This isn't just withdrawing a recommendation. This is "STOP USING IT NOW!", there's a big difference.
They're giving a clear command and giving a wishy-washy explanation for it.
The program is having a security audit, yes they should advise that it won't be known how secure it is until the audit is done but that headline will cause massive damage to the software's reputation that probably won't get repaired for a long time. Even if the audit verifies that it's secure and safe.
None of the sources give any clear reason why people should not use this program.
If you're going to systematically try to destroy the user base of someone's piece of software you should at least have the decency to explain why in clear terms, regardless of the reasons behind this kind of alert.
Whilst the gif spec may not specify a minimum wait time between frames, that doesn't mean you shouldn't implement one. The vast majority viewers implement a minimum pause because it has the handy feature of not having a gif that uses up 10-20x the CPU it actually needs to and doesn't render frames at 5-10x what the monitor or program could actually display.
Also: numerical font-weights. I'm using numerical values for a reason, don't just approximate it to one of 4 thicknesses (although Firefox isn't the only browser guilty of this).
Let me ask you this: There have been a number of horrific bombing incidents in Iraq recently. Without looking it up, can you tell me how many incidents there have been in the last 3 months? Of course you can't.
Why? Because stories about casualties in a war zone blend together. There have been a steady stream of incidents and operations in Afganistan for the last 9 years. Few people pay attention to every report and almost no one remembers each individual report because it would require an extraordinary memory. The incidents and operations are too common and too in-distinctive from each other to easily remember.
Wiki leaks compiled documents covering around 9 years worth of incidents and released them at once.
Source article is paywalled but the Times indicated that they were able to get dozens of names and locations of informants just from a fairly casual search of the documents.
Where next to none of the incidents were really unknown and all it really showed was that field reports by low level soldiers tend to not be very accurate. But hey, it named a whole bunch of informants who'll now find themselves dealing with a drastically life expectency, that was good right?
The only thing that really came out that was surprising for the British papers that looked over the documents was that it was the first time we'd heard the military accuse Pakistan intelligence and military of supplying weapons to extemists. They'd always tiptoed around this in the past, not admitting it publically.
The failures ALWAYS seem major in any big accident because for them to happen, whole safty systems have to be subverted or fail.
To go back to the plane crash example. Almost never get planes plummeting out of the sky in a fireball because there was a single screw that failed.
What happens was a mechanic didn't have the right type of screw so he put in another one, despite the maintenence manual saying it's vitally important to use the right screw (which they were out of stock in the hanger and to order in a new one would have kept the plane on the ground for a week, causing him to catch hell from his boss). This incorrect screw was missed by the next inspector because he was at the end of a 12 hour shift and was tired.
During the flight the pilot saw some major turbulance on the radar and decided to descend quickly (he was under pressure to land the plane on schedule) when the pilot's handbook for that plane recommended he pulled up. Descending quickly put a lot of stress on the frame of the plane, the screw came loose, got sucked into the engine, brushed against a fuel line which ignited, causing the engine to explode. This engine had gone 11 months since it had last been serviced (when the regulations say 12 months is the limit, 6 months is best), Boeing knew there was an issue with how this engine dealt with debris and had sent out a memo saying the engines needed extra protection but that they should wait till the service before installing it.
If you've seen documentaries on plane crashes, that's not a far fetched example of the series of events that lead up to a plane crash. Several major failures that all stack up upon each other, any one of which would've prevented the accident.
The fact that you need so many catastrophic failures to combine may make an individual accident look bad, but in truth, the layers and layers of redundancy in terms of safty mean, that for an accident to happen, chances are, you have a freak chain of events leading up to it because that's the only way it could actually occur.
You must teach your kids lots of extremely random, very specific things.
The ocean's boundry is calculated by precise measurements and a consistant scientific method. Any human involvement is artritrary and cancelled out by good scientific practice.
There is no fair method of establishing if someone is a private citizen or a government employee. That doesn't come down to someone saying "yeah I think he should be a government employee"
Sorry for being a stickler for human rights but I don't believe that it is right for someone to have the basic right to a private life completely removed just because lots of people want it.
It is stupid that you could get all sorts of information about a janitor with zero security clearance and no power to do anything just because he is part of THE GOVERNMENT (dum dum duuuum). Meanwhile my bank manager is a private citizen and he could completely and utterly fuck over my life at a whim. I don't know anything about this person with total power over my life nor am I easily able to.
I'm not saying certain jobs should involve more scruitiny especially ones with real power. What I find annoying and dubious in terms of freedoms is the whole "I should be able to know everything about everyone in The Government because they're the government!" thing. Everyone has some right to privacy and the amount of scruitiny should be based on the nature of your position and be entirely related to professional matters. It should not on how popular, famous or powerful the people who employ you are.
The problem with spoilers is that you don't often get a choice.
If you search for a movie to see if it's any good and the top result has Snape is Keyser Söze's ghost in the description, you've no chance of avoiding it.
You can't choose to avoid a spoiler because you don't know what's a spoiler until your mind processes it and it's incredibly hard to stop yourself automatically reading words presented to you. Case in point, I doubt the first sentence in this post was where your eyes were drawn to first.
So to sum up your argument, people should be allowed to break the law if they do important work?
What do you think is the worst crime he should be allowed to (allegedly) commit before he gets arrested then? Shall we draw the line at rape? Murder?
It's ok because wikileaks does it to governments?
on
Assange Rape Case Reopened
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Tell that to the named individuals in the wikileaks reports. Whether it be soldiers or informants (whose lives are now at risk).
Also, your belief that governments and their employees should have different rights to 'private citizens' is fundamentally flawed and doesn't create a fair and equal society at all. It creates a tyranny of the majority where people pick and choose which people should have which rights.
Don't believe me?
OK then: Tell me exactly who should be treated as 'government' and who should be a private citizen. Give me a cast iron definition in a single sentence.
Someone who receives money from the tax payers? Awesome, I can get info on anyone receiving state benefits.
Someone whose income is *mostly* from the government? Those farmers on subsidies didn't need their privacy anyway! All those people working for the arts and education? They don't need their privacy!
Only elected officials? That leaves out huge areas of the government, including all the supreme court judges.
Then there's the fun of how much of a government employee's private life do we have the right to know about...
You cannot draw a fair line between private citizens and government employees without picking and choosing who to apply it to (which just reeks of fairness doesn't it?) because of the simple fact that governments are in fact made up of private citizens.
A gaming console is exactly what the name implies. A console designed for gaming. If you've bought it and don't intend to game, you've probably wasted your money.
The iphone is a phone, it is designed to function well as a phone and general purpose mini-tablet at the expense of its gaming capabilities.
Take a look at the Japanese charts and release schedule sometime and tell me the console is dead.
The system is getting more games than the Wii is (although the phenomenal performance of Nintendo published Wii titles more than ensures the Wii is still going strong there too).
They pushed 3D gaming hard, their policy of discouraging developers from releasing 2D games whilst providing them with strong 3D capabilities (so strong they forced Sega, who thought 3D wasn't ready yet, to add an additional CPU and create the develpment nightmare that was the Saturn).
Sony brought gaming to a much wider audience than Sega or Nintendo had managed before. Remember the first Wipeout? Remember how wowed everyone was that they could listen to Progidy and chemical brothers whilst they race? Suddenly gaming was cool amongst nightclub going 20-somethings, not just kids and geeks. They created Gran Turismo, a game with a level of depth and wealth of content that no one had been able to match. They pushed Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, gave FFVII a huge marketing pushes. In every area the PS1 was pushing gaming in new directions and providing rich experiences.
Maybe you weren't part of the generation who grew up watching the consoles go from 8bit to 16bit to 32bit but I find it amazing anyone could brush off Sony's acheivements with both the PS1 and PS2.
Yeah because Linux is totally 100% immune to malware and never ever crashes!
If they couldn't properly isolate a mission critical windows system, guess what? They almost certainly wouldn't be able to properly secure a Linux or OSX system either. Relying on the small amount of Linux based malware for security? That sounds an awful lot like security by obscurity to me. Relying on the rights system? There's plenty that you could do without admin rights that would potential suppress or interfere with an alarm.
Yeah... That kind of circular logic makes for a pretty horrible society.
Police: "We don't have a warrant but we want to search your house"
Occupant: "what? No way, not without a warrant!"
Police: "aha! You refused to let us search, that means you must have something to hide! We now have reason to believe a crime is taking place here! Lets raid him boys!"
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy inside private residence which is protected by law. You are not allowed you put up a camera against a window and take pics of the inside, even if the curtains aren't drawn. Seems stupid but this is in place to stop people using zoom lenses to video someone in the shower across the street.
The danger is that photos taken aren't just pictures from the road that you can't see into the house from but photos taken at a higher resolution, from someone peering over a garden fence that give a clear view of the insides of the house.
To use an analogy (sorry, no cars involved) it could be the difference between walking down the street and looking at the front of a house to going up to a window and peering inside for a while. The former, no one has a problem with. The latter, most people would take issue with.
And the security on a voting slip is what exactly? If you have physical access to the PC innards, it's already compromised no matter what. If you have physical access to people's cast votes, they're compromised.
My person research has discovered that if you open a ballot box, it's entirely possible to bleach or otherwise erase votes and put in your own vote!
I trust all the major tech news sites will be carrying this shocking information that threatens the very foundations of democracy!
No? Oh wait, that's because you put tamper proof seals on ballot boxes just like you should put tamper proof seals on the cases for voting machines. Physical access to the voting computer innards/IO is basically the same as physicall access to people's cast votes.
If that's true that sucks. Pretty much ensures that all debug modes in future consoles will limit functionality to "wipe" and "only install one specific signed firmware" if they're included at all. Every console sent to be repaired will have their save games erased.
I thought that pretty much everyone who's looked at the PS3 security has found it to be pretty ironclad. The hypervisor was supposed to be obscenely difficult to get around, even if you did find an exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't just withdrawing a recommendation. This is "STOP USING IT NOW!", there's a big difference.
They're giving a clear command and giving a wishy-washy explanation for it.
The program is having a security audit, yes they should advise that it won't be known how secure it is until the audit is done but that headline will cause massive damage to the software's reputation that probably won't get repaired for a long time. Even if the audit verifies that it's secure and safe.
It can't be the Streisand effect! It's well known the Streisand effect only occurs to people and companies we dislike!
None of the sources give any clear reason why people should not use this program.
If you're going to systematically try to destroy the user base of someone's piece of software you should at least have the decency to explain why in clear terms, regardless of the reasons behind this kind of alert.
Firefox's handling of gifs is awful in general.
Whilst the gif spec may not specify a minimum wait time between frames, that doesn't mean you shouldn't implement one. The vast majority viewers implement a minimum pause because it has the handy feature of not having a gif that uses up 10-20x the CPU it actually needs to and doesn't render frames at 5-10x what the monitor or program could actually display.
Also: numerical font-weights. I'm using numerical values for a reason, don't just approximate it to one of 4 thicknesses (although Firefox isn't the only browser guilty of this).
It's almost like there's a lot of secrecy surrounding informants and spies. Funny that.
Ah yes, the greater good argument. The exact same argument used to justify the 1million Iraqi dead.
The rest of the civilians in Iraq? Why gnash teeth over people who MIGHT be in danger but who aren't actually dead yet.
Let me ask you this: There have been a number of horrific bombing incidents in Iraq recently. Without looking it up, can you tell me how many incidents there have been in the last 3 months? Of course you can't.
Why? Because stories about casualties in a war zone blend together. There have been a steady stream of incidents and operations in Afganistan for the last 9 years. Few people pay attention to every report and almost no one remembers each individual report because it would require an extraordinary memory. The incidents and operations are too common and too in-distinctive from each other to easily remember.
Wiki leaks compiled documents covering around 9 years worth of incidents and released them at once.
http://jonslattery.blogspot.com/2010/07/times-wikileaks-data-identifies.html
Source article is paywalled but the Times indicated that they were able to get dozens of names and locations of informants just from a fairly casual search of the documents.
Where next to none of the incidents were really unknown and all it really showed was that field reports by low level soldiers tend to not be very accurate. But hey, it named a whole bunch of informants who'll now find themselves dealing with a drastically life expectency, that was good right?
The only thing that really came out that was surprising for the British papers that looked over the documents was that it was the first time we'd heard the military accuse Pakistan intelligence and military of supplying weapons to extemists. They'd always tiptoed around this in the past, not admitting it publically.
The failures ALWAYS seem major in any big accident because for them to happen, whole safty systems have to be subverted or fail.
To go back to the plane crash example. Almost never get planes plummeting out of the sky in a fireball because there was a single screw that failed.
What happens was a mechanic didn't have the right type of screw so he put in another one, despite the maintenence manual saying it's vitally important to use the right screw (which they were out of stock in the hanger and to order in a new one would have kept the plane on the ground for a week, causing him to catch hell from his boss). This incorrect screw was missed by the next inspector because he was at the end of a 12 hour shift and was tired.
During the flight the pilot saw some major turbulance on the radar and decided to descend quickly (he was under pressure to land the plane on schedule) when the pilot's handbook for that plane recommended he pulled up. Descending quickly put a lot of stress on the frame of the plane, the screw came loose, got sucked into the engine, brushed against a fuel line which ignited, causing the engine to explode. This engine had gone 11 months since it had last been serviced (when the regulations say 12 months is the limit, 6 months is best), Boeing knew there was an issue with how this engine dealt with debris and had sent out a memo saying the engines needed extra protection but that they should wait till the service before installing it.
If you've seen documentaries on plane crashes, that's not a far fetched example of the series of events that lead up to a plane crash. Several major failures that all stack up upon each other, any one of which would've prevented the accident.
The fact that you need so many catastrophic failures to combine may make an individual accident look bad, but in truth, the layers and layers of redundancy in terms of safty mean, that for an accident to happen, chances are, you have a freak chain of events leading up to it because that's the only way it could actually occur.
You must teach your kids lots of extremely random, very specific things.
The ocean's boundry is calculated by precise measurements and a consistant scientific method. Any human involvement is artritrary and cancelled out by good scientific practice.
There is no fair method of establishing if someone is a private citizen or a government employee. That doesn't come down to someone saying "yeah I think he should be a government employee"
Sorry for being a stickler for human rights but I don't believe that it is right for someone to have the basic right to a private life completely removed just because lots of people want it.
It is stupid that you could get all sorts of information about a janitor with zero security clearance and no power to do anything just because he is part of THE GOVERNMENT (dum dum duuuum). Meanwhile my bank manager is a private citizen and he could completely and utterly fuck over my life at a whim. I don't know anything about this person with total power over my life nor am I easily able to.
I'm not saying certain jobs should involve more scruitiny especially ones with real power. What I find annoying and dubious in terms of freedoms is the whole "I should be able to know everything about everyone in The Government because they're the government!" thing. Everyone has some right to privacy and the amount of scruitiny should be based on the nature of your position and be entirely related to professional matters. It should not on how popular, famous or powerful the people who employ you are.
The problem with spoilers is that you don't often get a choice.
If you search for a movie to see if it's any good and the top result has Snape is Keyser Söze's ghost in the description, you've no chance of avoiding it.
You can't choose to avoid a spoiler because you don't know what's a spoiler until your mind processes it and it's incredibly hard to stop yourself automatically reading words presented to you. Case in point, I doubt the first sentence in this post was where your eyes were drawn to first.
So to sum up your argument, people should be allowed to break the law if they do important work?
What do you think is the worst crime he should be allowed to (allegedly) commit before he gets arrested then? Shall we draw the line at rape? Murder?
Tell that to the named individuals in the wikileaks reports. Whether it be soldiers or informants (whose lives are now at risk).
Also, your belief that governments and their employees should have different rights to 'private citizens' is fundamentally flawed and doesn't create a fair and equal society at all. It creates a tyranny of the majority where people pick and choose which people should have which rights.
Don't believe me?
OK then: Tell me exactly who should be treated as 'government' and who should be a private citizen. Give me a cast iron definition in a single sentence.
Someone who receives money from the tax payers? Awesome, I can get info on anyone receiving state benefits.
Someone whose income is *mostly* from the government? Those farmers on subsidies didn't need their privacy anyway! All those people working for the arts and education? They don't need their privacy!
Only elected officials? That leaves out huge areas of the government, including all the supreme court judges.
Then there's the fun of how much of a government employee's private life do we have the right to know about...
You cannot draw a fair line between private citizens and government employees without picking and choosing who to apply it to (which just reeks of fairness doesn't it?) because of the simple fact that governments are in fact made up of private citizens.
A gaming console is exactly what the name implies. A console designed for gaming. If you've bought it and don't intend to game, you've probably wasted your money.
The iphone is a phone, it is designed to function well as a phone and general purpose mini-tablet at the expense of its gaming capabilities.
Take a look at the Japanese charts and release schedule sometime and tell me the console is dead.
The system is getting more games than the Wii is (although the phenomenal performance of Nintendo published Wii titles more than ensures the Wii is still going strong there too).
They pushed 3D gaming hard, their policy of discouraging developers from releasing 2D games whilst providing them with strong 3D capabilities (so strong they forced Sega, who thought 3D wasn't ready yet, to add an additional CPU and create the develpment nightmare that was the Saturn).
Sony brought gaming to a much wider audience than Sega or Nintendo had managed before. Remember the first Wipeout? Remember how wowed everyone was that they could listen to Progidy and chemical brothers whilst they race? Suddenly gaming was cool amongst nightclub going 20-somethings, not just kids and geeks. They created Gran Turismo, a game with a level of depth and wealth of content that no one had been able to match. They pushed Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, gave FFVII a huge marketing pushes. In every area the PS1 was pushing gaming in new directions and providing rich experiences.
Maybe you weren't part of the generation who grew up watching the consoles go from 8bit to 16bit to 32bit but I find it amazing anyone could brush off Sony's acheivements with both the PS1 and PS2.
Yeah because Linux is totally 100% immune to malware and never ever crashes!
If they couldn't properly isolate a mission critical windows system, guess what? They almost certainly wouldn't be able to properly secure a Linux or OSX system either. Relying on the small amount of Linux based malware for security? That sounds an awful lot like security by obscurity to me. Relying on the rights system? There's plenty that you could do without admin rights that would potential suppress or interfere with an alarm.
Yeah... That kind of circular logic makes for a pretty horrible society.
Police: "We don't have a warrant but we want to search your house"
Occupant: "what? No way, not without a warrant!"
Police: "aha! You refused to let us search, that means you must have something to hide! We now have reason to believe a crime is taking place here! Lets raid him boys!"
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy inside private residence which is protected by law. You are not allowed you put up a camera against a window and take pics of the inside, even if the curtains aren't drawn. Seems stupid but this is in place to stop people using zoom lenses to video someone in the shower across the street.
The danger is that photos taken aren't just pictures from the road that you can't see into the house from but photos taken at a higher resolution, from someone peering over a garden fence that give a clear view of the insides of the house.
To use an analogy (sorry, no cars involved) it could be the difference between walking down the street and looking at the front of a house to going up to a window and peering inside for a while. The former, no one has a problem with. The latter, most people would take issue with.
nice citation you got there.
And the security on a voting slip is what exactly? If you have physical access to the PC innards, it's already compromised no matter what. If you have physical access to people's cast votes, they're compromised.
My person research has discovered that if you open a ballot box, it's entirely possible to bleach or otherwise erase votes and put in your own vote!
I trust all the major tech news sites will be carrying this shocking information that threatens the very foundations of democracy!
No? Oh wait, that's because you put tamper proof seals on ballot boxes just like you should put tamper proof seals on the cases for voting machines. Physical access to the voting computer innards/IO is basically the same as physicall access to people's cast votes.
If that's true that sucks. Pretty much ensures that all debug modes in future consoles will limit functionality to "wipe" and "only install one specific signed firmware" if they're included at all. Every console sent to be repaired will have their save games erased.
Any idea what the nature of this exploit is?
I thought that pretty much everyone who's looked at the PS3 security has found it to be pretty ironclad. The hypervisor was supposed to be obscenely difficult to get around, even if you did find an exploit.