"It can't be aimed at the tech-savvy crowd, they all know that the "DRM issue" is a non-issue."
Which tech savvy crown would that be? It cannot be the one that I am part of, where people actually care about trying to follow laws (such as the DMCA) but still want to use free software (and therefore have trouble with DRM'ed media because of licensing).
"DRM exists solely to allow playback of HD content (and is nonexistent when such content isn't being played), something with OSS can't do."
And had Microsoft not included any DRM support in its OS, for the sake of its customers, then HD content would not be DRM'ed (or would not be playable on any computer). Microsoft has been working with the content industry for a long time on DRM, and has been a major player in pushing DRM further in the desktop. Free software is about protecting the rights and freedoms of your users, and so DRM has no place in free software, even if that means that HD content from the MPAA will not play.
"Really, the FSF is almost as much of an embarassment to the Open Source community as RMS. If we ever want to see the day of the Linux desktop, we'll have to muzzle both of them first."
No, if you want to see Linux on the desktop, you need to convince people that the free licensing of Linux is a compelling reason to switch in and of itself.
"Wrong. Children learn to work on the platform that's mostly used in Businesses today, giving them the necessary skills to obtain a job."
Which is fine for a vocational school. A university, on the other hand, is not just there to provide job training to its students; it is there to provide them with a diverse education in a variety of fields. When a school chooses to use proprietary software, it is chipping away at the students' ability to explore programming/computer science on their own. Worse, the school is subtly telling the student that it is OK for some knowledge to remain secret (the old, "Well, of course it is not open source, how else could they make money?!"), which is a concept that has no place in academia.
Hey, you can leave Facebook any time you want to, and your information will no longer be exposed to these random applications. There is nothing that compels you to be on Facebook other than subtle social pressures.
"But, every time you install an FB app, it DOES ask you if you wish to allow the app to have full access to your information. So, if you don't feel comfortable, don't click that button!"
As the app in question demonstrates, you do not personally have to install an app in order for the app to see your Facebook information; a friend who installed could give it the same level of access.
By "we" you must be referring to whatever market you are in. From my perspective, the amount of data being processed has increased and scalability is more necessary now than ever before. Large companies are increasingly involved in data mining and other large scale statistical analysis, and the need for computer systems that can perform those calculations in a timely is continuing to grow.
To infringe on a patent, you do not even have to copy the idea. You an independently invent the same system, and that would still be patent infringement.
Algorithm patents are just as bad as any other software patent. The constitution explicitly excludes scientific and mathematical discoveries from the patent system, and algorithms are mathematics, through and through. When you allow people to patent algorithms, you wind up with all kinds of messes, such as the mess we had with GIF images.
The problem with patents is that there are no provisions for cases where two people invent the same thing independently, which is a very common situation. If 10 inventors are all trying to solve the same problem, and all working independently, the patent system guarantees that the work of 9 of those inventors will be in vain. The constitution was written to mitigate this problem by excluding math and science; ultimately, software is a form of math, and should therefore be entirely excluded from the patent system on constitutional grounds.
More importantly, since the MTA is a public entity, its documents should not be copyrighted at all -- like all government documents, they should automatically be in the public domain.
Of course, this is the MTA. During a contract negotiation a few years ago, when the workers were on the verge of a strike, it was revealed that all of the MTA's claims of budget shortfalls were fabricated -- they had been keeping two sets of books, one showing a deficit, the other showing a surplus. When it came time for a contract negotiation, they would point to the deficit books as evidence that they would not be able to afford any raises; when it came time to ask the city for approval to conduct a construction project, they would point to the surplus figures and declare that they would have no problems completing the project.
The kernel affects userland experience. People keep complaining about some network card not being supported, some random USB hardware not being supported, etc. This is all kernel stuff (sorry AST), and it affects user experiences and attitudes toward Linux distros as a whole.
The reason that you do not see Canonical committing these changes to the kernel is that Canonical is willing to ship proprietary drivers with their distro. This is a great band-aid, but it is not a strategy that I would want to rely on; if a proprietary company suddenly decides to stop supporting Linux, as they routinely do, nobody is able pick up where that company left off. We need more open source drivers, and we need companies that are working on distros for the "average" end user to commit some developers to that task.
I am all for avoiding Gmail, but it is no longer possible. My undergraduate university has switched to Gmail for its primary email provider, claiming that running our own email servers is too expensive (when I asked why they did not try saving money by ditching Sunguard's proprietary, expensive, and poorly functioning course management system, their eyes glazed over -- the cost of that system is equivalent to the salaries of roughly 6 IT workers). I just graduated, and was hoping that the university I am going to for graduate school would be different; sadly, it seems that they made the same switch over a year ago, for the exact same reason.
How can anyone avoid Gmail when they are forced to use it? Official university email, some of which is actually important, is sent to my university email address, so I truly am forced to use Gmail, despite my every objection.
I cannot speak for her motives, but this task force seems to be using the threat of terrorism as a pretext to expand its operations beyond the investigation of drug trafficking. The task force also works with the FBI, which has been known to secretly engage in questionable activities in past, as part of efforts to fight "terrorism" or "communism." That is enough to get me suspicious, although I am not sure that I would go as far as this lady did.
First of all, in a democracy, the activities of the police should be public knowledge. The police are not a military force, nor are the police involved with national security or any other work that would require secrecy for the safety of the public.
That being said, the drug enforcement task force that she supposedly endangered needed to have its operations exposed anyway. Take a look at the link to information about the task force -- what was originally a joint effort on the part of three towns to investigate drug trafficking in the area has been expanded to conduct investigations into "terrorism," using the September 11 attacks as a pretext for those investigations. That alone would make me instantly suspicious of the task force, especially having seen what police departments have done in the name of "terrorist investigations" in the past.
The whole time I was reading the response, I kept thinking, "If they need to police photographs just to keep the noncommercial environment, then it is time for Burning Man to just end and for something new to take its place."
However, remote access is a security liability in and of itself. When you allow someone to access your critical systems from a system that you do not control, you become unable to enforce data security policies; if the remote user wants to break the rules and print out some secure documents (thus making it impossible to keep track of who is viewing the data), he can do it from his system, and all of the rules you set up on your system become worthless. For on-site staff, you can set up auditing, you can record their every move, and you can thwart attempts to leak data, but once you allow off-site access with devices that you have no control over, that all becomes impossible. I doubt that that is the case with the person who is asking this question, but in general, yes, a remote admin is more of a liability than a local admin.
Keep in mind that this vulnerability can only be exploited by someone who already has access to the system, and is allowed to execute arbitrary binary code on the system, two hurdles that are fairly easy to correct. Linux is also constantly pounded away at by security researchers, and it is not at all obscure among the security community.
Except that part of establishing secure communications is authenticating the other end, or else you are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack; that is why SSL has a certificate system. If the only intention was to have a means of encrypting communication, then there would be no reason for SSL to have such a complicated protocol that includes identification and capabilities management.
Look at what happened with SSL. There are dozens of different authorities, each with different requirements, and the net result is that an SSL certificate is not the highly reliable security token that it might have been if greed had never entered the equation. This system will succumb to the same problem: everyone will want to get a piece of the action, and in the end only amateur spammers will be thwarted.
Slashdot Mirror
"It can't be aimed at the tech-savvy crowd, they all know that the "DRM issue" is a non-issue."
Which tech savvy crown would that be? It cannot be the one that I am part of, where people actually care about trying to follow laws (such as the DMCA) but still want to use free software (and therefore have trouble with DRM'ed media because of licensing).
So you do not mind if I just break into your car to check on whether or not you stole from me?
"DRM exists solely to allow playback of HD content (and is nonexistent when such content isn't being played), something with OSS can't do."
And had Microsoft not included any DRM support in its OS, for the sake of its customers, then HD content would not be DRM'ed (or would not be playable on any computer). Microsoft has been working with the content industry for a long time on DRM, and has been a major player in pushing DRM further in the desktop. Free software is about protecting the rights and freedoms of your users, and so DRM has no place in free software, even if that means that HD content from the MPAA will not play.
"Really, the FSF is almost as much of an embarassment to the Open Source community as RMS. If we ever want to see the day of the Linux desktop, we'll have to muzzle both of them first."
No, if you want to see Linux on the desktop, you need to convince people that the free licensing of Linux is a compelling reason to switch in and of itself.
"Wrong. Children learn to work on the platform that's mostly used in Businesses today, giving them the necessary skills to obtain a job."
Which is fine for a vocational school. A university, on the other hand, is not just there to provide job training to its students; it is there to provide them with a diverse education in a variety of fields. When a school chooses to use proprietary software, it is chipping away at the students' ability to explore programming/computer science on their own. Worse, the school is subtly telling the student that it is OK for some knowledge to remain secret (the old, "Well, of course it is not open source, how else could they make money?!"), which is a concept that has no place in academia.
I fail.
I am going to laugh so hard when the services you suggested go the way of Friendster and AOL Hometown.
Hey, you can leave Facebook any time you want to, and your information will no longer be exposed to these random applications. There is nothing that compels you to be on Facebook other than subtle social pressures.
"But, every time you install an FB app, it DOES ask you if you wish to allow the app to have full access to your information. So, if you don't feel comfortable, don't click that button!"
As the app in question demonstrates, you do not personally have to install an app in order for the app to see your Facebook information; a friend who installed could give it the same level of access.
By "we" you must be referring to whatever market you are in. From my perspective, the amount of data being processed has increased and scalability is more necessary now than ever before. Large companies are increasingly involved in data mining and other large scale statistical analysis, and the need for computer systems that can perform those calculations in a timely is continuing to grow.
The seem to be coinciding pretty well for Red Hat...
To infringe on a patent, you do not even have to copy the idea. You an independently invent the same system, and that would still be patent infringement.
Algorithm patents are just as bad as any other software patent. The constitution explicitly excludes scientific and mathematical discoveries from the patent system, and algorithms are mathematics, through and through. When you allow people to patent algorithms, you wind up with all kinds of messes, such as the mess we had with GIF images.
The problem with patents is that there are no provisions for cases where two people invent the same thing independently, which is a very common situation. If 10 inventors are all trying to solve the same problem, and all working independently, the patent system guarantees that the work of 9 of those inventors will be in vain. The constitution was written to mitigate this problem by excluding math and science; ultimately, software is a form of math, and should therefore be entirely excluded from the patent system on constitutional grounds.
More importantly, since the MTA is a public entity, its documents should not be copyrighted at all -- like all government documents, they should automatically be in the public domain.
Of course, this is the MTA. During a contract negotiation a few years ago, when the workers were on the verge of a strike, it was revealed that all of the MTA's claims of budget shortfalls were fabricated -- they had been keeping two sets of books, one showing a deficit, the other showing a surplus. When it came time for a contract negotiation, they would point to the deficit books as evidence that they would not be able to afford any raises; when it came time to ask the city for approval to conduct a construction project, they would point to the surplus figures and declare that they would have no problems completing the project.
The kernel affects userland experience. People keep complaining about some network card not being supported, some random USB hardware not being supported, etc. This is all kernel stuff (sorry AST), and it affects user experiences and attitudes toward Linux distros as a whole.
The reason that you do not see Canonical committing these changes to the kernel is that Canonical is willing to ship proprietary drivers with their distro. This is a great band-aid, but it is not a strategy that I would want to rely on; if a proprietary company suddenly decides to stop supporting Linux, as they routinely do, nobody is able pick up where that company left off. We need more open source drivers, and we need companies that are working on distros for the "average" end user to commit some developers to that task.
I am all for avoiding Gmail, but it is no longer possible. My undergraduate university has switched to Gmail for its primary email provider, claiming that running our own email servers is too expensive (when I asked why they did not try saving money by ditching Sunguard's proprietary, expensive, and poorly functioning course management system, their eyes glazed over -- the cost of that system is equivalent to the salaries of roughly 6 IT workers). I just graduated, and was hoping that the university I am going to for graduate school would be different; sadly, it seems that they made the same switch over a year ago, for the exact same reason.
How can anyone avoid Gmail when they are forced to use it? Official university email, some of which is actually important, is sent to my university email address, so I truly am forced to use Gmail, despite my every objection.
I cannot speak for her motives, but this task force seems to be using the threat of terrorism as a pretext to expand its operations beyond the investigation of drug trafficking. The task force also works with the FBI, which has been known to secretly engage in questionable activities in past, as part of efforts to fight "terrorism" or "communism." That is enough to get me suspicious, although I am not sure that I would go as far as this lady did.
First of all, in a democracy, the activities of the police should be public knowledge. The police are not a military force, nor are the police involved with national security or any other work that would require secrecy for the safety of the public.
That being said, the drug enforcement task force that she supposedly endangered needed to have its operations exposed anyway. Take a look at the link to information about the task force -- what was originally a joint effort on the part of three towns to investigate drug trafficking in the area has been expanded to conduct investigations into "terrorism," using the September 11 attacks as a pretext for those investigations. That alone would make me instantly suspicious of the task force, especially having seen what police departments have done in the name of "terrorist investigations" in the past.
The whole time I was reading the response, I kept thinking, "If they need to police photographs just to keep the noncommercial environment, then it is time for Burning Man to just end and for something new to take its place."
And completely worthless once those services are gone.
However, remote access is a security liability in and of itself. When you allow someone to access your critical systems from a system that you do not control, you become unable to enforce data security policies; if the remote user wants to break the rules and print out some secure documents (thus making it impossible to keep track of who is viewing the data), he can do it from his system, and all of the rules you set up on your system become worthless. For on-site staff, you can set up auditing, you can record their every move, and you can thwart attempts to leak data, but once you allow off-site access with devices that you have no control over, that all becomes impossible. I doubt that that is the case with the person who is asking this question, but in general, yes, a remote admin is more of a liability than a local admin.
I would guess that it costs less to outsource this sort of work than to try to keep your own full time IT staff employed. I might be wrong though.
Keep in mind that this vulnerability can only be exploited by someone who already has access to the system, and is allowed to execute arbitrary binary code on the system, two hurdles that are fairly easy to correct. Linux is also constantly pounded away at by security researchers, and it is not at all obscure among the security community.
Cryptographic signatures are a bit harder to forge than that; that is the point.
Except that part of establishing secure communications is authenticating the other end, or else you are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack; that is why SSL has a certificate system. If the only intention was to have a means of encrypting communication, then there would be no reason for SSL to have such a complicated protocol that includes identification and capabilities management.
Look at what happened with SSL. There are dozens of different authorities, each with different requirements, and the net result is that an SSL certificate is not the highly reliable security token that it might have been if greed had never entered the equation. This system will succumb to the same problem: everyone will want to get a piece of the action, and in the end only amateur spammers will be thwarted.