This filtering is truly an incredibly bad idea, destroying much of the value of the chat service.
The advantage of chat - so I thought - over email was that you had
confirmation that the other person got the information.
Now it turns out that the information might silently disappear, and
that the two people at the two ends of the conversation might have an inconsistent view of facts.
I am glad I stick to Google chat (out of laziness, since I have Gmail open anyway).
I actually happen to believe that one's sanity critically depends on the ability to forget things... I am not sure at all that the psychological consequences of a full-life recording have been investigated, and I somehow tend to believe they wouldn't be positive.
My wife and I often have to work in the evenings (what, a married slashdotter? married to an engineer? impossible!). I am SO thankful that I don't have to hear her "send! open! reply, to larry! cancel! to larry l-a-r-r-y! attach graph dot jeypeg"... it would be enough to drive me insane.
Re:The writer, I believe, is not religious
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Ah, that must be why Python does no miracles for me.
$100. Cheap. How much do you think it costs you to get a passport? Or a driver licence? Same order of magnitude. And most likely, if you mass produce it, it could be $20 (it shouldn't cost more than a pocket calculator).
Lose it? Call and ask for the key to be revoked. Somebody else voids your key? It is a nuisance, to be sure: bring it in and have it reprogrammed. I mean, also credit cards get lost, it's not the end of the world.
Somebody get my $100 thingie? They can do exactly what they can do if they know my SSN (the thingie could ask for a pin before spitting out the signature).
I also don't believe in a foolproof and perfect technical solution.
But anything is better than the current solution of NO security at all.
They might as well use my licence plate rather than my SSN - at least it's written in fewer places online!
Look, they could issue (for $100? or how much it costs) to people devices which are able to sign with a private key a short string of digits (16? 20?) that they dictate to you over the phone. You dictate back the 20 digits of the signature. The company verifies with the public key on record. No complication, no computer needed.
Ultimately secure? Not. The keys would be most likely too short, yadayada.
But anything like this would be VASTLY better than relying on the same 9-digit fixed number (the SSN) that appears in cleartext on every kind of document, and of which there are hundreds of copies lying around in offices around the country, from banks to insurance companies to medical offices to schools to universities to... you get the idea.
But until there is some legislative incentive to put this into place, companies will want to avoid carrying the cost of identifying you more properly, and will be happy to give out your information to anyone who collects a bit of knowledge about you.
The situation will change only when legislation will be introduced, or when consumers will essentially refuse to deal with companies with weak identification procedures (I am not holding my breath on this).
The scandal is not that people are selling and buying that kind of information.
The scandal is that companies accept that kind of information as identification information.
The scandal is that anyone can pretend to be me by knowing my name, address, phone number, and social security number, and little more sometimes, but not always. NONE of those pieces of information was EVER meant to be secret. We have to write our social security number in zillion of places, our employers know it - nobody in his right mind could trust that as a piece of identification information!
Yet this is exactly what companies do, because they bear little of the cost, and there is no legislation that forces them to be more selective with what they accept as identification information (read with what little info one could access the phone record of Thomas Perkins).
And all the while, better tools for identifications are widely available.
I could identify myself to my bank simply by sending them a PGP-signed email: all that this requires of me is to click on the "sign it" button in Thunderbird - and I get incredibly better security than monkeying around with SSNs.
Yes, people with PGP tend to have small webs of trust - but this is because of lack of legislation that requires better identification for transaction, and also, for lack of public services.
In my city, want to tell the tree pruners that the city tree next to my house needs some pruning? There is a phone number and a very kind and helpful employee on the other end of the line. Want to get your PGP key signed by a city/county officer that checks your papers thoroughly? No hope. You have to somehow know someone who is connected enough to others that need PGP (package maintainers, for instance). Tree haestetics surely ranks higher than basic identity security, even though our nation is more and more based on remote transactions.
Our legislation, and public services, are late some 20 years regarding identity management.
The scandal is that they are not brought up to date faster, not that some people are selling email footers that we send around for free.
Right, but coming up with the wget script took me less time than reading the ipupdate man page, and as a plus, automatically tells me when the machine is up, so I can log in.
Somebody else commented that I could teach the users to do updates with Ubuntu. The problem is how newbies the users are. In my case, the problem is that they would feel they have ZERO motivation to do the updates, and just never do them.
I really cannot understand why people use their ISP (Comcast, in this case) for their email. This limits the freedom to switch from one ISP to the other (as they would lose their email address)! Why not just get an account with Gmail, fastmail.fm, or any other of the many good independent email providers out there? Those providers are in the business of providing email to you, so they will make sure it works; and of course, if you switch ISP, you can keep your email address.
Even if you buy your own address, forward it to something else! Get yourself a Gmail or fastmail.fm or some similar account, do the email there, and be done with the problem.
I was in exactly the same situation, and here's what I did.
I installed Debian Stable, plus Firefox, and Thunderbird.
I wrote a few custom scripts to handle downloading photos from her digital camera, and storing them in folders named after the photo's month. A couple of scripts do similar stuff.
I installed a RAID 1 system, figuring that she would never take the time to do backups - and remote backups through her slow ADSL connection (with limited uplink speed) would be a hassle.
Most importantly, I wrote a cron job that every 5 mins or so, wget's a particular web page from my server.
In this way, I can get the IP address at which the machine is running when on. I can then remote log-in, and do "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade -u" whenever needed, as well as any other maintenance I need to do.
This arrangement has been working great. If I were to do it again, I would skip Thunderbird, which in my opinion is buggy, and just invite the person to gmail.
Well, what's special about that - there's plenty of people who propel themselves to higher places, and even manage to stay there for years, using nothing else than their jaws...
This is very good news! First, Intel supporting drivers for their on-board graphic chips. Then this.
What is the cause the latest? The fact that Google videos and YouTube are going to flash, rather than Realmedia format, in order to reach all audiences?
I am amazed that the tiny percentage of linux desktops is starting to matter.
I would welcome any insight into why it is so.
You worry about your kids having to cope with caps-lock, but if you have kids about 4-6 years old, they definitely appreciate the caps-lock key: they learn first the all-caps alphabet, and they have great fun typing:
MOM DAD CAT DOG...
For your egoistic web surfing and coding needs, you are going to deprive young children of such a learning experience? Shame on you!
Also note that if you leave caps-lock on, it's harder for them to accidentally type
I disagree - I believe people can be very different at their talents - the minds of different people can work in very different ways.
No matter how hard I tried, I was always terrible at soccer and at juggling. I just don't have enough control of my body for that. On the other hand, learning mathematics has always been effortless for me, and I can "view" in my head 3 and 4-dimensional functions with ease.
Regardless of how hard I try, I am definitely NOT good at picking up the correct accent of foreign languages - even languages that I have been speaking for decades. Other people can sound like native speakers in a couple of years. I spent lots hours trying to learn chess, and just about anybody could defeat me. At Go, in scarcely a few months I became good enough to hold my own with most players in my city.
The belief that "education does all" is the kind of belief you have before you see enough students, and especially, before you have children. After that, you know very well that kids are born with very definite personalities and abilities - you can educate them, but the personality and basic abilities are there from day 1, perhaps not fully expressed, but there.
Education, or training, just feeds the prepared mind or body.
I agree that it is simply amazing how few bugs there are in Tex.
I do not think this is due to the fact that Knuth was paying people who found bugs.
Rather, I believe the quality of TeX is due to Knuth's genius, and also not in small part to his idea of "literate programming".
There are better ways to put it, but in essence, literate programming means that you are supposed to write text that explains the algorithm or process; the code is like actions intersepsed in the text, but in a sense, the main product is the text, not the code.
I try myself to follow this style, having code that either reads obvious, or having large comment sections that explain what is going on, and all the background assumptions, so that the code is then obvious. It certainly had an influence on the amounts of bugs in my code, not to mention in my coworker's ability to understand what is going on.
In this respect, I believe a lot of OSS is sorely lacking.
And the pity is that they lose developers in this fashion.
As a personal story, some time ago I wanted to develop a plugin for Gimp to implement a particular effect, something I used to be able to achieve with a chemical darkroom.
After three hours of staring at the code, and not being able to figure out for certain how to get to the pixels of an image, I gave up. I remember staring at hundreds of lines of C code, written in poor style, with very few comments (and what comments there were explained the obvious, instead of the background and the assumptions of the piece of code).
The analysis denotes an astoundingly low level of understanding of how people actually use the web. What the author is seeing is absolutely normal and obvious. The only abnormal thing is his surprise.
The Pornhound. The fact that people search for porn on the web must rank as the discovery of the year!
The Manhunter. Who ever bookmarks other people's web pages? I just type the people's names in Google, and most people I know do just that. We are all manhunters I guess.
The Shopper. Same as above, who uses bookmarks? If I am interested in a treo 700 and I type it 37 times in 3 days, this just means that I find it more convenient to type treo 700, then select from the search results, that bookmark the result pages that I am interested in. And this is reasonable: why should I create bookmarks that become useless once I do buy the treo?
The Obsessive. See above. People that search often for A are simply people who don't bother creating a bookmark for some results about A. Big discovery.
The Omnivore. Ok, so when the pattern is complex, the author gives up. This is a really informative category.
The Newbie. Again, it must rank as one of the big discoveries of the year that there are newbies on AOL...
The Basket Case. This seems to be a repeat of "the omnivore", except that the author found these queries weirder.
Who posted this on Slashdot? It's not interesting research at all! It's junk!
Being able to fish back old emails has helped me untold times to get out of a tight spot.
I also wonder why some people believe than "deleting" is more organized or self-disciplined than "filing". If it filled up your house with paper, I would agree, but my 10+ years of email fit easily in some 20GB, which is less than 1/10 of a modern HD...
I agree that the skill can be learnt, but I learnt it only after I switched to Gmail.
Two features of gmail just make it very easy to archive things:
Conversations. When there is an "email storm" over a certain topic (all too frequent), I can archive the whole storm with a single click, confident that a search will quickly bring up the whole conversation. Email clients (at least Thunderbird) are often able to archive whole threads, but when searching, often return emails one by one.
Search. Yes, some people use spotlight, but this means, as far as I know, that you have to keep your email on a local machine. I work on several PCs, and I need to keep my email centralized.
If you feel you can easily retrieve things, you are more likely to archive them in the first place.
Also, I really like the fast, text-based approach to search, so that I can type "to: nikki", rather than having to select "To:" from a pull-down list, as in Thunderbird, and then write "nikki".
When you are a young hacker, with one favorite PC at home, jumping through hoops to have multimedia support is nothing.
I am maintaining 2 linux PCs at home (one for me, one for my wife, and soon the kids will have also PCs with linux). Then, there are 2 in the office. My in-laws. My father. One linux laptop.
If you think it is fun to have to jump through hoops to get multimedia support on 7-8 PCs, you have way too much time in your hands. I generally advise friends/family to get Macs just not to have to help them getting the multimedia working. I am even considering switching to Macs, just to get rid of the waste of time myself. I probably should.
I very much agree: this will help people transition to linux. When I try to convince friends/family to run linux on a PC, the usual roadblocks are things like "I can't watch BBC video any more!", or "I cannot listen to my favorite broadcast", or... you get the idea.
Sure, it can (almost) all be solved, but it takes time and experience to solve it.
Newbie linux users don't know how to solve these issues, and expert users often don't have the time to solve and re-solve these issues for all friends/family, and after each reinstall, on a regular basis.
A distribution where multimedia works out of the box is a GREAT thing.
Now I am just waiting for a distribution where ACPI, suspend-to-disk, and wireless support works out-of-the-box for laptops... sigh.
The point is that even though I am (somewhat) linux expert, I don't have enough time to pamper every linux installation I do (I use various PCs, we have even more in the family, etc). For that reason alone I have been running Windows on all laptops but one - Windows suspends to disk, and has wireless support, out of the box, which is more than I can say for Debian.
I work for a university, and I have a Windows XP laptop (university property) installed using our school of engineering key (we have a site-wide license). Is that a "corporate" version? Anyway, I had not booted that laptop in Windows in a LONG while, since I had been mostly using it with another hard drive with SuSE linux installed.
Recently, I booted it, and gave my ok to its doing 18 Windows Updates (techstaff won't support my laptop unless I do the updates). After doing the updates (from my home, I am not sure if this is relevant), Windows now claims that the copy is pirated.
Since it is certainly not pirated, I decided to simply not bother with it.
The fun part is that in some couple of weeks, I am going to give a talk at Microsoft with that laptop... and no, I don't plan to fix it before then!
The keyboard cannot possibly know whether you are typing a password, or some other data.
From the article, it seems that the bandwidth is limited: they can delay-encode 1 (or perhaps at most 2) bits per keystroke.
But each character typed contains more than 2 bits of entropy (and it is not realistic to delay transmission so that you compress the stream to the optimal size).
So, if you knew where the passwords are in the stream of data, you could possibly transmit them (subject to the problems mentioned by the parent post; mod it up).
But you don't know which keystrokes correspond to passwords (the keyboard does not know in response to what prompt you are typing).
And, the bandwidth of the channel is too small according to the article to send everything you type.
Therefore, the attack seems to be a very impractical, if not far-fetched, one.
Zoom ahead one year, and here is the slashdot headline:
The RIAA sues 1000s in car parking song swapping scheme
The RIAA claims that it has identified over 1000 people involved in what it terms
a "car parking song swapping scheme". According to the legal papers filed, the RIAA
claims that the subjects were involved in a scheme whereby they would occasionally
park their car in the proximity of other subject's residence, ostensibly with the
excuse of running errands.
It is alleged that then their Ipods - especially modified for the purpose -
proceeded to illegally download songs from the residences.
According to sources that asked not to be named, the RIAA is about to
crack down on similar activity occurring at traffic lights and jams all over the nation.
The source quoted,
"This vehicular promiscuity is one of the greatest threats to the free enjoyment of
copyright protection in our country".
Wifi... it would be enough for me to be able to plug my car into my Mac Mini via a small USB cable.
So, wheneven I want to upload new songs, I could just bring the car in and plug i....
Slashdot Mirror
This filtering is truly an incredibly bad idea, destroying much of the value of the chat service. The advantage of chat - so I thought - over email was that you had confirmation that the other person got the information. Now it turns out that the information might silently disappear, and that the two people at the two ends of the conversation might have an inconsistent view of facts.
I am glad I stick to Google chat (out of laziness, since I have Gmail open anyway).
I actually happen to believe that one's sanity critically depends on the ability to forget things... I am not sure at all that the psychological consequences of a full-life recording have been investigated, and I somehow tend to believe they wouldn't be positive.
Mod parent up!
My wife and I often have to work in the evenings (what, a married slashdotter? married to an engineer? impossible!). I am SO thankful that I don't have to hear her "send! open! reply, to larry! cancel! to larry l-a-r-r-y! attach graph dot jeypeg"... it would be enough to drive me insane.
Ah, that must be why Python does no miracles for me.
$100. Cheap. How much do you think it costs you to get a passport? Or a driver licence? Same order of magnitude. And most likely, if you mass produce it, it could be $20 (it shouldn't cost more than a pocket calculator).
Lose it? Call and ask for the key to be revoked. Somebody else voids your key? It is a nuisance, to be sure: bring it in and have it reprogrammed. I mean, also credit cards get lost, it's not the end of the world.
Somebody get my $100 thingie? They can do exactly what they can do if they know my SSN (the thingie could ask for a pin before spitting out the signature).
I also don't believe in a foolproof and perfect technical solution. But anything is better than the current solution of NO security at all. They might as well use my licence plate rather than my SSN - at least it's written in fewer places online!
Look, they could issue (for $100? or how much it costs) to people devices which are able to sign with a private key a short string of digits (16? 20?) that they dictate to you over the phone. You dictate back the 20 digits of the signature. The company verifies with the public key on record. No complication, no computer needed.
Ultimately secure? Not. The keys would be most likely too short, yadayada. But anything like this would be VASTLY better than relying on the same 9-digit fixed number (the SSN) that appears in cleartext on every kind of document, and of which there are hundreds of copies lying around in offices around the country, from banks to insurance companies to medical offices to schools to universities to... you get the idea.
But until there is some legislative incentive to put this into place, companies will want to avoid carrying the cost of identifying you more properly, and will be happy to give out your information to anyone who collects a bit of knowledge about you.
The situation will change only when legislation will be introduced, or when consumers will essentially refuse to deal with companies with weak identification procedures (I am not holding my breath on this).
The scandal is not that people are selling and buying that kind of information. The scandal is that companies accept that kind of information as identification information.
The scandal is that anyone can pretend to be me by knowing my name, address, phone number, and social security number, and little more sometimes, but not always. NONE of those pieces of information was EVER meant to be secret. We have to write our social security number in zillion of places, our employers know it - nobody in his right mind could trust that as a piece of identification information!
Yet this is exactly what companies do, because they bear little of the cost, and there is no legislation that forces them to be more selective with what they accept as identification information (read with what little info one could access the phone record of Thomas Perkins).
And all the while, better tools for identifications are widely available. I could identify myself to my bank simply by sending them a PGP-signed email: all that this requires of me is to click on the "sign it" button in Thunderbird - and I get incredibly better security than monkeying around with SSNs.
Yes, people with PGP tend to have small webs of trust - but this is because of lack of legislation that requires better identification for transaction, and also, for lack of public services. In my city, want to tell the tree pruners that the city tree next to my house needs some pruning? There is a phone number and a very kind and helpful employee on the other end of the line. Want to get your PGP key signed by a city/county officer that checks your papers thoroughly? No hope. You have to somehow know someone who is connected enough to others that need PGP (package maintainers, for instance). Tree haestetics surely ranks higher than basic identity security, even though our nation is more and more based on remote transactions.
Our legislation, and public services, are late some 20 years regarding identity management. The scandal is that they are not brought up to date faster, not that some people are selling email footers that we send around for free.
Right, but coming up with the wget script took me less time than reading the ipupdate man page, and as a plus, automatically tells me when the machine is up, so I can log in.
Somebody else commented that I could teach the users to do updates with Ubuntu. The problem is how newbies the users are. In my case, the problem is that they would feel they have ZERO motivation to do the updates, and just never do them.
I really cannot understand why people use their ISP (Comcast, in this case) for their email. This limits the freedom to switch from one ISP to the other (as they would lose their email address)! Why not just get an account with Gmail, fastmail.fm, or any other of the many good independent email providers out there? Those providers are in the business of providing email to you, so they will make sure it works; and of course, if you switch ISP, you can keep your email address.
Even if you buy your own address, forward it to something else! Get yourself a Gmail or fastmail.fm or some similar account, do the email there, and be done with the problem.
I was in exactly the same situation, and here's what I did.
I installed Debian Stable, plus Firefox, and Thunderbird. I wrote a few custom scripts to handle downloading photos from her digital camera, and storing them in folders named after the photo's month. A couple of scripts do similar stuff.
I installed a RAID 1 system, figuring that she would never take the time to do backups - and remote backups through her slow ADSL connection (with limited uplink speed) would be a hassle.
Most importantly, I wrote a cron job that every 5 mins or so, wget's a particular web page from my server. In this way, I can get the IP address at which the machine is running when on. I can then remote log-in, and do "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade -u" whenever needed, as well as any other maintenance I need to do.
This arrangement has been working great. If I were to do it again, I would skip Thunderbird, which in my opinion is buggy, and just invite the person to gmail.
Well, what's special about that - there's plenty of people who propel themselves to higher places, and even manage to stay there for years, using nothing else than their jaws...
This is very good news! First, Intel supporting drivers for their on-board graphic chips. Then this.
What is the cause the latest? The fact that Google videos and YouTube are going to flash, rather than Realmedia format, in order to reach all audiences?
I am amazed that the tiny percentage of linux desktops is starting to matter. I would welcome any insight into why it is so.
You worry about your kids having to cope with caps-lock, but if you have kids about 4-6 years old, they definitely appreciate the caps-lock key: they learn first the all-caps alphabet, and they have great fun typing:
MOM DAD CAT DOG ...
For your egoistic web surfing and coding needs, you are going to deprive young children of such a learning experience? Shame on you!
Also note that if you leave caps-lock on, it's harder for them to accidentally type
\rm -r ~/*
I disagree - I believe people can be very different at their talents - the minds of different people can work in very different ways.
No matter how hard I tried, I was always terrible at soccer and at juggling. I just don't have enough control of my body for that. On the other hand, learning mathematics has always been effortless for me, and I can "view" in my head 3 and 4-dimensional functions with ease. Regardless of how hard I try, I am definitely NOT good at picking up the correct accent of foreign languages - even languages that I have been speaking for decades. Other people can sound like native speakers in a couple of years. I spent lots hours trying to learn chess, and just about anybody could defeat me. At Go, in scarcely a few months I became good enough to hold my own with most players in my city.
The belief that "education does all" is the kind of belief you have before you see enough students, and especially, before you have children. After that, you know very well that kids are born with very definite personalities and abilities - you can educate them, but the personality and basic abilities are there from day 1, perhaps not fully expressed, but there.
Education, or training, just feeds the prepared mind or body.
I agree that it is simply amazing how few bugs there are in Tex. I do not think this is due to the fact that Knuth was paying people who found bugs. Rather, I believe the quality of TeX is due to Knuth's genius, and also not in small part to his idea of "literate programming".
There are better ways to put it, but in essence, literate programming means that you are supposed to write text that explains the algorithm or process; the code is like actions intersepsed in the text, but in a sense, the main product is the text, not the code.
I try myself to follow this style, having code that either reads obvious, or having large comment sections that explain what is going on, and all the background assumptions, so that the code is then obvious. It certainly had an influence on the amounts of bugs in my code, not to mention in my coworker's ability to understand what is going on.
In this respect, I believe a lot of OSS is sorely lacking. And the pity is that they lose developers in this fashion. As a personal story, some time ago I wanted to develop a plugin for Gimp to implement a particular effect, something I used to be able to achieve with a chemical darkroom. After three hours of staring at the code, and not being able to figure out for certain how to get to the pixels of an image, I gave up. I remember staring at hundreds of lines of C code, written in poor style, with very few comments (and what comments there were explained the obvious, instead of the background and the assumptions of the piece of code).
The analysis denotes an astoundingly low level of understanding of how people actually use the web. What the author is seeing is absolutely normal and obvious. The only abnormal thing is his surprise.
The Pornhound. The fact that people search for porn on the web must rank as the discovery of the year!
The Manhunter. Who ever bookmarks other people's web pages? I just type the people's names in Google, and most people I know do just that. We are all manhunters I guess.
The Shopper. Same as above, who uses bookmarks? If I am interested in a treo 700 and I type it 37 times in 3 days, this just means that I find it more convenient to type treo 700, then select from the search results, that bookmark the result pages that I am interested in. And this is reasonable: why should I create bookmarks that become useless once I do buy the treo?
The Obsessive. See above. People that search often for A are simply people who don't bother creating a bookmark for some results about A. Big discovery.
The Omnivore. Ok, so when the pattern is complex, the author gives up. This is a really informative category.
The Newbie. Again, it must rank as one of the big discoveries of the year that there are newbies on AOL...
The Basket Case. This seems to be a repeat of "the omnivore", except that the author found these queries weirder.
Who posted this on Slashdot? It's not interesting research at all! It's junk!
Just look at Google Trends. It gives you exactly the time-related information you are wondering about.
Being able to fish back old emails has helped me untold times to get out of a tight spot. I also wonder why some people believe than "deleting" is more organized or self-disciplined than "filing". If it filled up your house with paper, I would agree, but my 10+ years of email fit easily in some 20GB, which is less than 1/10 of a modern HD...
Let me be even clearer.
When you are a young hacker, with one favorite PC at home, jumping through hoops to have multimedia support is nothing.
I am maintaining 2 linux PCs at home (one for me, one for my wife, and soon the kids will have also PCs with linux). Then, there are 2 in the office. My in-laws. My father. One linux laptop. If you think it is fun to have to jump through hoops to get multimedia support on 7-8 PCs, you have way too much time in your hands. I generally advise friends/family to get Macs just not to have to help them getting the multimedia working. I am even considering switching to Macs, just to get rid of the waste of time myself. I probably should.
I very much agree: this will help people transition to linux. When I try to convince friends/family to run linux on a PC, the usual roadblocks are things like "I can't watch BBC video any more!", or "I cannot listen to my favorite broadcast", or ... you get the idea.
Sure, it can (almost) all be solved, but it takes time and experience to solve it. Newbie linux users don't know how to solve these issues, and expert users often don't have the time to solve and re-solve these issues for all friends/family, and after each reinstall, on a regular basis.
A distribution where multimedia works out of the box is a GREAT thing.
Now I am just waiting for a distribution where ACPI, suspend-to-disk, and wireless support works out-of-the-box for laptops... sigh. The point is that even though I am (somewhat) linux expert, I don't have enough time to pamper every linux installation I do (I use various PCs, we have even more in the family, etc). For that reason alone I have been running Windows on all laptops but one - Windows suspends to disk, and has wireless support, out of the box, which is more than I can say for Debian.
I work for a university, and I have a Windows XP laptop (university property) installed using our school of engineering key (we have a site-wide license). Is that a "corporate" version? Anyway, I had not booted that laptop in Windows in a LONG while, since I had been mostly using it with another hard drive with SuSE linux installed.
Recently, I booted it, and gave my ok to its doing 18 Windows Updates (techstaff won't support my laptop unless I do the updates). After doing the updates (from my home, I am not sure if this is relevant), Windows now claims that the copy is pirated.
Since it is certainly not pirated, I decided to simply not bother with it. The fun part is that in some couple of weeks, I am going to give a talk at Microsoft with that laptop... and no, I don't plan to fix it before then!
The keyboard cannot possibly know whether you are typing a password, or some other data. From the article, it seems that the bandwidth is limited: they can delay-encode 1 (or perhaps at most 2) bits per keystroke. But each character typed contains more than 2 bits of entropy (and it is not realistic to delay transmission so that you compress the stream to the optimal size).
So, if you knew where the passwords are in the stream of data, you could possibly transmit them (subject to the problems mentioned by the parent post; mod it up). But you don't know which keystrokes correspond to passwords (the keyboard does not know in response to what prompt you are typing). And, the bandwidth of the channel is too small according to the article to send everything you type. Therefore, the attack seems to be a very impractical, if not far-fetched, one.
The RIAA sues 1000s in car parking song swapping scheme
The RIAA claims that it has identified over 1000 people involved in what it terms a "car parking song swapping scheme". According to the legal papers filed, the RIAA claims that the subjects were involved in a scheme whereby they would occasionally park their car in the proximity of other subject's residence, ostensibly with the excuse of running errands. It is alleged that then their Ipods - especially modified for the purpose - proceeded to illegally download songs from the residences.
According to sources that asked not to be named, the RIAA is about to crack down on similar activity occurring at traffic lights and jams all over the nation. The source quoted, "This vehicular promiscuity is one of the greatest threats to the free enjoyment of copyright protection in our country".
oh wait, maybe the wifi was a better idea...