i just took a quick look at the diffs... some APIC changes for SMP, some driver updates, the vfat rename bug looks fixed, and one of the small mm diffs from linux-kernel got added (the one that said to bring mm performance back to 2.1.132 levels). now time to compile and run it:)
CD prices haven't gone up recently, they've been insanely expensive right from the start. when they started replacing vinyls, CDs were twice as expensive as them. I expected they'd drop signficantly once they were dominant, but they haven't. I don't disagree with your main argument, but suggesting that mp3's have driven cd prices up doesn't hold water, IMO.
well, if numbers are crypto signed, I'd expect sites to pop up with huge lists of valid signed numbers collected by various means... then you build a 10k list into the linux kernel or into mozilla (depending on how this works exactly -- i'd guess mozilla), and pick one at random. for extra cookie points, add a menu entry (or a/proc file if it's in the kernel) to turn this on and off.
huh? if you get a virus on your computer, you are at the whim of the virus coder. I'd rather worry about the virus trashing my data than about it turning off ID's.
there could be schemes to corroborate it... imagine Intel publishes a public RSA key, and every chip ID is a number signed with that key. you can replay them, but you can't make up your own. and I don't think distributed.net would even attempt to crack the key, because it woulnd't be neutral enough. to make the signatures non-replayable, they'd need to include the current time in them (which the processor doesn't know) and generate the signatures on the fly (which I doubt anyone feels like implementing in microcode), so my guess is that at the very least they willl be replayable.
my take is that, by having it disabled by default, the chip number is as dead as if it had never existed. most lusers wouldn't know how to turn it on, or want to bother to learn, which means that not many sites that care about their bottom line will actually require it. which means that no-one will bother to turn it on either.
To those who claim this is a privacy issue: I suppose you run with cookies turned off to avoid the possibility of people being able to identify your computer, that you fill in fake data in the registration forms so people can't work out who you are. GROW UP!
As a matter of fact, I do just that. I fill out crap in forms, unless I actually trust the people I'm giving the info to (e.g my/. subscription does have accurate data on it). Now tell me, just why on earth would we *want* to cooperate with attempts to get private information from us, from companies who only "need" it so they can better spam us? Do you think they're doing it to help you, or what?
As for software piracy, I'd be very happy if MS's software wasn't piratable at all, but not if the same measure made the average user even more traceable with everything they do on the internet. In fact, I'd have welcomed and these processor ID's, if it wasn't for the idea that software should send them over the internet in any case. just use them locally to check your licenses on proprietary software, I have no problem with that.
nah, Linux is not like everything else, Linux is cool enough that it *will* sustain an exponential rate, until every electron in the universe is running it!
if a socket isn't an fd, how do you select() between sockets and other kinds of things? do they have a general notion of sets of events that you poll on?
you don't seem to get the fact that there are different perspectives on these things. cookies, javascript and DHTML are GREAT for the programmer of web-based applications. they let you do many things more easily, more quickly, etc. the problem is that, from the point of view of the consumer who does not trust all the sites he goes to, these things can also be abused, using cookies to track your viewing habits in detail, or javascript to open more browser windows on their site or with ads or whatever, or making it hard to leave their site. this is the basic design problem that these technologies have: they get the trust model completely wrong, by assuming that you trust the content provider to "do the right thing", when in practice you know that many won't. if you need to trust a site just to see it, something is very, very screwed up.
i find/. works just great with lynx... I'm running 2.8.1 with a couple patches that shouldn't make a difference for this. it's so much faster than netscape at displaying the/. pages that it's scary. in fact, I'll read/. with lynx even when I'm running X and already have a netscape running.
as an individual, I don't give a fuck about my processor having an ID number; I know I use Linux which doesn't send numbers around (and given that Linux developpers are a very clueful bunch, I trust that it won't in the future unless I explicitly tell it to), and I know that the Netscape I use can't send these (if only because they don't exist yet). so if/when the P3 comes out and if/when I end up getting one, I can stay out of the ID number craze very easily, and even hack the kernel, or mozilla, or both, to make up random ID's on the fly. any techie can do that by spending enough time on it (and i'm sure it'd take me quite a while to figure out the code involved, but I bet it'd be a fun project).
now, we also have to understand, that the world is not only made of techies, and that it's a nice thing when the non-nerds can have privacy too... so it's a good thing to oppose things that would make the average user easier to track. the ID won't be magically transmitted, but if some future version of windoze+IE sends it by default, much damage is done.
I've seen (and installed) Linux on a poweredge and it worked very nicely. the box has 136 days of uptime right now... it doesn't have RAID though, so I don't know how supported that is...
is it that common to have debt? borrowing money sounds to me like the thing I wouldnt want to do, unless I was really screwed or basically had no choice.
an audio format that requires you to buy a special, more expensive soundcard? I don't see that having any actual success. my guess is that lemmings will use liquid audio, mainstream stuff will be available on it, and the rest of the world will go on using mp3.
they will track lemmings, but not necessarily you. remember, for any track-able ID to get out to the internet, some software has to send it. the CPU isn't going to write to a socket all by itself. don't run OS's and software you don't trust, and you're all set.
as for tracking, well, they do it now with cookies, so just go ahead an disable them, you can always turn them on for the odd site that you do trust and needs them.
oh, and if you don't like the idea that the net remembers what you said, make sure you stop posting anywhere! I for one don't mind people finding out what I've posted, since I consider postings to be public, so I think services like dejanews are a good thing.
wake up, this is about the KERNEL. the GNU project do a lot of things that Linux (or GNU/Linux if you want) uses, but not the kernel. In fact, they make their own, called the Hurd. And Debian is going to support it one of these days.
wine was known to the Romans, oral sex probably goes back to the dawn of time, and the best food is a matter of taste, but I'd put it either in India or somewhere in the Middle East:)
my lynx asked me if I wanted to accept an invalid cookie (something like one for the whole domain when it's coming out of just one machine), and I said 'no'. no problemo.
Slashdot Mirror
couldn't have said it any better myself :)
i just took a quick look at the diffs... some APIC changes for SMP, some driver updates, the vfat rename bug looks fixed, and one of the small mm diffs from linux-kernel got added (the one that said to bring mm performance back to 2.1.132 levels). now time to compile and run it :)
so does anyone have Linus' post to linux-kernel announcing this? I get the digest, but it wasn't on the one I got a few mins ago yet...
CD prices haven't gone up recently, they've been insanely expensive right from the start. when they started replacing vinyls, CDs were twice as expensive as them. I expected they'd drop signficantly once they were dominant, but they haven't. I don't disagree with your main argument, but suggesting that mp3's have driven cd prices up doesn't hold water, IMO.
well, if numbers are crypto signed, I'd expect sites to pop up with huge lists of valid signed numbers collected by various means... then you build a 10k list into the linux kernel or into mozilla (depending on how this works exactly -- i'd guess mozilla), and pick one at random. for extra cookie points, add a menu entry (or a /proc file if it's in the kernel) to turn this on and off.
huh? if you get a virus on your computer, you are at the whim of the virus coder. I'd rather worry about the virus trashing my data than about it turning off ID's.
there could be schemes to corroborate it... imagine Intel publishes a public RSA key, and every chip ID is a number signed with that key. you can replay them, but you can't make up your own. and I don't think distributed.net would even attempt to crack the key, because it woulnd't be neutral enough. to make the signatures non-replayable, they'd need to include the current time in them (which the processor doesn't know) and generate the signatures on the fly (which I doubt anyone feels like implementing in microcode), so my guess is that at the very least they willl be replayable.
my take is that, by having it disabled by default, the chip number is as dead as if it had never existed. most lusers wouldn't know how to turn it on, or want to bother to learn, which means that not many sites that care about their bottom line will actually require it. which means that no-one will bother to turn it on either.
As for software piracy, I'd be very happy if MS's software wasn't piratable at all, but not if the same measure made the average user even more traceable with everything they do on the internet. In fact, I'd have welcomed and these processor ID's, if it wasn't for the idea that software should send them over the internet in any case. just use them locally to check your licenses on proprietary software, I have no problem with that.
nah, Linux is not like everything else, Linux is cool enough that it *will* sustain an exponential rate, until every electron in the universe is running it!
if a socket isn't an fd, how do you select() between sockets and other kinds of things? do they have a general notion of sets of events that you poll on?
you don't seem to get the fact that there are different perspectives on these things. cookies, javascript and DHTML are GREAT for the programmer of web-based applications. they let you do many things more easily, more quickly, etc. the problem is that, from the point of view of the consumer who does not trust all the sites he goes to, these things can also be abused, using cookies to track your viewing habits in detail, or javascript to open more browser windows on their site or with ads or whatever, or making it hard to leave their site. this is the basic design problem that these technologies have: they get the trust model completely wrong, by assuming that you trust the content provider to "do the right thing", when in practice you know that many won't. if you need to trust a site just to see it, something is very, very screwed up.
i find /. works just great with lynx... I'm running 2.8.1 with a couple patches that shouldn't make a difference for this. it's so much faster than netscape at displaying the /. pages that it's scary. in fact, I'll read /. with lynx even when I'm running X and already have a netscape running.
now, we also have to understand, that the world is not only made of techies, and that it's a nice thing when the non-nerds can have privacy too... so it's a good thing to oppose things that would make the average user easier to track. the ID won't be magically transmitted, but if some future version of windoze+IE sends it by default, much damage is done.
I've seen (and installed) Linux on a poweredge and it worked very nicely. the box has 136 days of uptime right now... it doesn't have RAID though, so I don't know how supported that is ...
it's probably sitting behind a IR link, so it got slashdotted quickly ;)
is it that common to have debt? borrowing money sounds to me like the thing I wouldnt want to do, unless I was really screwed or basically had no choice.
an audio format that requires you to buy a special, more expensive soundcard? I don't see that having any actual success. my guess is that lemmings will use liquid audio, mainstream stuff will be available on it, and the rest of the world will go on using mp3.
yeah, I was pretty amazed, something controversial coming out of Microsoft, and I actually agreed with it!
as for tracking, well, they do it now with cookies, so just go ahead an disable them, you can always turn them on for the odd site that you do trust and needs them.
oh, and if you don't like the idea that the net remembers what you said, make sure you stop posting anywhere! I for one don't mind people finding out what I've posted, since I consider postings to be public, so I think services like dejanews are a good thing.
wake up, this is about the KERNEL. the GNU project do a lot of things that Linux (or GNU/Linux if you want) uses, but not the kernel. In fact, they make their own, called the Hurd. And Debian is going to support it one of these days.
damn, the site is slashdotted. I wonder if it runs on NoTechnology.
wine was known to the Romans, oral sex probably goes back to the dawn of time, and the best food is a matter of taste, but I'd put it either in India or somewhere in the Middle East :)
naww... small countries are the way to go. Andorra is about the right size :-) Now free Catalonia and I'll be happy :)
my lynx asked me if I wanted to accept an invalid cookie (something like one for the whole domain when it's coming out of just one machine), and I said 'no'. no problemo.