why are so many people always offended by the notion of targeted advertising?
Well, for one, targeted advertising implies that we lose some of our privacy; those of us who still think privacy is worth having find that to be problematic. There is also a bit of a notion that advertisers believe we do not know what we are looking for, and that we need them to tell us. I know what I need and what I want, and I do not need anyone's trend tracking algorithms to tell me what I should be buying. If I am looking for restaurants, I can find a restaurant guide. Why do I need a computer telling me that I am looking for restaurants in my area (and why should an advertising company know what my specific area is)?
No of course not! Really! This system would never get used for such an intrusive advertising technique! It is just to better connect you and your friends!
18 months later, Facebook announces a new advertising platform...
...and driving. Take New York State as an example. There used to be a passenger rail line from New York City to Binghamton, which went through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and continued up to Syracuse (where there is currently Amtrak service on a different line). Then some politicians thought that promoting cars would be a good idea, and had an interstate highway built parallel to that rail line.
Now there is no passenger service on those tracks; in fact, 30 miles of track were torn up and sold as scrap metal. The only rail connection from Binghamton to New York City is a single track freight line, which is far too heavily trafficked to be useful for passenger rail, and is a longer trip.
Xorg throws a wrench into SELinux; just ask the Fedora SELinux policy maintainers. I still remember the days when my Fedora system would pop up SELinux warnings left and right because Xorg was trying to do something stupid and suspicious. These days, Xorg just gets exempted from SELinux policies in Fedora.
Also, note that this was silently patched with no announcement of the problem.
It was not "silently patched." It would be pretty hard to "silently patch" the Linux kernel, unless you could come up with some other explanation of your changes to the kernel developer. The patch was noted in the changelog like any other patch. No attempt was made to hide it.
Or did you think that the developers should have been screaming about the patch from the rooftops? This is not the first security bug to patch in this way.
Depends on whether or not the reader can be compromised. Adobe's PDF reader is known to allow the execution of arbitrary programs and code on the target system if you send someone a specially crafted PDF.
Of course, plenty of other PDF readers do not, and on a number of desktop Linux distros, packages are compiled with stack and heap smashing protection enabled, so finding a PDF exploit would be pretty tough. Of course, a lot of people wind up installing Acrobat Reader on their systems despite the available of libre PDF readers in the repositories, so perhaps the point is moot.
Xorg is a mess. Fedora had to craft a special SELinux policy, which exempted Xorg from a number of restrictions that apply to other applications (for example, the ability to unset the NX bit on a region of memory), because not only does Xorg do so many questionable things, but there is no good way to fix it. That, and the fact that Xorg runs as root, make it a particularly weak link in the chain.
if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts.
Except that Google benefits from faster Javascript engines in any browser, not just Chrome. Firefox is a popular browser, and if Firefox can execute Javascript faster, that means that Google's web apps (which I am just going to guess account for more revenue than Chrome) will perform better. It also means that Google could potentially do more, i.e. have heavier Javascript programs, without worrying that people are going to get annoyed at how slow their applications are. How does Google lose here?
Please see the comment I was replying to. OP said that it would be a bad idea to discuss the software; my point was simply that if discussing the software meant that it would be less effective, then it is not very good to begin with.
The comment I was replying to indicated that it would be a bad idea to talk about the system, since it might tip off the Iranian government. My point was that if talking about the system makes it less useful, then it is not very secure to begin with.
The goal of the system is to avoid government censorship. If the government being aware of such a system allows them to be able to prevent it from being used, then the system does not solve the problem it is intended to solve. The second sentence was meant to illustrate this point: the Iranian government will undoubtedly become aware of this system if more than a handful of people use it (can you imagine trying to convince 1000s of people to protect the secret that a particular computer program exists?).
Thus explaining why they have spent the past few months pouring through the documents that major newspapers indicated could contain the names of civilians, and removing those names. And why they asked for the Pentagon, who undoubtedly knows which documents contain those names, to assist them.
The last time I worked for a big corporation, we were given a guide to avoiding sexual harassment. Already, this should suggest to you that "sexual harassment" covers more than you think it does -- after all, we were given a guide to avoiding it, not just told to show respect to our coworkers. The guide indicated that pinning up a swimsuit calendar in your cubicle is considered sexual harassment. So is look at sexy (not necessarily nude or pornographic) pictures on your computer, since a female coworker might see the display and get offended.
Sorry, but ever since then, I have been suspicious of "sexual harassment" claims, particularly when details are scant and the claims come out of a corporation. If one her first day at HP, her first encounter with Mr. Hurd was him grabbing her butt in the copy room and asking her to get naked, then fine, it is sexual harassment. Without details indicating that, though, I would not jump to conclusions.
But better still, don't be a moron and look at anything NSFW (at least not intentionally) while at work
Honestly, I wonder about people who do such things. Not just at work, but also in public places. I was on Amtrak once, and I sat next to someone who had a pornographic picture as his desktop background. In plain sight, on a train filled with other people, and no attempt was made to hide it.
I have no problem with porn, or looking for "racy" clips of your former-actress-coworker, but I would think that people would want to be a bit more private about these sorts of things. Surely the CEO of HP has a home where he can privately look at whatever he wants.
All I hear about are nebulous concepts of (gasp) charging people for bandwidth
No, what you hear are concepts of people being forced to pay every ISP between them and the computers connecting to them. Do you think Slashdot does not currently pay for its bandwidth? Now imagine if in addition to paying their own ISP, Slashdot also had to pay every intermediate ISP as well as your ISP.
If Slashdot did not pay that fee, then what? Slow service? No service, even though they are paying their ISP?
People keep taking about how few broadband choices we have
We can't all live in the big city. Some of us really do not have more than one broadband option (some have none, but that is a separate issue entirely). I guess in your convenient free-market-religion, people who live in small towns are not really people. Or maybe you think that people who live in small towns do not deserve a neutral network, since your precious "free market" does not serve their interests.
Back in the day (early-mid 90's through late 90's), we were scared to death the government was going to come in and tax everything, censor everything, and put all kinds of regulations in place.
Yeah, and further back in the day, people were pissed off about the telephone networks that would not allow you to attach anything other than the phones they licensed. Then the government came in and told them they could not do that, and everyone celebrated that move.
Net neutrality is not government control of the Internet. It is government regulation of ISPs, in the form of a mandate that they continue to provide neutral access to the Internet. It is an assurance the free and open Internet remains free and open. That is all. Stop spreading the FUD.
and again, *sigh*, there is no requirement to use DRMed books on the iPad...
No, and I don't mean to suggest that there is a requirement. However, judging from the tactics that textbook publishers have used in the past, and by the fact that we already have some DRMed ebooks provided through our library system, I really doubt that if the university pushes for iPad textbooks, they will come without DRM. Textbooks publishers have indicated, in the past, a desire to create ebooks that expire or that must be rented; this is certainly possible on the iPad. It would be great if I were wrong, and textbook publishers relented and allowed these technologies to be used for the benefit of the students; I just doubt things will turn out that way.
I fully support having "open" resources, through the likes of podcasting, "iTunes U" in particular, Apple is actually PROMOTING such educational changes.
iTunes U is "open" if you are using Apple's proprietary software, which is only available on the platforms that Apple thinks are worth supporting. I support open resources as well; that means that people can access them using libre software, or proprietary software if that is what they want to use.
Unfortunately, the reason is no longer "to make it easy for people who cannot administrate their own server." All too often, the reason is becoming "to collect data from people and sell it to marketers, by convincing them to do things they were already doing before on a server that is programmed to collect data."
Like so many other things, though, I see this is as becoming relegated to geeks who actually care about the issues, and remaining completely unknown among the majority of people. Case-in-point: email cryptography; most people are not doing it, not because it takes too much effort to verify keys, but because they are completely unaware of cryptography.
You know, there are other ways to do something about the iPad and DRM encroachment in academia than by building an iPad competitor and going head to head with Apple's marketing department. Some of us go out and try to convince our universities that bringing DRMed textbooks to campus would be a bad thing, and that bringing iPad-style DRM to campus would be an ever worse thing.
Or does bringing the issue up with people who have power not qualify as "doing something about it?"
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not all distros are up to date on these things. Are you sure that the distro you use has distributed the update yet?
Then worry about this:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/08/18/1534258/Linux-Xorg-Critical-Security-Flaw-Silently-Patched?from=rss
why are so many people always offended by the notion of targeted advertising?
Well, for one, targeted advertising implies that we lose some of our privacy; those of us who still think privacy is worth having find that to be problematic. There is also a bit of a notion that advertisers believe we do not know what we are looking for, and that we need them to tell us. I know what I need and what I want, and I do not need anyone's trend tracking algorithms to tell me what I should be buying. If I am looking for restaurants, I can find a restaurant guide. Why do I need a computer telling me that I am looking for restaurants in my area (and why should an advertising company know what my specific area is)?
No of course not! Really! This system would never get used for such an intrusive advertising technique! It is just to better connect you and your friends!
18 months later, Facebook announces a new advertising platform...
Then people gave up passenger trains for flying,
Now there is no passenger service on those tracks; in fact, 30 miles of track were torn up and sold as scrap metal. The only rail connection from Binghamton to New York City is a single track freight line, which is far too heavily trafficked to be useful for passenger rail, and is a longer trip.
Xorg throws a wrench into SELinux; just ask the Fedora SELinux policy maintainers. I still remember the days when my Fedora system would pop up SELinux warnings left and right because Xorg was trying to do something stupid and suspicious. These days, Xorg just gets exempted from SELinux policies in Fedora.
Also, note that this was silently patched with no announcement of the problem.
It was not "silently patched." It would be pretty hard to "silently patch" the Linux kernel, unless you could come up with some other explanation of your changes to the kernel developer. The patch was noted in the changelog like any other patch. No attempt was made to hide it.
Or did you think that the developers should have been screaming about the patch from the rooftops? This is not the first security bug to patch in this way.
Depends on whether or not the reader can be compromised. Adobe's PDF reader is known to allow the execution of arbitrary programs and code on the target system if you send someone a specially crafted PDF.
Of course, plenty of other PDF readers do not, and on a number of desktop Linux distros, packages are compiled with stack and heap smashing protection enabled, so finding a PDF exploit would be pretty tough. Of course, a lot of people wind up installing Acrobat Reader on their systems despite the available of libre PDF readers in the repositories, so perhaps the point is moot.
The attack allows even to escape from the SELinux's "sandbox -X" jail.
(From the announcement of the attack)
Xorg is a mess. Fedora had to craft a special SELinux policy, which exempted Xorg from a number of restrictions that apply to other applications (for example, the ability to unset the NX bit on a region of memory), because not only does Xorg do so many questionable things, but there is no good way to fix it. That, and the fact that Xorg runs as root, make it a particularly weak link in the chain.
if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts.
Except that Google benefits from faster Javascript engines in any browser, not just Chrome. Firefox is a popular browser, and if Firefox can execute Javascript faster, that means that Google's web apps (which I am just going to guess account for more revenue than Chrome) will perform better. It also means that Google could potentially do more, i.e. have heavier Javascript programs, without worrying that people are going to get annoyed at how slow their applications are. How does Google lose here?
Perhaps they would consider paying if, say, Reddit or Digg were not being blocked or having their service degraded by some intermediate ISP.
We have been saying that something is seriously wrong for a long time now, yet somehow, nobody ever seems to care...
Please see the comment I was replying to. OP said that it would be a bad idea to discuss the software; my point was simply that if discussing the software meant that it would be less effective, then it is not very good to begin with.
The comment I was replying to indicated that it would be a bad idea to talk about the system, since it might tip off the Iranian government. My point was that if talking about the system makes it less useful, then it is not very secure to begin with.
The goal of the system is to avoid government censorship. If the government being aware of such a system allows them to be able to prevent it from being used, then the system does not solve the problem it is intended to solve. The second sentence was meant to illustrate this point: the Iranian government will undoubtedly become aware of this system if more than a handful of people use it (can you imagine trying to convince 1000s of people to protect the secret that a particular computer program exists?).
Security through obscurity is no security at all.
I strongly doubt that the existence of this system is a mystery to the government of Iran, at least not if it is beyond a certain level of popularity.
Thus explaining why they have spent the past few months pouring through the documents that major newspapers indicated could contain the names of civilians, and removing those names. And why they asked for the Pentagon, who undoubtedly knows which documents contain those names, to assist them.
Yup, they don't care.
sexual harassment is pretty serious
The last time I worked for a big corporation, we were given a guide to avoiding sexual harassment. Already, this should suggest to you that "sexual harassment" covers more than you think it does -- after all, we were given a guide to avoiding it, not just told to show respect to our coworkers. The guide indicated that pinning up a swimsuit calendar in your cubicle is considered sexual harassment. So is look at sexy (not necessarily nude or pornographic) pictures on your computer, since a female coworker might see the display and get offended.
Sorry, but ever since then, I have been suspicious of "sexual harassment" claims, particularly when details are scant and the claims come out of a corporation. If one her first day at HP, her first encounter with Mr. Hurd was him grabbing her butt in the copy room and asking her to get naked, then fine, it is sexual harassment. Without details indicating that, though, I would not jump to conclusions.
But better still, don't be a moron and look at anything NSFW (at least not intentionally) while at work
Honestly, I wonder about people who do such things. Not just at work, but also in public places. I was on Amtrak once, and I sat next to someone who had a pornographic picture as his desktop background. In plain sight, on a train filled with other people, and no attempt was made to hide it.
I have no problem with porn, or looking for "racy" clips of your former-actress-coworker, but I would think that people would want to be a bit more private about these sorts of things. Surely the CEO of HP has a home where he can privately look at whatever he wants.
All I hear about are nebulous concepts of (gasp) charging people for bandwidth
No, what you hear are concepts of people being forced to pay every ISP between them and the computers connecting to them. Do you think Slashdot does not currently pay for its bandwidth? Now imagine if in addition to paying their own ISP, Slashdot also had to pay every intermediate ISP as well as your ISP.
If Slashdot did not pay that fee, then what? Slow service? No service, even though they are paying their ISP?
People keep taking about how few broadband choices we have
We can't all live in the big city. Some of us really do not have more than one broadband option (some have none, but that is a separate issue entirely). I guess in your convenient free-market-religion, people who live in small towns are not really people. Or maybe you think that people who live in small towns do not deserve a neutral network, since your precious "free market" does not serve their interests.
Back in the day (early-mid 90's through late 90's), we were scared to death the government was going to come in and tax everything, censor everything, and put all kinds of regulations in place.
Yeah, and further back in the day, people were pissed off about the telephone networks that would not allow you to attach anything other than the phones they licensed. Then the government came in and told them they could not do that, and everyone celebrated that move.
Here we go again.
Net neutrality is not government control of the Internet. It is government regulation of ISPs, in the form of a mandate that they continue to provide neutral access to the Internet. It is an assurance the free and open Internet remains free and open. That is all. Stop spreading the FUD.
and again, *sigh*, there is no requirement to use DRMed books on the iPad...
No, and I don't mean to suggest that there is a requirement. However, judging from the tactics that textbook publishers have used in the past, and by the fact that we already have some DRMed ebooks provided through our library system, I really doubt that if the university pushes for iPad textbooks, they will come without DRM. Textbooks publishers have indicated, in the past, a desire to create ebooks that expire or that must be rented; this is certainly possible on the iPad. It would be great if I were wrong, and textbook publishers relented and allowed these technologies to be used for the benefit of the students; I just doubt things will turn out that way.
I fully support having "open" resources, through the likes of podcasting, "iTunes U" in particular, Apple is actually PROMOTING such educational changes.
iTunes U is "open" if you are using Apple's proprietary software, which is only available on the platforms that Apple thinks are worth supporting. I support open resources as well; that means that people can access them using libre software, or proprietary software if that is what they want to use.
I am not sure what you mean. That worked on my system without an issue...
Servers exist for a reason
Unfortunately, the reason is no longer "to make it easy for people who cannot administrate their own server." All too often, the reason is becoming "to collect data from people and sell it to marketers, by convincing them to do things they were already doing before on a server that is programmed to collect data."
Like so many other things, though, I see this is as becoming relegated to geeks who actually care about the issues, and remaining completely unknown among the majority of people. Case-in-point: email cryptography; most people are not doing it, not because it takes too much effort to verify keys, but because they are completely unaware of cryptography.
You know, there are other ways to do something about the iPad and DRM encroachment in academia than by building an iPad competitor and going head to head with Apple's marketing department. Some of us go out and try to convince our universities that bringing DRMed textbooks to campus would be a bad thing, and that bringing iPad-style DRM to campus would be an ever worse thing.
Or does bringing the issue up with people who have power not qualify as "doing something about it?"