The unfortunate truth is that most people don't actually care about DRM, and the **AA knows this, and knows that even with DRM the discs will sell very well. People half expect the systems to be protected, and half don't care at all as long as they get their music and movies. Only the more educated users can even think that they should be able to make personal copies of these things, but they don't care enough to go out and get programs or media that allow that. This is the unfortunate thing that people like RMS neglect to account for -- consumers don't really care about freedom, they just want entertainment and flashiness.
The law is the law, and no modifications means no modifications. This is a voting machine, not some office computer -- any change might have consequences in terms of accuracy, or the ability of a third party to manipulate the vote. What if the rearrangement makes it easier for me to hack the machine, because it puts the motherboard in a position that is easier for my to connect my palmtop to? I'm sure that is a far-fetched situation, but we can't allow that kind of scenario to go unchecked when it comes to voting machines, especially with the track record that digital voting machines have.
Or that they are not willing to use the provided password utilities in the HTTP standard. Digest passwords are, at the very least, salted. Oh well, I suppose that if it doesn't "look pretty" people will automatically reject it...
This is not really a question of what Apple does with the information, Apple is not out to harm its customers. It is more a question of what someone who is out to get you might be able to do with that sort of data. The FBI has been known to send agents to meetings of anti-war groups, who attempt to get group members to talk about actively fighting to government (e.g., with explosives); information about how members of such a group are using their cell phone could aide the FBI in this sort of activity. If you think that a company would put up a fight against a government request for such information...well, just a few days ago, Slashdot ran a story about Hushmail turning over decrypted copies of member email to the US government.
OK, that is a bit tin-foil-ey. Less conspiracy theory oriented is the possibility of a person with a vendetta, who might be able to use that information to hunt you down. It isn't as contrived as you might think; there have been cases of people being actively stalked by ex-lovers or angry neighbors, and even of people being signed up for thousands of things they don't want by a person who is out to get them. Imagine what a stalker could do with information about what locality you are in, or what stocks you are tracking?
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be worried about this form of tracking. Privacy is more than a right, privacy is a freedom. Once we lose privacy, we start to lose our freedoms -- the freedom to protest the government, the freedom to speak our minds, the freedom to love who we chose, etc. It is unfortunate that the next generation has no respect for privacy, and no understanding of its importance; the "I have nothing to hide" attitude is like a mantra. When told that by using GPG for email and OTR with Pidgin for their IMs they can keep their conversations private, they just shrug, because the effort of configuring a plugin that protects their privacy is too much effort for something that is not important enough. If the government mandated that RSA private keys must be surrendered to the Police upon request, they wouldn't even blink an eye, not for lack of understanding, but for simple apathy about who reads their email or IMs. A lot has been written about this new phenomenon, and the best summary I've seen is this: The next generation expects someone to be watching them at all times.
Or just don't by anything from Apple. Overpriced was always my opinion, and the whole TPM thing didn't seem to concern a lot of non-FSF people...but covert tracking? How many more things will Apple get away with before people stop acting like Apple is a perfect angel company?
XP was not very successful, and in fact, there were still millions of Windows 2000 systems in active use when Microsoft put the squeeze on the cut support for it. The moral here is simple: If a platform works, it is difficult to convince a company to roll out an expensive upgrade. There are still places running RHEL 3, for comparison, even though it is several years out of date. My university is still running Solaris 9, even though the upgrade to 10 would have 0 acquisition cost.
As for the "Linux/Apple" question, that is a poorly phrased question in a lot of ways. Not only could a single conversation about it be "consideration," but there are plenty of places running Linux servers, or in the process of switching from some old NT servers to a Linux system, or whatever. Does it count if a bunch of Windows machines are being used to connect to a Linux or Apple server for some web app, or some other functionality? What if it is a heterogeneous server environment, with a Linux server running JEE, a Windows server handling domain logins, and 4 Apple servers running as a render farm? Those types of questions are poorly worded, and make too many assumptions about what an IT staff might be running or planning to run.
You submit your passphrase to Hushmail's servers, which log it. What stops hushmail from doing that?
You are using a closed Java Applet that is developed by Hushmail; how do you know it isn't sending a decrypted copy for logging on Hushmail's servers?
Hushmail does store private keys, otherwise their system would break. If the private key was never stored on their servers, then you wouldn't get the convenience of Hushmail.
Lesson: don't use a third party encryption service, it is complete bullshit. Hushmail provides nothing more than a fresh MITM attack vector for anyone wishing to look at your email. It capitalizes on people who heard that the NSA is eavesdropping on Email, that encryption can prevent this invasion of privacy, but who are simply too lazy to set up Enigmail (for Windows) or any of the dozens of email programs for *nix. As with all privacy violations, this one is fueled by laziness -- too lazy to learn about cryptography, too lazy to set up secure cryptography, too lazy to think about the implications of a third party encrypting your message for you.
Hushmail always seemed fishy to me. At the behest of a friend, I uploaded my public key to their keyserver, which does not sync up with the MIT keyserver, and which took a huge amount of effort because of their use of a Java applet to parse keys (who the hell thought that was a good idea, when all the other keyservers just use an HTML form?). When I examined Hushmail, I instantly knew that trusting it had to be taken with a grain of salt, simply because of the existence of a web client for encryption. This only validates my paranoia about it, and demonstrates that being lazy about these things is a recipe for disaster.
I don't agree that it is necessarily wrong, as long as it doesn't disrupt the service of the person who owns the Internet connection. What harm is done by me piggybacking on a neighbor's wifi connection at 2AM while they sleep, to check some email? As long as I don't mask crimes by it or interrupt the neighbor's ability to use their equipment, I fail to see what harm is done, and therefore, what is wrong with it.
The problem is that the backdoor is difficult to guess. The mathematicians who figured out the existence of the backdoor could only say that such a set of numbers exists, not what that set is. So unless you have some extra CPU cycles to put towards computing that...
When I installed it, the installer crashed because I had a multicore processor (but the same processor was fine with FC6). The fix was to disable multiple cores while installing, then reenable them. Then, suspend didn't work, then it worked but unreliably, then it didn't work again. Then it was the network card. None of these things were problems with FC6. As everyone else said, Fedora is a development distro, and so stability is not something that can be expected, but 7 was just particularly bad (even the Fedora developers noted this on their mailing list).
Fedora 7 is horribly unstable, and I stuck with Fedora Core 6. 8 seems to be a lot more stable, and I am burning an install disc as I type this. 9 is probably going to be stable as well, and is predicted to be the basis for RHEL 6. If I were you, I would leave 7 in the dust, it is too badly botched...
And what constitutes encryption? What if I used Base64 encoding, which is used for sending binary attachments by email? What if I just make allusions that the police do not understand, but that my recipient does? And what differentiates those from PGP?
I guess you don't go to many banks during the winter. People wear various things into a bank, that would make it difficult to identify them on security cameras, and it really isn't a problem. Claiming that one shouldn't be allowed to wear a ski mask in a bank is:
Arguing against the constitution of the United States, at least as interpreted by the courts.
Blaming ski masks for bank robbery.
Claiming that there is no legitimate reason to be wearing a ski mask, except in the commission of a crime.
I use encryption for my email, and I decrypt those emails in RAM so that there is no record left on my end. This technique could be used for the following, very serious crimes:
Conspiracy of various kinds.
Planning an electronic bank robbery.
Exchanging child pornography.
Sending designs for weapons to terrorists.
But, it also has many legitimate uses:
Sending private photographs to a lover
Sending email through a system that is open to a FIA request, such as the email server at my university (yes, you can request a copy of my email from the government, if you so choose).
Sending email that is critical of the Bush administration (in the context of the PATRIOT act and the NSA program, and the known behavior of the FBI and NSA following the 9/11/2001 attacks).
Communicating with people in countries with oppressive regimes, such as China or Burma (also legitimizes the use of steganographic techniques).
Sending confidential information, such as bank account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, copies of birth certificates, patient records, etc.
And those are just the obvious. Arguing that something should be illegal or otherwise disallowed because it might be used for a criminal purpose, even for serious crimes, is nonsense, unless you have no respect for a person's freedom to wear what they want or have a private life.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, nobody else does. Nobody has respect for privacy, and anything that can keep things secret is viewed with suspicion. Trust has long since expired, as demonstrated by people who packet sniff their spouses to see if they are having an affair. Anyone who insists on privacy is thought to have something illegal to hide.
It is unfortunate, but nobody in America respects privacy anymore. Crawling through access logs shouldn't be happening, but we just don't seem to have enough respect for each other for that.
If conservatives would stop their whining, we could solve our energy problems with wind and hydroelectric power. There is enough wind blowing across the country, on average, to handle our entire electricity load, and then some. Hydroelectric could server as a backup for the extremely small chance of a day where no wind was blowing anywhere. Our cars should be BEVs. Literally, such measures would drastically curtail pollution.
"Now put them in front of a box running DOS 6.22 and well, you can figure it out."
Depends on what you are trying to get them to do. The librarians at the Queens public library don't use a GUI to manage transactions. Everything from checking in/out books to issuing library cards is handled by a console app, and I've seen 80 year old librarians do it with no problem. The keys are plainly labeled on screen. The bar code ready just acts as a keyboard, and enters a single line of text followed by a newline after every scan.
That being said, there is no need for a system with Mac OS X graphics. It wastes battery life, it wastes program code, it increases complexity (and the probability of a bug goes up with it), and all the effort spent on flashy graphics could have been spent on better software design. I once sat down and figured this out: I could do everything I need to do for school using only:
vi
groff or latex
lpr
w3m
ssh/scp
That's it; things like Matlab are running on our Unix servers. That software could be run in 4MB of RAM, which is the cutoff for NetBSD, and is therefore feasible for a modern OS. Prove to me that a student needs more than that.
Global warming is not a scam. To claim it is stating:
You know more about climatology than the climatologists at the National Academy of Sciences.
Models are bullshit, and we should ignore them (never mind the number of models used in the design and production of the computer you are using to read this).
Yeah, some people over-hype the issue, but it is an issue, we should have signed Kyoto, we should be driving BEVs, we should not allow an oil company to own the patent on better BEV batteries, and we should have more respect for our scientists.
"How far would you go building your own computer, and what software would you run?"
I would build the system with 4xxx series CMOS ICs, or ICs with similar power dissipation, so that I could really say I built it myself. RAM might be built from some discrete RAM ICs, rather than trying to do it with pure 4xxx series, just to save time on wiring up the 4MB needed for NetBSD-tiny. Switching speed wouldn't be much of a concern, I'm not looking to run beyond 8MHz or so, this wouldn't be a high-end graphics workstation or something like that. I would do it mostly for pride, and to show that there is legitimacy to the idea that computing without bulky software is completely possible. My idea is a system that has:
A VGA display (nothing too fancy)
Ethernet networking (10BaseT is fine)
LPR printing
LaTeX or Groff
W3M or Lynx/Links
Vi (I'm more of an Emacs guy, but I have no illusions about running it on a small system)
If there is room for more, so much the better! My point would be to build a system that can do everything I need to do for school, with as little bloat as is reasonably possible. LaTeX or Groff would be enough for writing a typical paper, W3M or Links would be enough for web browsing (at least the kind of web browsing I do), and LPR printing would be enough to print to the school's print system. Building a system that could support that on my own would be nice, and would give me some bragging rights (I am an EE and CS double major, so it would be close to home for me).
As for a C compiler...pcc seems like a viable candidate, since I would want to run BSD. The real challenge would be porting the base system and bootstrapping the rest, but on a well designed system, that wouldn't be too hard.
I haven't given much though to it, though. You seem to have a working design going, just needs some rounding out. I would first need to come up with that much...
* Learning experience -- not many people actually get to learn about the intricacies of computer architecture and design.
* Hobby -- the entire PC concept was started by hobbyists, as were great achievements like Fidonet (make fun of it all you want, but it was certainly an impressive feat). If the hobbyist movement died down, the world of PC computing would be ruled by corporations. It sucks for cell phones, and it would suck for computers.
* Pride -- a lot of people like to be able to say, "I built this, and I can use it to do what I need/want to do." I have a friend who is rebuilding an old car with his brother; sure, if they spent the time just working extra hours they could afford to get a new car, but it would be nice for them to be driving around a car that they put work into.
* Lack of reliance on corporations -- right now, we are all dependent on corporate America to provide our computers, at every level except (possibly) our software. I can see the attraction of building a computer that required less dependence on corporations; using 74xx series chips means you are only dependent on the chip fab. that built your ICs, and whatever company built the wiring (likely a small company). Hell, you could go to a typical hobbyist electronics store to get most of the stuff you needed, and not have to worry about Intel or AMD or their whims.
Slashdot Mirror
The unfortunate truth is that most people don't actually care about DRM, and the **AA knows this, and knows that even with DRM the discs will sell very well. People half expect the systems to be protected, and half don't care at all as long as they get their music and movies. Only the more educated users can even think that they should be able to make personal copies of these things, but they don't care enough to go out and get programs or media that allow that. This is the unfortunate thing that people like RMS neglect to account for -- consumers don't really care about freedom, they just want entertainment and flashiness.
The law is the law, and no modifications means no modifications. This is a voting machine, not some office computer -- any change might have consequences in terms of accuracy, or the ability of a third party to manipulate the vote. What if the rearrangement makes it easier for me to hack the machine, because it puts the motherboard in a position that is easier for my to connect my palmtop to? I'm sure that is a far-fetched situation, but we can't allow that kind of scenario to go unchecked when it comes to voting machines, especially with the track record that digital voting machines have.
Or that they are not willing to use the provided password utilities in the HTTP standard. Digest passwords are, at the very least, salted. Oh well, I suppose that if it doesn't "look pretty" people will automatically reject it...
No, but there are plenty who click on links, so whenever CNET can create a 10-page article with 10 lines of actual content, they will.
OK, that is a bit tin-foil-ey. Less conspiracy theory oriented is the possibility of a person with a vendetta, who might be able to use that information to hunt you down. It isn't as contrived as you might think; there have been cases of people being actively stalked by ex-lovers or angry neighbors, and even of people being signed up for thousands of things they don't want by a person who is out to get them. Imagine what a stalker could do with information about what locality you are in, or what stocks you are tracking?
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be worried about this form of tracking. Privacy is more than a right, privacy is a freedom. Once we lose privacy, we start to lose our freedoms -- the freedom to protest the government, the freedom to speak our minds, the freedom to love who we chose, etc. It is unfortunate that the next generation has no respect for privacy, and no understanding of its importance; the "I have nothing to hide" attitude is like a mantra. When told that by using GPG for email and OTR with Pidgin for their IMs they can keep their conversations private, they just shrug, because the effort of configuring a plugin that protects their privacy is too much effort for something that is not important enough. If the government mandated that RSA private keys must be surrendered to the Police upon request, they wouldn't even blink an eye, not for lack of understanding, but for simple apathy about who reads their email or IMs. A lot has been written about this new phenomenon, and the best summary I've seen is this: The next generation expects someone to be watching them at all times.
Or just don't by anything from Apple. Overpriced was always my opinion, and the whole TPM thing didn't seem to concern a lot of non-FSF people...but covert tracking? How many more things will Apple get away with before people stop acting like Apple is a perfect angel company?
As for the "Linux/Apple" question, that is a poorly phrased question in a lot of ways. Not only could a single conversation about it be "consideration," but there are plenty of places running Linux servers, or in the process of switching from some old NT servers to a Linux system, or whatever. Does it count if a bunch of Windows machines are being used to connect to a Linux or Apple server for some web app, or some other functionality? What if it is a heterogeneous server environment, with a Linux server running JEE, a Windows server handling domain logins, and 4 Apple servers running as a render farm? Those types of questions are poorly worded, and make too many assumptions about what an IT staff might be running or planning to run.
Lesson: don't use a third party encryption service, it is complete bullshit. Hushmail provides nothing more than a fresh MITM attack vector for anyone wishing to look at your email. It capitalizes on people who heard that the NSA is eavesdropping on Email, that encryption can prevent this invasion of privacy, but who are simply too lazy to set up Enigmail (for Windows) or any of the dozens of email programs for *nix. As with all privacy violations, this one is fueled by laziness -- too lazy to learn about cryptography, too lazy to set up secure cryptography, too lazy to think about the implications of a third party encrypting your message for you.
Hushmail always seemed fishy to me. At the behest of a friend, I uploaded my public key to their keyserver, which does not sync up with the MIT keyserver, and which took a huge amount of effort because of their use of a Java applet to parse keys (who the hell thought that was a good idea, when all the other keyservers just use an HTML form?). When I examined Hushmail, I instantly knew that trusting it had to be taken with a grain of salt, simply because of the existence of a web client for encryption. This only validates my paranoia about it, and demonstrates that being lazy about these things is a recipe for disaster.
I don't agree that it is necessarily wrong, as long as it doesn't disrupt the service of the person who owns the Internet connection. What harm is done by me piggybacking on a neighbor's wifi connection at 2AM while they sleep, to check some email? As long as I don't mask crimes by it or interrupt the neighbor's ability to use their equipment, I fail to see what harm is done, and therefore, what is wrong with it.
The problem is that the backdoor is difficult to guess. The mathematicians who figured out the existence of the backdoor could only say that such a set of numbers exists, not what that set is. So unless you have some extra CPU cycles to put towards computing that...
When I installed it, the installer crashed because I had a multicore processor (but the same processor was fine with FC6). The fix was to disable multiple cores while installing, then reenable them. Then, suspend didn't work, then it worked but unreliably, then it didn't work again. Then it was the network card. None of these things were problems with FC6. As everyone else said, Fedora is a development distro, and so stability is not something that can be expected, but 7 was just particularly bad (even the Fedora developers noted this on their mailing list).
Red Hat has many employees paid to work on Fedora. The changes in artwork from release to release are an indication.
Fedora 7 is horribly unstable, and I stuck with Fedora Core 6. 8 seems to be a lot more stable, and I am burning an install disc as I type this. 9 is probably going to be stable as well, and is predicted to be the basis for RHEL 6. If I were you, I would leave 7 in the dust, it is too badly botched...
And what constitutes encryption? What if I used Base64 encoding, which is used for sending binary attachments by email? What if I just make allusions that the police do not understand, but that my recipient does? And what differentiates those from PGP?
I use encryption for my email, and I decrypt those emails in RAM so that there is no record left on my end. This technique could be used for the following, very serious crimes:
But, it also has many legitimate uses:
And those are just the obvious. Arguing that something should be illegal or otherwise disallowed because it might be used for a criminal purpose, even for serious crimes, is nonsense, unless you have no respect for a person's freedom to wear what they want or have a private life.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, nobody else does. Nobody has respect for privacy, and anything that can keep things secret is viewed with suspicion. Trust has long since expired, as demonstrated by people who packet sniff their spouses to see if they are having an affair. Anyone who insists on privacy is thought to have something illegal to hide.
That's why there is a 99-cents store that sells Chinese toys right next to the downtown bars around here!
grep your_ip_address /var/log/httpd/access_log
It is unfortunate, but nobody in America respects privacy anymore. Crawling through access logs shouldn't be happening, but we just don't seem to have enough respect for each other for that.
If conservatives would stop their whining, we could solve our energy problems with wind and hydroelectric power. There is enough wind blowing across the country, on average, to handle our entire electricity load, and then some. Hydroelectric could server as a backup for the extremely small chance of a day where no wind was blowing anywhere. Our cars should be BEVs. Literally, such measures would drastically curtail pollution.
Depends on what you are trying to get them to do. The librarians at the Queens public library don't use a GUI to manage transactions. Everything from checking in/out books to issuing library cards is handled by a console app, and I've seen 80 year old librarians do it with no problem. The keys are plainly labeled on screen. The bar code ready just acts as a keyboard, and enters a single line of text followed by a newline after every scan.
That being said, there is no need for a system with Mac OS X graphics. It wastes battery life, it wastes program code, it increases complexity (and the probability of a bug goes up with it), and all the effort spent on flashy graphics could have been spent on better software design. I once sat down and figured this out: I could do everything I need to do for school using only:
That's it; things like Matlab are running on our Unix servers. That software could be run in 4MB of RAM, which is the cutoff for NetBSD, and is therefore feasible for a modern OS. Prove to me that a student needs more than that.
Yeah, some people over-hype the issue, but it is an issue, we should have signed Kyoto, we should be driving BEVs, we should not allow an oil company to own the patent on better BEV batteries, and we should have more respect for our scientists.
I would build the system with 4xxx series CMOS ICs, or ICs with similar power dissipation, so that I could really say I built it myself. RAM might be built from some discrete RAM ICs, rather than trying to do it with pure 4xxx series, just to save time on wiring up the 4MB needed for NetBSD-tiny. Switching speed wouldn't be much of a concern, I'm not looking to run beyond 8MHz or so, this wouldn't be a high-end graphics workstation or something like that. I would do it mostly for pride, and to show that there is legitimacy to the idea that computing without bulky software is completely possible. My idea is a system that has:
If there is room for more, so much the better! My point would be to build a system that can do everything I need to do for school, with as little bloat as is reasonably possible. LaTeX or Groff would be enough for writing a typical paper, W3M or Links would be enough for web browsing (at least the kind of web browsing I do), and LPR printing would be enough to print to the school's print system. Building a system that could support that on my own would be nice, and would give me some bragging rights (I am an EE and CS double major, so it would be close to home for me).
As for a C compiler...pcc seems like a viable candidate, since I would want to run BSD. The real challenge would be porting the base system and bootstrapping the rest, but on a well designed system, that wouldn't be too hard.
I haven't given much though to it, though. You seem to have a working design going, just needs some rounding out. I would first need to come up with that much...
* Learning experience -- not many people actually get to learn about the intricacies of computer architecture and design.
* Hobby -- the entire PC concept was started by hobbyists, as were great achievements like Fidonet (make fun of it all you want, but it was certainly an impressive feat). If the hobbyist movement died down, the world of PC computing would be ruled by corporations. It sucks for cell phones, and it would suck for computers.
* Pride -- a lot of people like to be able to say, "I built this, and I can use it to do what I need/want to do." I have a friend who is rebuilding an old car with his brother; sure, if they spent the time just working extra hours they could afford to get a new car, but it would be nice for them to be driving around a car that they put work into.
* Lack of reliance on corporations -- right now, we are all dependent on corporate America to provide our computers, at every level except (possibly) our software. I can see the attraction of building a computer that required less dependence on corporations; using 74xx series chips means you are only dependent on the chip fab. that built your ICs, and whatever company built the wiring (likely a small company). Hell, you could go to a typical hobbyist electronics store to get most of the stuff you needed, and not have to worry about Intel or AMD or their whims.
If I had time, I might try something similar.
I get it! We're in ImaginationLand! This must be part 4 of the new South Park episodes!