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Comment Re:if only... (Score 1) 235

I'll concur with Galactic Dominator - I used Linux emulation for almost a year as part of my backup strategy, before switching to duplicity. I still use dump (and yes, I'm doing dumps of live, mounted, read/write filesystems - all of them - nightly.

I also use ZFS on my system, and have never had corruption or a failure of any kind. As for double parity mode - I'm not sure what the status is, but as of version 8.0, ZFS is no longer considered experimental.

Comment Re:Jail Breaking Makes sense NOT! (Score 1) 137

Sorry, but what part of "destroys the very security mode. that prevents malware from spreading" when you "break" the BSD "jails" is baloney? That is exactly what is happening when you jailbreak an iPhone. It is no longer secure and can be infected by a Trojan hiding on a Cydia repository. There was a version of Customize 1.3 back in the 1.3 days which was in fact a Trojan.

You can jailbreak if you want but you should be aware that your phone is no longer secure once you do that and any personal information that you store on your device can be compromised. The BSD jails prevent other applications from accessing data that does not belong to them.

Comment Re:A question (Score 2, Insightful) 822

I can't fit into a thimble, and I'm a scientist who is skeptical about global warming.

In fact, ALL scientists should be skeptical of global warming, and every other theory they come across. Blind acceptance of ANY theory is the ticket to scientific stagnation, and eventually dogmatic quasi-religions.

Comment Re:How do they know? (Score 1) 280

people on here think they have somehow been winning this fight to control media, when they have been kidding themselfs. the fight hasn't even STARTED yet...

Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

I can't fucking wait for the fight to get started. I'd be very impressed if their DPI can get signatures on what I am sending/receiving with VPN/SSL protected traffic, and usually at a minimum of 128-bit AES.

When you use hosted torrent solutions, ssl protected ftp transfers, and VPN tunnels back and forth between different locations and devices, it makes it pretty gosh darned hard to effectively inspect that traffic for content. I think the best researchers have been able to demonstrate is figuring out the type of traffic, not getting individual signatures on the content.

This is not very hard to setup. I am sure that there could be thousands of blog sites up within weeks once the fight starts showing people how to bypass the DPI by encapsulating their traffic with some form of encryption.

Of course, our methods of sharing data between each other will evolve to meet this new threats since encryption is not the complete solution for torrents, but seriously, BRING THE NEW THREATS NOW. We need to evolve past this point so that corporations and government figure out that they cannot win period.

Once we get to that point, it will be the end-game. The final decision. Outlaw encryption or let it remain free?

We need to get to that point sooner rather than later because it as that point, the point being the truly logical conclusion of our path, that our destiny will be decided with how we treat communications and the sharing of information in this brave new world.

Comment Re:Debate! (Score 1) 352

The exclusive distribution rights granted by copyright were meant to give you an exclusive right to profit from your work. Copyright law when originally drafted could not anticipate a scenario where copying cost nothing, so they simply assumed that any copy must have a profit motive which as of the advent of consumer electronics is no longer necessarily the case.

Note also that the concept of copyright originates with a machine which could make cheap copies if you wanted many copies of the same thing. Being able to separate "content" from "media" means that the cost of copying is trivial and having a global telecommunications network means that distance isn't a significent issue. The latter being something which movie companies and broadcasters appear to be unable to get a handle on. Except when it comes to broadcasting news and sporting events. Where innovative use of communications technology has long been the norm.

Comment Re:What crime has he committed? (Score 1) 90

The closest US analogy I can think of would involve some variety of "theft of service"

What about DMCA - which is where most copy-protection-removal schemes fall.

It's a pity the guy was concerned with profit, and didn't just post the method for breaking the copy limit on some eastern European web server. Then he'd be (a) famous and admired, and (b) a free man.

Comment Re:A lesson to Google (Score 1) 197


I think it shows how Google lives the 'don't do evil' slogan. They try to be a good citizen everywhere.

Exactly! And in Soviet Russia "being a good citizen" means turning in dissidents. In North Korea it means never ever saying anything bad about the Government. In eastern Congo it means tolerating rape and violence against women. In Nazi Germany.... Yup, it's all just a days work in "don't be evil".

This kind of moral relativism run amok is not "don't be evil". I'm not willing to start saying Google has lost any moral fiber, but the extreme you're proposing is simply wrong. I think you've really missed the central issue here though. Google is a red herring in this whole story.

I don't think the video really has much of anything to do with Google being right or wrong. Google is merely reflecting the moral character of the society, and some people don't seem to like looking in the mirror. This kind of thing isn't going away, and it certainly isn't going to be stopped by turning to a centralized source like Google to attempt to control an inherently de-centralized Internet.

Comment What is a copy? (Score 1) 352

[A record label lawyer] approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.

By "copies", do you include homebrew games that implement the same rules as a non-free commercial game? Would Lockjaw, for instance, be considered a "copy" of Tetris DS?

ObTopic: I've seen torrents of just homebrew. I imagine they'd go away too because Nintendo would object to including them in "Content Distribution" on patent grounds.

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