[By the way, the security problem is not hiding the extensions. The real issue... being executable by double click].
I don't agree.
I think the real security problem is that the only way to tell what a program does is
"theoretically": by reading the source code
experimentally: by running it.
For proprietary software, that leaves only "by running it". I don't know about you, but I don't read all the open-source code I run. See also the underhand C code contest (write malicious code that's read-the-source-resistant).
What would improve security somewhat is if each program specified what it wanted to do*, and then got promptly killed if it did anything else; AppArmor does something like this.
* Say, like "I want to write files below/home/${user who runs me}/.emacs.d/**", or "I'd like to make outgoing connections on all tcp ports", or "I'd like to listen for connections", or "I'd like to execute the following programs: [...]".
By having programs explicitly state their externally visible behavior, the user can know what the program does, and whether it's safe to run.
It won't be a panacea, and most people probably won't understand all the implications of letting programs listen for incoming connections on all ports and be able to run arbitrary other programs. But it will allow at least the technical users to have a security policy better than trusting or not trusting the source, which is all you realistically can do.
Why can't [government] protect these rights through legislation?
Because a law book won't actually do anything about the burglar who repeatedly trespasses my apartment and steals my stuff.
Addressing the real issues: in most western societies I know about, the trinity of the legislative, executive and judiciary branches of government protect the citizens' rights by working together.
I believe it's fair to say that your parent pointed out that the police (executive) and the courts are the branches that actually do something about it.
Personally I feel that Wikipedia will now continue to go downhill in quality, precisely because of their blind insistence on citations, every time, rather than accepting the word of acknowledged experts.
What makes an expert acknowledged? Surely if an expert is acknowledge, they can cite either their own publications in relevant peer-reviewed journals, or at least the textbooks from which they learned their expertise?
Retractions are there to save the newspaper face, not to correct public knowledge.
Presumably, some people take pride in doing a good job (but have deadlines too). I figure they bemoan the lack of a better way of correcting public knowledge.
We should all be able to relate, right?
I mean, this is a site for hackers---people who love doing a technically good job within our field.
Hi all. I live in Denmark, and we have a similar thing.
Until "the Internet counted as a TV", the rules were:
If you have a TV, you have to pay $n DKK per year. That included 98% of the people.
After: If you have a TV or a 256 kilobit/s (or faster) internet connection, you have to pay $n DKK per year. This includes 99% of the people.
The license-paid station (dr.dk, "Denmark's Radio") streams some microsoft video format over mms://.
At 256 kb/s, it can't be particularly great quality; yet if they stream in greater quality, they essentially charging people who can't get a good viewing experience.
But---they're being quite fair about it. A fellow student of mine who owns no TV but has an internet connection had to pay, until he phoned them up and said "I don't have the necessary codec to play your videos, and I won't install it" (He's on Linux). They exempted him from paying, and even paid him back what he had paid so far (because he paid under a false pretext).
They are testing something which will reach Linux users as well (and presumably other OS users too). Then he'll have to pay.
Note that DR sometimes shows infomercials on their channels, encouraging illegal viewers to pay license fees. That is: they spend money on it.
If 99% of the people have to pay already, why not just charge everyone via the Plain Old Taxation system? The remaining 1% can go to a public library and view DR on the web, so they're getting something for their money too. That'll save the money spent on the "please pay up" campaigns.
And then of course there's an argument to be had about the pros and cons of Public Service and Public Access, but let's leave that for later...
Yep. The US created the internet. If you want to be the ultimate authority, or let a group of countries have a consensus over a network--go create your own damn Internet.
I know I'll get modded troll, but here goes.
An interesting idea (that will never happen in practice) would be to mirror all the DNS data that's only stored in the US, and probably the RFCs too, then (from the non-US side) drop all packets crossing the US/non-US border.
There we go, now we have our own Internet. What's that, US? You want on it?
I hope it doesn't happen (all my cool shit is in the US). But in case US really becomes too much a problem for everyone else, there's the solution.
Imagine the nightmares when both sides allocate IP addresses previously used by the other side, and the networks have to be merged again...
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
Really? I think I'm being on-topic and relevant--I'm discussing particular concerns relating to the relative merits of EU vs. US control over ICANN.
I'm talking about controversial stuff (free speech zone, Mohamed box) but the controversy is whether they're a good thing or not (which I don't talk about), not whether they exist/took place (where I agree with everyone else: they do/did).
The only rude thing I see that I said is "crazy shit goes on in Europe", but that's toward my own people; and I'm being equally rude to US and EU: "I'm not really sure who's worst".
Could someone explain to me why I'm all wrong?
(Or did I just draw the short straw, moderator-wise?)
Even if the Pirate Bay is banned in the United States
I think you're falsely assuming I'm from the US. (English isn't my first language; my using "our lawmakers" in response to "Europeans would [...]" implies I'm European, right?).
I'm from Denmark. When I try to go to thepiratebay.org, I'm faced with this: 84.238.1.5/dom.pdf (in Danish, sorry).
It's a verdict from our second-highest court thing which forces $DANISH_ISP to not allow their customers to access thepiratebay.org (and all its subdomains).
Those were private corporations making those decisions
True. Now, why would they make such decisions? I'd say it's highly plausible they'd make such decisions because they believe it's what the people wants. If they rightfully believe so, then at least you can't say that the American spirit isn't "100% free speech, 0% sensitivity".
Maybe it's 90-10 and Europe is 80-20; maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's 99-1 and 60-40, I don't know.
What I was trying to say: maybe I'm ignorant, but it's not clear to me that it's safe to a priori assume that European control would be worse than US control. Nor better.
For the most part, the United States has a great deal of respect for different view points and allows for free thought.
"Free Speech Zone"
I can certainly imagine Europeans banning Internet websites for fear that they will anger [...]
No, our law-makers really only care about what angers law-makers. Thus, they ban child porn and the pirate bay.
Also, I heard that after 9/11, people weren't supposed to play "Leaving on a Jetplane". And Comedy Central put a black box over Mohamed in Cartoon Wars (a South Park episode) after the big Mohamed hubbub, despite Mohamed being depicted in Super Best Friends (an earlier episode).
Some crazy shit goes on in Europe, but that's true for the US. I'm not really sure who's worst.
Also, why can't we just carve up the root name space into 192 pieces (okay, maybe 193 for a "broadcast nation") and be done with it?;-)
These restrictions don't seem excessive to me, merely the [...] usual price fixing
Price fixing. Not excessive. Right...
I'm shocked by the mobile telephony prices in the US: $0.25 per text message. What The Fuck??
I get 50 messages for free every month (and 50 minutes of calls) for a monthly fee of nothing, and $0.032 per text after the first 50.
That's in the socialist haven that is Denmark, where income is most evenly distributed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality#cite_note-0 -- UN Gini, second most equal by CIA Gini, more equal than the US by every metric).
Sure, they can cash out and get their millions of dollars now.
Let's see; if I have five million dollars, I pretty much don't have to work again in my life, ever. (I can get a day job if I want, or start a new company, or sit in the couch playing games all day.)
Or I could keep my company, which doesn't seem able to make money, and hope it'll become worth more money on the basis of... hype?
I'm leaning to the "independently wealthy now". I'm not sure what being "more independently wealthy" would buy me---a thicker gold plating on my car? A gold plating on my fifth car?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought slashdot was for techies, not lit crit majors ;)
Write your MEP's now!
Morphological Equivalent Privacy?
could you be more specific about what you think I should be doing (bearing in mind that the most important thing is to save time)?
(I'm not him). Use the "Quote Parent" button, which adds a "correctly" quoted version of your parent to your post; then edit it as you see fit.
Does anyone know how Linux handles this in the various GUI file managers?
No.
[By the way, the security problem is not hiding the extensions. The real issue ... being executable by double click].
I don't agree.
I think the real security problem is that the only way to tell what a program does is
For proprietary software, that leaves only "by running it". I don't know about you, but I don't read all the open-source code I run. See also the underhand C code contest (write malicious code that's read-the-source-resistant).
What would improve security somewhat is if each program specified what it wanted to do*, and then got promptly killed if it did anything else; AppArmor does something like this.
* Say, like "I want to write files below /home/${user who runs me}/.emacs.d/**", or "I'd like to make outgoing connections on all tcp ports", or "I'd like to listen for connections", or "I'd like to execute the following programs: [...]".
By having programs explicitly state their externally visible behavior, the user can know what the program does, and whether it's safe to run.
It won't be a panacea, and most people probably won't understand all the implications of letting programs listen for incoming connections on all ports and be able to run arbitrary other programs. But it will allow at least the technical users to have a security policy better than trusting or not trusting the source, which is all you realistically can do.
you should go on a tour of the Nevada Testes Range
That joke was sorta... hanging in the air :)
The fact of the matter is that (porn excepted) people don't pay for online content.
You pay for your porn???
Why can't [government] protect these rights through legislation?
Because a law book won't actually do anything about the burglar who repeatedly trespasses my apartment and steals my stuff.
Addressing the real issues: in most western societies I know about, the trinity of the legislative, executive and judiciary branches of government protect the citizens' rights by working together.
I believe it's fair to say that your parent pointed out that the police (executive) and the courts are the branches that actually do something about it.
Personally I feel that Wikipedia will now continue to go downhill in quality, precisely because of their blind insistence on citations, every time, rather than accepting the word of acknowledged experts.
What makes an expert acknowledged? Surely if an expert is acknowledge, they can cite either their own publications in relevant peer-reviewed journals, or at least the textbooks from which they learned their expertise?
Retractions are there to save the newspaper face, not to correct public knowledge.
Presumably, some people take pride in doing a good job (but have deadlines too). I figure they bemoan the lack of a better way of correcting public knowledge.
We should all be able to relate, right?
I mean, this is a site for hackers---people who love doing a technically good job within our field.
Segmentation fault
I would like to reiterate http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1220783&cid=27813603
The vapor that I long for most
The Duke, the Wolf*,
And the Starcraft: Ghost
They saw their code build
So they'd boast
The day
Their sche-----dule died.
And Duke was saying:
(Chorus)
bye, bye
Eat some shit and then die
... apparently, writing code isn't as easy as (American) Pie :)
hopefully when I die, Duke Nukem Forever will be waiting for me on God's Commodore 64.
But everyone knows God uses Linux, which doesn't run on the C64.
Google numbers for "God uses $OS":
I found these numbers on the Internet, so they must be true!
What, I thought DNF was "Digital Noise Filter". Which is what you need when reading rumors about the impending release of DNF :)
Wikipedia says it's
"Did not finish" in racing parlance
(Non-native English speakers might not be familiar with this particular acronym expansion.)
do not listen to these podcasts [of the LKML] [...] You will kill someone.
Someone should tell that to Hans Reiser.
Hi all. I live in Denmark, and we have a similar thing.
Until "the Internet counted as a TV", the rules were:
If you have a TV, you have to pay $n DKK per year. That included 98% of the people.
After: If you have a TV or a 256 kilobit/s (or faster) internet connection, you have to pay $n DKK per year. This includes 99% of the people.
The license-paid station (dr.dk, "Denmark's Radio") streams some microsoft video format over mms://.
At 256 kb/s, it can't be particularly great quality; yet if they stream in greater quality, they essentially charging people who can't get a good viewing experience.
But---they're being quite fair about it. A fellow student of mine who owns no TV but has an internet connection had to pay, until he phoned them up and said "I don't have the necessary codec to play your videos, and I won't install it" (He's on Linux). They exempted him from paying, and even paid him back what he had paid so far (because he paid under a false pretext).
They are testing something which will reach Linux users as well (and presumably other OS users too). Then he'll have to pay.
Note that DR sometimes shows infomercials on their channels, encouraging illegal viewers to pay license fees. That is: they spend money on it.
If 99% of the people have to pay already, why not just charge everyone via the Plain Old Taxation system? The remaining 1% can go to a public library and view DR on the web, so they're getting something for their money too. That'll save the money spent on the "please pay up" campaigns.
And then of course there's an argument to be had about the pros and cons of Public Service and Public Access, but let's leave that for later...
Yep. The US created the internet. If you want to be the ultimate authority, or let a group of countries have a consensus over a network--go create your own damn Internet.
I know I'll get modded troll, but here goes.
An interesting idea (that will never happen in practice) would be to mirror all the DNS data that's only stored in the US, and probably the RFCs too, then (from the non-US side) drop all packets crossing the US/non-US border.
There we go, now we have our own Internet. What's that, US? You want on it?
I hope it doesn't happen (all my cool shit is in the US). But in case US really becomes too much a problem for everyone else, there's the solution.
Imagine the nightmares when both sides allocate IP addresses previously used by the other side, and the networks have to be merged again...
Speculation: oh the fun! :)
Why am I modded troll?
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
Really? I think I'm being on-topic and relevant--I'm discussing particular concerns relating to the relative merits of EU vs. US control over ICANN.
I'm talking about controversial stuff (free speech zone, Mohamed box) but the controversy is whether they're a good thing or not (which I don't talk about), not whether they exist/took place (where I agree with everyone else: they do/did).
The only rude thing I see that I said is "crazy shit goes on in Europe", but that's toward my own people; and I'm being equally rude to US and EU: "I'm not really sure who's worst".
Could someone explain to me why I'm all wrong?
(Or did I just draw the short straw, moderator-wise?)
Even if the Pirate Bay is banned in the United States
I think you're falsely assuming I'm from the US. (English isn't my first language; my using "our lawmakers" in response to "Europeans would [...]" implies I'm European, right?).
I'm from Denmark. When I try to go to thepiratebay.org, I'm faced with this: 84.238.1.5/dom.pdf (in Danish, sorry).
It's a verdict from our second-highest court thing which forces $DANISH_ISP to not allow their customers to access thepiratebay.org (and all its subdomains).
Those were private corporations making those decisions
True. Now, why would they make such decisions? I'd say it's highly plausible they'd make such decisions because they believe it's what the people wants. If they rightfully believe so, then at least you can't say that the American spirit isn't "100% free speech, 0% sensitivity".
Maybe it's 90-10 and Europe is 80-20; maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's 99-1 and 60-40, I don't know.
What I was trying to say: maybe I'm ignorant, but it's not clear to me that it's safe to a priori assume that European control would be worse than US control. Nor better.
For the most part, the United States has a great deal of respect for different view points and allows for free thought.
"Free Speech Zone"
I can certainly imagine Europeans banning Internet websites for fear that they will anger [...]
No, our law-makers really only care about what angers law-makers. Thus, they ban child porn and the pirate bay.
Also, I heard that after 9/11, people weren't supposed to play "Leaving on a Jetplane". And Comedy Central put a black box over Mohamed in Cartoon Wars (a South Park episode) after the big Mohamed hubbub, despite Mohamed being depicted in Super Best Friends (an earlier episode).
Some crazy shit goes on in Europe, but that's true for the US. I'm not really sure who's worst.
Also, why can't we just carve up the root name space into 192 pieces (okay, maybe 193 for a "broadcast nation") and be done with it? ;-)
Stupid as it sounds, i like the idea of having the root dns servers operating behind the worlds largest military.
That does sound kinda' stupid. At least it makes it hard to seize power from those who have it when they misuse it.
It's actually also wrong. I spent two seconds on google for you, and found this nice map of the root servers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Root-current.svg
ICANNada!
Our 127.0.0.1 and world-wide LAN.
[...]
ICANNada we firewall for thee
whose genitals were the size of Playstation 3s, and whose emissions burned with the fire of the Xbox 360.
What, no wiiwii jokes?
These restrictions don't seem excessive to me, merely the [...] usual price fixing
Price fixing. Not excessive. Right...
I'm shocked by the mobile telephony prices in the US: $0.25 per text message. What The Fuck??
I get 50 messages for free every month (and 50 minutes of calls) for a monthly fee of nothing, and $0.032 per text after the first 50.
That's in the socialist haven that is Denmark, where income is most evenly distributed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality#cite_note-0 -- UN Gini, second most equal by CIA Gini, more equal than the US by every metric).
Sure, they can cash out and get their millions of dollars now.
Let's see; if I have five million dollars, I pretty much don't have to work again in my life, ever. (I can get a day job if I want, or start a new company, or sit in the couch playing games all day.)
Or I could keep my company, which doesn't seem able to make money, and hope it'll become worth more money on the basis of... hype?
I'm leaning to the "independently wealthy now". I'm not sure what being "more independently wealthy" would buy me---a thicker gold plating on my car? A gold plating on my fifth car?