Such as people who claim that Apple has raised any sort of bar in technology. When has Apple ever innovated anything, or raised any bar? Apple is good at two things: dressing up other people's technology so it looks like Apple made it, and selling other people's technology once it looks like Apple made it.
As for raising the bar, which bar did they raise? Aside from prices, nothing was really raised at all. Their hardware is equivalent to what I am using, and their software can only compete on looks -- for those of us trying to get real work done, Mac OS X is just another expensive proprietary Unix. Yes, proprietary, take a look at the license agreement before you take a look at whatever source code Apple has released. What real value is there in OS X that isn't in...RHEL? *BSD? Minix? I can think of something that RHEL has which OS X does not: an EAL 4 certification (to be fair, OS X 10.3.6 did receive an EAL 3 certification, but there are legitimate and meaningful differences).
Photography law is a lot different than copyright law. You cannot put someone's face on an advertisement without their permission, regardless of the copyright status of the photograph. You can, however, sell a picture of someone, in a public place without their permission, without reimbursing them or even telling them about it.
Film photographers have almost no use for copyright law, since it is impossible to make a good copy of a print without the negatives. For a 5x7 print, it isn't so tough, but for a 11x16 or larger prints, the only way to make a decent copy is to use the negatives; as long as the photographer hangs on to those, they are safe.
Personally, I don't have a problem with pre-DMCA copyright law. Patent law, on the other hand, is something I take issue with. Patent law should be reformed so that it is not a violation of a patent if one can produce design documents that clearly demonstrate that they developed the same idea independently. It is very rare for someone to develop an idea so monumentally innovative that nobody in the entire world would have that same idea, so why did we develop a patent system that assumes the original inventor is the only one who could ever have had that idea? Why assume that anyone with a similar or identical idea MUST have copied it?
Exactly. Furthermore, if you want to ensure that the encrypted email doesn't arouse suspicions, you should encrypt all your mail, regardless of how trivial or innocent it seems to be. Besides, you never know when something that seemed innocent could turn up later to bite you in the rear.
Maybe it is reasonable in rural areas, where the cost of living is fairly low. We are talking about New York City, where the cost of living is many times higher. $10/hour in NYC is considered a high schooler's pocket change these days.
I disagree that unions need to go away. I went to a photography store recently and there were protesters outside, because the owners of the store had fired everyone when they joined a union. Their base pay prior to joining the union? $10/hour, for janitorial work, no benefits. I am making more as an intern right now than they were making as full time employees, and most of them were old enough to be my parents.
What really needs to happen is that unions need to be restructured. Instead of being massively beauracratic behemoths that exchange favors and get payoffs from large corporations, unions need to be reformed as representatives of their workers' concerns. Unions should also be subdivided when they exceed 2000 members; TWU local 100 (NYC subways and buses) represents 30000 members, and can't get anything done (the last contract negotiation resulted in a 72 hour strike, then a "no" vote on the contract by a 7 vote margin, then a second vote on the same contract).
Hushmail was never safe, not from a cryptographic perspective. Hushmail kept a copy of your private key, AND the passphrase for that key would be sent to their servers. The drug investigation demonstrates why that is unsafe, but anyone with a basic understanding of cryptography knew that it was a possibility long ahead of time.
Two questions: when did "troll" become respectable, and when did trolling require any effort? Trolling is as artistic and respectable as blowjob porn (if you'll pardon the expression), except that the only people who want it are the people who "produce" it. Maybe trolling was a funny prank in the 1980s, but in the 21st century it is an annoying waste of time and electricity.
Why is it so surprising to people when I tell them that methamphetamine is *not* illegal, it is available by prescription from a doctor, and it is even prescribed to children sometimes? Just because something can be *used* illegally does not make it illegal (hint: guns).
The only point I disagree with you on is the implicit assumption that people do get angry when their email is read, or more precisely, that people do actually care about their privacy. Unfortunately, despite my effort to get people to use PGP and OTR, only a small handful of people even take the time to generate a key pair, and of those, only a small fraction really wind up encrypting their email and IMs. The rest? A typical response from them is, "Who cares if someone reads my email?" It is a classic case of apathy.
That is what really scares me. Not that the right to use encryption will be taken away, but that any perceived need for it will be completely forgotten. Privacy, in general, seems to carry almost no value for most people. As another example, consider what happened when I mentioned to some friends that Facebook's employees were caught in the act of reading the extensive logs of user activity on Facebook: nobody even blinked. One person even thought it was totally justified, saying that since she went around "Facebook stalking" people, she didn't think it was a problem if Facebook itself was "stalking" her.
They won't complain to the government. They won't complain at all.
It is a question of money. Frankly, I haven't seen many protest videos made with high quality equipment, at least from universities, because the protesters usually don't even have the budget to make signs. A wireless camera, with enough range to reach someone who won't get caught up in the protest? Not cheap.
Perhaps if it was in the course of a routine ticket. But if it is less routine, like a protest of some kind, chances are that the cops will just use the excuse, "It was becoming chaotic, we didn't have time to make sure we didn't knock the camera over." It's hard to prove that the cops deliberately destroyed all the cameras when tear gas was being thrown.
Pretty much. Cops have a lot of leeway when it comes to knocking over your camera in the course of an arrest or ticket, especially at an event where there is already some misbehavior from the police. Try filming a protest where the cops start throwing tear gas; unless you have your camera affixed to a telescope and you're on a hill far away, chances are that a cop is gonna "firmly grasp" the arm holding the camera, and the camera will end up on the ground waiting to be destroyed. We had a protest a few months ago at my university that ended up like that; only one fragmented video escaped.
Right, it was just civilians killing other civilians with machetes, alongside the war between rebel forces and government forces. I guess it would have been terrorism if the civilians had been killing their neighbors with bombs?
This is what starts to happen when people don't bother to protect their privacy: the notion of privacy itself starts to vanish. If this argument flies, privacy will become a thing of the past, and people who to protect their own privacy will just be labeled as "paranoid weirdos."
I would accept that as the truth if there was a way for me to import other signing certificates, or manually sign packages that I trust. When the secret keys cannot be modified and only the vendor has a copy of them, it becomes clear that the computer is to be trusted by the vendor for the vendor's purposes, not by the user for the user's purposes. Considering that Microsoft has publicly stated that their goal is for software to be purchased like hardware, so that each copy can only be installed on a single system, I have little reason to trust that they have any other goal in mind for trusted computing than to ensure that they can trust the end users' systems.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that rebel squads going around raping enemy women and killing people with machetes no longer met the definition of terrorism. Right, it is only terrorism when there is a bomb involved. My bad!
Well, perhaps you should watch media that reports on something other than the middle east then. Terrorism in Congo has been a part of the civil war in that country since that war began, following the genocide in Rwanda, in which terrorists also participated. In neither case were the terrorists Islamic or pushing any sort of Islamic agenda. Terrorism is not specific to Islam, despite what certain American media outlets would have led us to believe.
Care to cite? I have trouble believing that there are more Muslim terrorists than the number of terrorists involved in the ongoing conflict in Congo, let alone the rest of Africa and South America. The Congolese terrorists are not Muslims.
Actually, most terrorists are not brown or Muslim. Perhaps you forgot about all the terrorists in South America? Or Africa? We don't lock them up in Guantanamo because we don't really care that much about them or the people they harm, but they are no less terrorists than the terrorists from Afghanistan.
And how is that? He did, in fact, gain unauthorized access to DoD computers. Labeling a person who did that as a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant" is not too difficult, especially in an age where we are worried about foreign powers gaining that access. We've put a lot of innocent people away in Guantanamo on terrorism related charges because they were muslims, so why wouldn't we put a man who actually did violate our national security there?
"The guy's lawyers are acting like we're going to flog him and throw him in a dungeon or something."
He gained unauthorized access to defense department computers in the months following the September 11 attacks, and he is not a US citizen. Where did we toss other people who pissed off the DoD? He has a semi-legitimate reason to be afraid.
I'm young, but even I can remember the days when email could be delayed for a day or two. Small mail servers sometimes get overloaded and only have enough bandwidth or CPU time to send an email a few days late (better than never?).
Slashdot Mirror
Such as people who claim that Apple has raised any sort of bar in technology. When has Apple ever innovated anything, or raised any bar? Apple is good at two things: dressing up other people's technology so it looks like Apple made it, and selling other people's technology once it looks like Apple made it.
As for raising the bar, which bar did they raise? Aside from prices, nothing was really raised at all. Their hardware is equivalent to what I am using, and their software can only compete on looks -- for those of us trying to get real work done, Mac OS X is just another expensive proprietary Unix. Yes, proprietary, take a look at the license agreement before you take a look at whatever source code Apple has released. What real value is there in OS X that isn't in...RHEL? *BSD? Minix? I can think of something that RHEL has which OS X does not: an EAL 4 certification (to be fair, OS X 10.3.6 did receive an EAL 3 certification, but there are legitimate and meaningful differences).
Photography law is a lot different than copyright law. You cannot put someone's face on an advertisement without their permission, regardless of the copyright status of the photograph. You can, however, sell a picture of someone, in a public place without their permission, without reimbursing them or even telling them about it.
Film photographers have almost no use for copyright law, since it is impossible to make a good copy of a print without the negatives. For a 5x7 print, it isn't so tough, but for a 11x16 or larger prints, the only way to make a decent copy is to use the negatives; as long as the photographer hangs on to those, they are safe.
Personally, I don't have a problem with pre-DMCA copyright law. Patent law, on the other hand, is something I take issue with. Patent law should be reformed so that it is not a violation of a patent if one can produce design documents that clearly demonstrate that they developed the same idea independently. It is very rare for someone to develop an idea so monumentally innovative that nobody in the entire world would have that same idea, so why did we develop a patent system that assumes the original inventor is the only one who could ever have had that idea? Why assume that anyone with a similar or identical idea MUST have copied it?
Exactly. Furthermore, if you want to ensure that the encrypted email doesn't arouse suspicions, you should encrypt all your mail, regardless of how trivial or innocent it seems to be. Besides, you never know when something that seemed innocent could turn up later to bite you in the rear.
Maybe it is reasonable in rural areas, where the cost of living is fairly low. We are talking about New York City, where the cost of living is many times higher. $10/hour in NYC is considered a high schooler's pocket change these days.
I disagree that unions need to go away. I went to a photography store recently and there were protesters outside, because the owners of the store had fired everyone when they joined a union. Their base pay prior to joining the union? $10/hour, for janitorial work, no benefits. I am making more as an intern right now than they were making as full time employees, and most of them were old enough to be my parents.
What really needs to happen is that unions need to be restructured. Instead of being massively beauracratic behemoths that exchange favors and get payoffs from large corporations, unions need to be reformed as representatives of their workers' concerns. Unions should also be subdivided when they exceed 2000 members; TWU local 100 (NYC subways and buses) represents 30000 members, and can't get anything done (the last contract negotiation resulted in a 72 hour strike, then a "no" vote on the contract by a 7 vote margin, then a second vote on the same contract).
...a 19 year old Finnish student has embarked on a project to learn more about his computer by writing a kernel.
No really though, I remember reading about this or something similar years ago.
Uh...wow? Maybe they can join forces with the RIAA?
Sorry, it's the best I can do. This story is...I'm just...wow...
Hushmail was never safe, not from a cryptographic perspective. Hushmail kept a copy of your private key, AND the passphrase for that key would be sent to their servers. The drug investigation demonstrates why that is unsafe, but anyone with a basic understanding of cryptography knew that it was a possibility long ahead of time.
It is a matter of convenience trumping security.
Two questions: when did "troll" become respectable, and when did trolling require any effort? Trolling is as artistic and respectable as blowjob porn (if you'll pardon the expression), except that the only people who want it are the people who "produce" it. Maybe trolling was a funny prank in the 1980s, but in the 21st century it is an annoying waste of time and electricity.
Why is it so surprising to people when I tell them that methamphetamine is *not* illegal, it is available by prescription from a doctor, and it is even prescribed to children sometimes? Just because something can be *used* illegally does not make it illegal (hint: guns).
The only point I disagree with you on is the implicit assumption that people do get angry when their email is read, or more precisely, that people do actually care about their privacy. Unfortunately, despite my effort to get people to use PGP and OTR, only a small handful of people even take the time to generate a key pair, and of those, only a small fraction really wind up encrypting their email and IMs. The rest? A typical response from them is, "Who cares if someone reads my email?" It is a classic case of apathy.
That is what really scares me. Not that the right to use encryption will be taken away, but that any perceived need for it will be completely forgotten. Privacy, in general, seems to carry almost no value for most people. As another example, consider what happened when I mentioned to some friends that Facebook's employees were caught in the act of reading the extensive logs of user activity on Facebook: nobody even blinked. One person even thought it was totally justified, saying that since she went around "Facebook stalking" people, she didn't think it was a problem if Facebook itself was "stalking" her.
They won't complain to the government. They won't complain at all.
It is a question of money. Frankly, I haven't seen many protest videos made with high quality equipment, at least from universities, because the protesters usually don't even have the budget to make signs. A wireless camera, with enough range to reach someone who won't get caught up in the protest? Not cheap.
Perhaps if it was in the course of a routine ticket. But if it is less routine, like a protest of some kind, chances are that the cops will just use the excuse, "It was becoming chaotic, we didn't have time to make sure we didn't knock the camera over." It's hard to prove that the cops deliberately destroyed all the cameras when tear gas was being thrown.
Pretty much. Cops have a lot of leeway when it comes to knocking over your camera in the course of an arrest or ticket, especially at an event where there is already some misbehavior from the police. Try filming a protest where the cops start throwing tear gas; unless you have your camera affixed to a telescope and you're on a hill far away, chances are that a cop is gonna "firmly grasp" the arm holding the camera, and the camera will end up on the ground waiting to be destroyed. We had a protest a few months ago at my university that ended up like that; only one fragmented video escaped.
Right, it was just civilians killing other civilians with machetes, alongside the war between rebel forces and government forces. I guess it would have been terrorism if the civilians had been killing their neighbors with bombs?
This is what starts to happen when people don't bother to protect their privacy: the notion of privacy itself starts to vanish. If this argument flies, privacy will become a thing of the past, and people who to protect their own privacy will just be labeled as "paranoid weirdos."
I would accept that as the truth if there was a way for me to import other signing certificates, or manually sign packages that I trust. When the secret keys cannot be modified and only the vendor has a copy of them, it becomes clear that the computer is to be trusted by the vendor for the vendor's purposes, not by the user for the user's purposes. Considering that Microsoft has publicly stated that their goal is for software to be purchased like hardware, so that each copy can only be installed on a single system, I have little reason to trust that they have any other goal in mind for trusted computing than to ensure that they can trust the end users' systems.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that rebel squads going around raping enemy women and killing people with machetes no longer met the definition of terrorism. Right, it is only terrorism when there is a bomb involved. My bad!
Well, perhaps you should watch media that reports on something other than the middle east then. Terrorism in Congo has been a part of the civil war in that country since that war began, following the genocide in Rwanda, in which terrorists also participated. In neither case were the terrorists Islamic or pushing any sort of Islamic agenda. Terrorism is not specific to Islam, despite what certain American media outlets would have led us to believe.
Care to cite? I have trouble believing that there are more Muslim terrorists than the number of terrorists involved in the ongoing conflict in Congo, let alone the rest of Africa and South America. The Congolese terrorists are not Muslims.
Actually, most terrorists are not brown or Muslim. Perhaps you forgot about all the terrorists in South America? Or Africa? We don't lock them up in Guantanamo because we don't really care that much about them or the people they harm, but they are no less terrorists than the terrorists from Afghanistan.
And how is that? He did, in fact, gain unauthorized access to DoD computers. Labeling a person who did that as a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant" is not too difficult, especially in an age where we are worried about foreign powers gaining that access. We've put a lot of innocent people away in Guantanamo on terrorism related charges because they were muslims, so why wouldn't we put a man who actually did violate our national security there?
"The guy's lawyers are acting like we're going to flog him and throw him in a dungeon or something."
He gained unauthorized access to defense department computers in the months following the September 11 attacks, and he is not a US citizen. Where did we toss other people who pissed off the DoD? He has a semi-legitimate reason to be afraid.
Didn't he just use Microsoft's Remote Desktop to "hack into" those systems?
I'm young, but even I can remember the days when email could be delayed for a day or two. Small mail servers sometimes get overloaded and only have enough bandwidth or CPU time to send an email a few days late (better than never?).