Then it was badly set up or a bad choice of hardware, but that's a hardware suppliers thing not a Linux thing. Or you just didn't like it. My girlfriend uses a Dell mini 10 with Ubuntu and completed her degree using it. It is quiet clearly useable and suitable for general computing tasks.
Agreed. Started with Dapper, it's been (net) improving ever since. Finally somebody stopped just copying other companies or previous desktops and tried something new. Took a few years but it's now very usable.
And you have proof that they are deliberately attempting to undermine Linux have you? A signed confession by Mark Shuttleworth perhaps?
It's their product, they're allowed to make whatever choices they like. And goodness, how dare they ask you to give a dollar or two for all their millions of hours of work that they give away for free!
Double points if you've got her parents using it as well.
Also I don't use the forums any more, for useful info AskUbuntu of (incredible) StackExchange fame is where it's at now.
Although there is a general Unix stack exchange, as far as I know only Ubuntu has a dedicated one. Well, that and the Raspberry Pi on which you can ask Raspbian questions.
It also won a following from people who *can* use a command line but didn't necessarily spend every spare hour outside of work inside of one trying to get the GPU drivers to work or *insert common hardware name here*.
So no, no thank you to Linux Mint. Ubuntu works and I like being able to load applications using Super + Search on the Dash or whatever it's called. Which was the only feature I liked on Win7.
Oh no, you don't understand, Linux means no money for anyone ever!
How dare they attempt to charge for their hard work!! *8@
And you are, of course, right. The package manager is still apt or Aptitude or whatever it's called. The Ubuntu Software Centre is GUI built on top of this and it's utterly fantastic. Compared to the original Gnome Synaptic which was functional but utterly incomprehensible to all but the few percentiles of techies out there do this for a living. And you still have the apt- command line tools, which are best for "power" use anyway.
Although I'm happy with the dumbing down if it means stuff actually works out of the box in a sane way. What turned me off Linux based OSes 10-12 years ago was the amount of text file hacking that was required to get a usable system. Gives me more time now to dig down into the stuff I'm actually interested in, building a cool home server full of services I like/need. When it comes to low level tinkering I'm much happier playing with Raspbian on my Pi, because if I break it (and I do) I can still watch movies on the TV and do desktop browsing on the Ubuntu box.
And I like seeing they're take on OS design and not just cranking out *another* tinkerer's Linux, it's not like there isn't enough of those. Microsoft, Apple and Canonical all have three distinctly different designs and that's great. Although IMO anything =Windows 7 was just awful, from a design and usability perspective.
The C stands for Completely Out Of Ideas perhaps?;) It's all about the race to zero now I guess. Sadly the race to the Infinite Inches Screen also continues.
Don't like 3, I live here way too much. Besides, we've got at least 3... wait, no, 2 Warships left. One, admittedly, is the Isle of Wight ferry, but we reckon we could at least keep the Belgians out...
Too slow and expensive. Seize all assets and nationalize them, fire every manager and conscript them into the army. Good lesson for all the others, play the game and the rewards ($16bn) are tremendous but the risks come with catastrophic consequences. >-)
Yep, sadly I think at some point everybody decided private companies would do it better and cheaper. When all it really turns out is they did precisely *nothing* for 10 billion pounds. If they are interested, I'll write the entire thing myself for just one billion. I am literally one tenth the cost, it's a deal, it's a steal, it's the sale of the f*****g century.
It's not so much about the key server, as I was musing that it there appears to be systems in place to have private email conversation that don't rely on manual processes or the service (email) or service provider (insert ISP here) themselves.
One problem that does spring to mind here is NAT'ing. All phones (don't own an LTE one yet, maybe they're IPv6?) have an RFC1918 address, natted behind the ISP. Unless magic is happening, or there's some knowledge I don't have, two phones can't connect to each other, not without a trusted 3rd party. whatsapp may encrypt your communications, but what's actually happening is you're routing all your traffic through a single party who, if they wanted to, could divulge everything.
Could you handshake a set of keys that couldn't be compromised even though the entire conversation is being routed through your messaging app of choice's parent servers? Is that analogous to an SSL handshake over the public internet?
You can make better, more trusted, keys, ones that are proof beyond your word. But think of it like this:
You tell your friend that you email address is dan@mud.com You create a key pair and upload the public part to a key server. Your friend now sends you encrypted emails. Somebody could indeed pretend to be you. But you own mud.com, including dan@mud.com. Those emails are going to your address, which you could host at home on your own server.
At this point in order to hijack that somebody must hijack an awful lot of stuff. And we're talking about groups that, in essence, trawl the unencrypted 'net and coerce public sites into giving your information to them. If you really want to have a private conversation, it appears to be pretty simple to have one.
A whatsapp like application that leveraged such a network would create such a volume a pretty-well-secured information that IMO it would be *too expensive* to intercept in any useful way.
The blocker to this I think is there's no button on a smartphone that sets it up for normal people.
However at the moment we have default blanket unencrypted everything.
So it certainly can't get any worse, unless you consider false sense of anonymity worse.
One advantage of automation is adoption, people will do something if it's easy. They won't do it if it requires effort of their part.
Another thing to consider is they probably really aren't interested in what you are I are doing/saying/thinking,. It's the casual collection of everything that seems to get peoples backs up. If you put in place a system that was a bit tricky to bypass, would they bother?
Er, yes, I guess they probably would wouldn't they? You could always fight them the capitalist way, make it too expensive to try.
So, centralisation. Decentralise then. How could you have a decentralised trusted third party?
They could MITM your public key, substituting their own. But it you look up your public key and see that it's != yours, you know you're been breached. You'd need a 3rd party to do the validation because you can't trust your own connection back to them. VPN providers. They have to return the bogus key to everybody except you, but they don't know who you are. Or use TOR to anonymity the check.
It doesn't seem that difficult to make it cost way more than it's worth to discover what you've been saying/doing....hang on there's a someone knocking at the door, back in a minute...
OK, so assuming the intelligence agencies have the power to secretly coerce all of those public key servers to do their bidding. Which they probably do. Is the only solution out of band? What about authentication? A way to encrypt a message in a way that the recipient know that you encrypted it. Which probably doesn't work because they have that guy's public keys too. There's got to be *some* trusted 3rd party they can leverage. Wait a minute.
Why can't you just check the public key on the server is equal to your own?
There's a button on my Ubuntu PC for creating private/public key pairs and uploading the public key to a ring of public key servers. Then, people can encrypt emails that only I can read because only I have the private key. I've always wondered why this isn't better integrated/more automatic when it comes to email systems (gmail?)
Why not just leverage that type of mechanism? 1) Install app 2) it creates a key pair for your phone number 3) It uploads the public key to one of these servers 4) Anybody who texts you using a compatible app, it looks up your private key and encrypts the message only for you.
Job done.
If you can't fit the encrypted message in 120chars, it uploads the encrypted data to a 3rd party and all it sends is a message ID. Or it uses IP only (like imessage/whatsapp) Or is uses email as the bulk carrier All those IP messaging systems must use a 3rd party anyway as you're always NAT'ed behind a real IP address anyway on a mobile connection. I'm always on a 10.x.x.x address.
It's the same as Windows, you just target what gets you the largest return. Organised crime is a business, just like any other. However there is still the walled garden thing, even if Apple went back up to a 50:50 market share with Android, Android would get targeted more because every Android user can choose to install any application and give that app the permission to email their bank details to Russia.
With iOS they have to wait for a good ol' fashioned buffer overflow before they can grab anything I guess. Unless you get that with iOS too? I don't know I've never owned one.
But the 8:2 logic holds up, when the sample size it that large I'm guessing that's exactly the reason why.
Ultimately it's all moot.
If Apple had 100% of the market share this is what would happen:
The crims would send everyone sms/emails with links to pages that asked them for their passwords an X percent of users would give it to them.
No amount of security or walled gardens get around the fact most of you are really really thick.
You don't have to install Cute Kitty Wallpapers with internet, sms and bank details access. Because that's all this "malware" is, it's not big or clever, 50% are just from the wrong side of the bell curve.
Oh, an I use Linux. On the Desktop. Well, I used to, because who the hell uses a desktop anymore anyway? Have you seen this cute screensaver I found!!!
Read that in school-mistress voice: Like "*tuts, taps foot, sing song voice*, I'm not hearing any gun fiiiiiiiiire" (*stares at shoes*, yes miss, sorry miss, won't happen again miss, *loads gun*)
Slashdot Mirror
*mumble mumble* ...C# has unsigned integers...
Wait, what, why are you all pouring petrol/gasoline on me!? :'(
Fair enough.
But why would I want to change OS and set it all up myself just to avoid Ubuntu?
It already does exactly what I need it to! :)
Then it was badly set up or a bad choice of hardware, but that's a hardware suppliers thing not a Linux thing. Or you just didn't like it. My girlfriend uses a Dell mini 10 with Ubuntu and completed her degree using it. It is quiet clearly useable and suitable for general computing tasks.
Agreed.
But why so anonymous?
Agreed.
Started with Dapper, it's been (net) improving ever since.
Finally somebody stopped just copying other companies or previous desktops and tried something new.
Took a few years but it's now very usable.
And you have proof that they are deliberately attempting to undermine Linux have you?
A signed confession by Mark Shuttleworth perhaps?
It's their product, they're allowed to make whatever choices they like.
And goodness, how dare they ask you to give a dollar or two for all their millions of hours of work that they give away for free!
Oooh, snap.
Double points if you've got her parents using it as well.
Also I don't use the forums any more, for useful info AskUbuntu of (incredible) StackExchange fame is where it's at now.
Although there is a general Unix stack exchange, as far as I know only Ubuntu has a dedicated one.
Well, that and the Raspberry Pi on which you can ask Raspbian questions.
It also won a following from people who *can* use a command line but didn't necessarily spend every spare hour outside of work inside of one trying to get the GPU drivers to work or *insert common hardware name here*.
So no, no thank you to Linux Mint.
Ubuntu works and I like being able to load applications using Super + Search on the Dash or whatever it's called.
Which was the only feature I liked on Win7.
Oh no, you don't understand, Linux means no money for anyone ever!
How dare they attempt to charge for their hard work!! *8@
And you are, of course, right.
The package manager is still apt or Aptitude or whatever it's called.
The Ubuntu Software Centre is GUI built on top of this and it's utterly fantastic.
Compared to the original Gnome Synaptic which was functional but utterly incomprehensible to all but the few percentiles of techies out there do this for a living.
And you still have the apt- command line tools, which are best for "power" use anyway.
pfffft, I *think* you'll find it's RISCOS FTW .
Agreed.
Although I'm happy with the dumbing down if it means stuff actually works out of the box in a sane way.
What turned me off Linux based OSes 10-12 years ago was the amount of text file hacking that was required to get a usable system.
Gives me more time now to dig down into the stuff I'm actually interested in, building a cool home server full of services I like/need.
When it comes to low level tinkering I'm much happier playing with Raspbian on my Pi, because if I break it (and I do) I can still watch movies on the TV and do desktop browsing on the Ubuntu box.
And I like seeing they're take on OS design and not just cranking out *another* tinkerer's Linux, it's not like there isn't enough of those.
Microsoft, Apple and Canonical all have three distinctly different designs and that's great.
Although IMO anything =Windows 7 was just awful, from a design and usability perspective.
The C stands for Completely Out Of Ideas perhaps? ;)
It's all about the race to zero now I guess.
Sadly the race to the Infinite Inches Screen also continues.
Don't like 3, I live here way too much.
Besides, we've got at least 3... wait, no, 2 Warships left.
One, admittedly, is the Isle of Wight ferry, but we reckon we could at least keep the Belgians out...
Too slow and expensive.
Seize all assets and nationalize them, fire every manager and conscript them into the army.
Good lesson for all the others, play the game and the rewards ($16bn) are tremendous but the risks come with catastrophic consequences.
>-)
Yep, sadly I think at some point everybody decided private companies would do it better and cheaper.
When all it really turns out is they did precisely *nothing* for 10 billion pounds.
If they are interested, I'll write the entire thing myself for just one billion.
I am literally one tenth the cost, it's a deal, it's a steal, it's the sale of the f*****g century.
I say we dust off and nuke it from space.
It's the only way to be sure.
But yeah, source code please or it never happened and we want a refund.
True: http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/general/21864047
It's not so much about the key server, as I was musing that it there appears to be systems in place to have private email conversation that don't rely on manual processes or the service (email) or service provider (insert ISP here) themselves.
One problem that does spring to mind here is NAT'ing.
All phones (don't own an LTE one yet, maybe they're IPv6?) have an RFC1918 address, natted behind the ISP.
Unless magic is happening, or there's some knowledge I don't have, two phones can't connect to each other, not without a trusted 3rd party.
whatsapp may encrypt your communications, but what's actually happening is you're routing all your traffic through a single party who, if they wanted to, could divulge everything.
Could you handshake a set of keys that couldn't be compromised even though the entire conversation is being routed through your messaging app of choice's parent servers?
Is that analogous to an SSL handshake over the public internet?
You can make better, more trusted, keys, ones that are proof beyond your word.
But think of it like this:
You tell your friend that you email address is dan@mud.com
You create a key pair and upload the public part to a key server.
Your friend now sends you encrypted emails.
Somebody could indeed pretend to be you.
But you own mud.com, including dan@mud.com.
Those emails are going to your address, which you could host at home on your own server.
At this point in order to hijack that somebody must hijack an awful lot of stuff.
And we're talking about groups that, in essence, trawl the unencrypted 'net and coerce public sites into giving your information to them.
If you really want to have a private conversation, it appears to be pretty simple to have one.
A whatsapp like application that leveraged such a network would create such a volume a pretty-well-secured information that IMO it would be *too expensive* to intercept in any useful way.
The blocker to this I think is there's no button on a smartphone that sets it up for normal people.
True.
However at the moment we have default blanket unencrypted everything.
So it certainly can't get any worse, unless you consider false sense of anonymity worse.
One advantage of automation is adoption, people will do something if it's easy.
They won't do it if it requires effort of their part.
Another thing to consider is they probably really aren't interested in what you are I are doing/saying/thinking,.
It's the casual collection of everything that seems to get peoples backs up.
If you put in place a system that was a bit tricky to bypass, would they bother?
Er, yes, I guess they probably would wouldn't they?
You could always fight them the capitalist way, make it too expensive to try.
So, centralisation. Decentralise then. How could you have a decentralised trusted third party?
They could MITM your public key, substituting their own.
But it you look up your public key and see that it's != yours, you know you're been breached.
You'd need a 3rd party to do the validation because you can't trust your own connection back to them.
VPN providers. They have to return the bogus key to everybody except you, but they don't know who you are.
Or use TOR to anonymity the check.
It doesn't seem that difficult to make it cost way more than it's worth to discover what you've been saying/doing. ...hang on there's a someone knocking at the door, back in a minute...
OK, so assuming the intelligence agencies have the power to secretly coerce all of those public key servers to do their bidding.
Which they probably do.
Is the only solution out of band?
What about authentication?
A way to encrypt a message in a way that the recipient know that you encrypted it.
Which probably doesn't work because they have that guy's public keys too.
There's got to be *some* trusted 3rd party they can leverage.
Wait a minute.
Why can't you just check the public key on the server is equal to your own?
Or public key encryption.
Private key on your phone, public key on that key server network that's used for encrypting and authenticating emails.
There's a button on my Ubuntu PC for creating private/public key pairs and uploading the public key to a ring of public key servers.
Then, people can encrypt emails that only I can read because only I have the private key.
I've always wondered why this isn't better integrated/more automatic when it comes to email systems (gmail?)
Why not just leverage that type of mechanism?
1) Install app
2) it creates a key pair for your phone number
3) It uploads the public key to one of these servers
4) Anybody who texts you using a compatible app, it looks up your private key and encrypts the message only for you.
Job done.
If you can't fit the encrypted message in 120chars, it uploads the encrypted data to a 3rd party and all it sends is a message ID.
Or it uses IP only (like imessage/whatsapp)
Or is uses email as the bulk carrier
All those IP messaging systems must use a 3rd party anyway as you're always NAT'ed behind a real IP address anyway on a mobile connection.
I'm always on a 10.x.x.x address.
Agreed.
It's the same as Windows, you just target what gets you the largest return. Organised crime is a business, just like any other.
However there is still the walled garden thing, even if Apple went back up to a 50:50 market share with Android, Android would get targeted more because every Android user can choose to install any application and give that app the permission to email their bank details to Russia.
With iOS they have to wait for a good ol' fashioned buffer overflow before they can grab anything I guess.
Unless you get that with iOS too? I don't know I've never owned one.
But the 8:2 logic holds up, when the sample size it that large I'm guessing that's exactly the reason why.
Ultimately it's all moot.
If Apple had 100% of the market share this is what would happen:
The crims would send everyone sms/emails with links to pages that asked them for their passwords an X percent of users would give it to them.
No amount of security or walled gardens get around the fact most of you are really really thick.
You don't have to install Cute Kitty Wallpapers with internet, sms and bank details access.
Because that's all this "malware" is, it's not big or clever, 50% are just from the wrong side of the bell curve.
Oh, an I use Linux.
On the Desktop.
Well, I used to, because who the hell uses a desktop anymore anyway?
Have you seen this cute screensaver I found!!!
Come back to England, all is forgiven. ;)
I'll stick the kettle on.
Read that in school-mistress voice:
Like "*tuts, taps foot, sing song voice*, I'm not hearing any gun fiiiiiiiiire"
(*stares at shoes*, yes miss, sorry miss, won't happen again miss, *loads gun*)