installed. Also, trojans would be very easy to make, and could use the network itself to self-replicate. A script kiddie with little or no talent could write a "really cool" theme with a backdoor, get it on digg, and infect thousands. Finally, if a master key were ever compromised, the whole distro would be effectively compromised. The key could be revoked, but then you would leave all your users unable to update until they manually entered a new key. Distribution systems now aren't that easy to compromise; to pull it off, you would also have to spoof the main server.
Maybe I've put too much thought into this. Admittedly though, it would be cool having a truly decentralised distro. For those who doubt the workability of such a scheme, botnet operators already use this technique to control and update their machines. So, if it's secure enough for botnet operators, it would probably be secure enough for me. It would also cut server load, and it would "free us" (those who want it, anyway) from the "tyranny" (annoyances) of monolithic distros, while preserving most of their advantages.
Factor in the horrible and clunky camera and movement controls and I just can't understand how anyone can withstand that thing.
Agreed. Where I'm from, we use A and D to strafe, not turn in place. And we use space to jump. I got bored pretty quickly when I couldn't find anything to kill.
Technically, it's not really a game; it's more like a MUD without roleplaying or quests or stats, but with user-editable graphics. Like slow, laggy IRC in 3D. Frankly, from what I saw, it was far less immersive than a simple text mud, and even more boring. But I guess some people really like that kind of thing.
Opera, Safari, Konqueror: Same damn thing. Especially if you're comparing browsers. Yes, there are incompatabilities and feature differences between the three, but they are more kin to each other than to anything else, just like the BSDs.
Oh, God, yes. Norton puts hooks deep in the kernel. The easiest way to remove it is to reinstall windows. Licenses are almost impossible to transfer. It hogs enormous amounts of ram and slows older machines down to a crawl. They use a p2p system for definition updates, which will kill your bandwidth (especially on dialup). Norton is worse than the virus itself. Norton is pure evil.
Yeah, bad people deserve to die. If anyone, Saddam did. It's not about injustice.
I think what the GP was trying to say is, that you have to actually see war and exection to understand what it really entails. That sort of thing is not something to be taken lightly. Voters, especially, should know the consequences of their actions, instead of it just being some abstract conflict on the other side of the world.
Yeah, maybe democracy is worth it. Maybe the ends justify the means. But there are always consequencces.
Hang on. I was under the impression that downloading music wasn't actually illegall, only distributing it. Now, with Bittorrent, you distribute the stuff as you download it, so they can get you on that. However, they can't get you just for downloading, I don't think.
For debian users (maybe ubuntu too), you probably want to add debian-multimedia to your sources list, so you can get all your dodgy codecs from one place. Seriously, though, MPlayer will play most stuff WMP does AND MORE; it can even encode a lot, too. Even WMV9 is supported in win32codecs, and there is experimental support in FFMpeg already. At this point, the only excuse is ignorance, and illegality. But, most of the time you're getting your multimedia illegally anyway, which kind of makes that a moot point.
Now, admittedly, support for streaming on linux really sucks, with Real (and youtube, if you want to count that) probably being the best thing out there. Personally, I find that konqueror (with the KMplayer Kpart) does a much better job at this than firefox does, but whatever.
Check out WiiRoomba110, a reimplementation of WiiRoomba in Rule 110. Unlike the original WiiRomba, this version is written in the purest, most perfect programming language ever conceived by the mind of man, instead of that unreadable Perl crap. From the source code:
"White Black Black White White White Black White Black White Black White Black Black
White White Black White Black White Black White Black Black White White Black White Black
Black Black White White White Black White Black White Black White Black Black
White White Black White Black White Black White Black Black White White"
Slashdot Mirror
I know. There's a reason why Windows users like to use VLC, and it's usually not because they lost their copy of powerdvd.
Good luck. As my younger brother knows, the computer is only secure if you can't get physical access to it. My parents experimented with setting bios passwords, removing power cables, and the like. None of it worked. Eventually, they bought one of these. My brother picked the crappy lock on the cabinet with a coathanger. So, they got a great, thick chain to keep the thing shut, as well as a real lock. But even a good lock won't do you any good if you can't keep the keys secure. And so on. And, frankly, I don't see how you could block porn effectively in software. Sure, you can block IPs, URLs, and web content. But what about IRC, ssh tunneling, proxies, and that sort of thing? Or do you just plan to setup firefox in kiosk mode and firewall the crap out of everything else?
"Show me some b00bs, Hal. Hal? Do you read me?"
Actually, anything other than passive logging has always seemed like overkill to me, but I guess other people think differently.
Yeah. Forget "becoming gods" after the singularity. More likely, the world will become a spam wasteland, dominated by AIs trying to take each other out, both online and in real life. Imagine people with their brains hacked running down the street harassing you, screaming about viagra, and killing the other viagra peddlers.
On the other hand, it would be really easy to get pr0n and warez...
Yeah, I know. You may be able to blunder through a problem in your room, in an hour. But, you don't really know the stuff until you can work it on a paper towel in lab, in only five minutes.
Cue Wheel of Time jokes about what drug "Taint" most closely resembles.
I've been given to understand that most nanny software is hideously insecure, poorly programmed, and blatantly obvious. For example, some software simply takes screen captures every five minutes or so, causing the screen to lock up briefly. Anyone who was serious about circumventing that sort of thing probably would not have a problem with it.
Of course, I doubt that many kids are actually that serious. It would be far easier to just go to the library.
Since when did an age requirement stop anyone? Do you think myspace really cares how old their users are? As a goatse site said, "this site contains adult material. So, if you're under 18, don't look!"
At the very least, you should have a right to require attribution. Otherwise, there would be very little incentive to create in the first place.
I'd rather do the opposite, seeing as I'm probably going to be dead before global warming starts getting serious. By "serious", I mean something that's likely to actually affect me, like california sinking into the pacific, unbreathable air, widespread famine, or global nuclear war.
Sorry to double post, but I remembered another underutilised installation method: bootstrap from existing install. That's right, an installer that runs as an ordinary program on the host system. I know debian has something like this, but it's not a foolproof process; you have to make a chroot jail. I'm surprised somebody hasn't ported the debian installer over to mingw or cygwin. It would certainly make the installation easier; I remember when I got into linux, downlaoding and burning the CD was actually the hardest part of the whole process. "What, you mean burning the ISO to disk as a file won't work? Crap." Of course, having users that dumb trying to use linux might be a serious problem, but it WOULD increase marketshare.
I'm really surprised that they don't have bittorrent package managers already. apt-get already uses gpg-signing to verify the authenticity of packages. Furthermore, if set up properly, it could blur the distinctions between distros, and between "upstream" and "downstream". You would define the "distro" by whoever signed the package.
To install Ubuntu, for example, you would install the "ubuntu-main-desktop" (or whatever it is) package (signed by ubuntu), which would then try to grab a bunch of other ubuntu-signed packages.
To install "Bob's Very Own Ubuntu Mod", you would install "bobs-ubuntu-desktop" (signed by bob himself). bobs-ubuntu-desktop would depend on a bunch of ubuntu packages, as well as some of Bob's packages. The installer would first try to find packages signed by bob. then, it would look for packages signed by someone trusted by bob. Most of the packages in Bob's distro would probably fall into this second category. Then, as a last resort, it would look for any old shit.
The big advantage with this is that ideological and legal annoyances would pretty much disappear. Want a package for Opera? No problem -- at most, you would just have to add a key. At least, the opera package would be signed by ubuntu or by someone trusted by ubuntu. Want libdvdcss2? win32 codecs? SubSeven? Pirate packages of commercial games for linux? Same thing. It all depends on how much you trusted the guy who signed the package. Essentially, you would combine the convenience of a central repository with the availability of plain binaries.
You could even take it to extremes and border on abuse of the package system. You could have packages for individual wallpapers, for example, or for firefox plugins, or window manager themes, or whatever.
The good news is that there would be plenty of seeders. About one for every installation, in fact. You would probably want to set the default install to activate btpd at night via a cronjobb. Of course, the user could easily turn this off, but that's his choice. Also, you could use QOS to deprioritize bittorrent packets (they could do this already, they just don't bother).
The bad news is that dialup users would be pretty much screwed. Of course, to some degree they already are -- I know that simply trying to keep abreast with the latest ubuntu beta over dialup can be like bailing out a leaking boat, especially if you have gnome and kde installed. Also, trojans would be very easy to make, and could use the network itself to self-replicate. A script kiddie with little or no talent could write a "really cool" theme with a backdoor, get it on digg, and infect thousands. Finally, if a master key were ever compromised, the whole distro would be effectively compromised. The key could be revoked, but then you would leave all your users unable to update until they manually entered a new key. Distribution systems now aren't that easy to compromise; to pull it off, you would also have to spoof the main server.
Maybe I've put too much thought into this. Admittedly though, it would be cool having a truly decentralised distro. For those who doubt the workability of such a scheme, botnet operators already use this technique to control and update their machines. So, if it's secure enough for botnet operators, it would probably be secure enough for me. It would also cut server load, and it would "free us" (those who want it, anyway) from the "tyranny" (annoyances) of monolithic distros, while preserving most of their advantages.
Agreed. Where I'm from, we use A and D to strafe, not turn in place. And we use space to jump. I got bored pretty quickly when I couldn't find anything to kill.
Technically, it's not really a game; it's more like a MUD without roleplaying or quests or stats, but with user-editable graphics. Like slow, laggy IRC in 3D. Frankly, from what I saw, it was far less immersive than a simple text mud, and even more boring. But I guess some people really like that kind of thing.
Hey, am I the only one here having trouble logging out?
Opera, Safari, Konqueror: Same damn thing. Especially if you're comparing browsers. Yes, there are incompatabilities and feature differences between the three, but they are more kin to each other than to anything else, just like the BSDs.
Right. Witness the single-keystroke cache-clearing abilities of firefox. Also, they refer to their image rendering library as "libpr0n"
Oh, God, yes. Norton puts hooks deep in the kernel. The easiest way to remove it is to reinstall windows. Licenses are almost impossible to transfer. It hogs enormous amounts of ram and slows older machines down to a crawl. They use a p2p system for definition updates, which will kill your bandwidth (especially on dialup). Norton is worse than the virus itself. Norton is pure evil.
Naw, this is more like brainfuck 2.0. It has built-in support for multithreading, OOP, and types. Dynamic types, at that.
Am I the only one who finds it odd that an enlightenment user is bitching about "eye candy"? I thought that was pretty much the whole point of E17.
Though, I agree that it does perform better.
Yeah, bad people deserve to die. If anyone, Saddam did. It's not about injustice.
I think what the GP was trying to say is, that you have to actually see war and exection to understand what it really entails. That sort of thing is not something to be taken lightly. Voters, especially, should know the consequences of their actions, instead of it just being some abstract conflict on the other side of the world.
Yeah, maybe democracy is worth it. Maybe the ends justify the means. But there are always consequencces.
Hang on. I was under the impression that downloading music wasn't actually illegall, only distributing it. Now, with Bittorrent, you distribute the stuff as you download it, so they can get you on that. However, they can't get you just for downloading, I don't think.
most old skool h4xx0rs will do it like this {
something();
}
but most textbooks will tell you to do it like this
{
something();
}
It isn't really a big deal, though.
What does piss me off, though, is the java people who like to do this {
something();}
For debian users (maybe ubuntu too), you probably want to add debian-multimedia to your sources list, so you can get all your dodgy codecs from one place. Seriously, though, MPlayer will play most stuff WMP does AND MORE; it can even encode a lot, too. Even WMV9 is supported in win32codecs, and there is experimental support in FFMpeg already. At this point, the only excuse is ignorance, and illegality. But, most of the time you're getting your multimedia illegally anyway, which kind of makes that a moot point.
Now, admittedly, support for streaming on linux really sucks, with Real (and youtube, if you want to count that) probably being the best thing out there. Personally, I find that konqueror (with the KMplayer Kpart) does a much better job at this than firefox does, but whatever.
Roomba + Wii remote + Rule 110 = Insanity
alphamugwump writes: