Apology accepted Captain Ozzie.

I have been reading Slashdot for a long time, but I have to say that this was easily the best comment I have ever seen here. Well done.

The changes announced today seem to be little more than a delaying tactic to remove the issue of mandatory Internet censorship from the agenda ahead of the election that is expected to be announced any day now. This issue has turned quite toxic for the government; the people who are for it are only weakly so, but the people who are against it are furious and are already organising campaigns against the government on various social media.

I don't think the government can be trusted not to bring it back in a essentially unmodified form after the next election. Vote accordingly.

Sony has managed to lose my trust too. I was a very happy customer of PS1-3, but the retroactive otheros thing has put me right off. I rarely used Linux once I installed it, but that they were willing to retrospectively nuke an advertised feature of their product clearly demonstrated to me that they do not put the customer first. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do start crippling the PSN for non-paying customers.

The dumbest thing about the OtherOS removal is that it is probably not even going to help. Now that the hypervisor has been cracked enough to obtain memory dumps, it is far more likely that further hacking is going to rely on bugs that are found in the hypervisor software itself. These will probably be reachable by any application running on the system that takes user or network input. Think that every savegame loader is foolproof? How about that dinky web browser? Nuking OtherOS just pissed off loyal customers and bought them very little.

Actually, in some places (e.g. Australia), a significant amount of paper _is_ made by chopping down unique old-growth forests. Furthermore, the chlorine bleaching processes commonly used release a substantial amount of toxic effluent. So yeah, you should worry.

Actually there is: you cannot use the Playstation network or BD+ bluray features without the latest SW version.

Thanks for the pointer, I have been meaning to do just that. Here is mine:

You mean like Moody's or Standard and Poor's? Oh, wait...

Larger sensors will always have a noise and sensitivity advantage to smaller sensors: larger surface area == more photon gathering ability. Also, I'm surprised they cite a four-stop improvement; I thought we were within that range of the quantum limit with current sensors already.

If you are randomly generating your passwords and they are of a decent length then you don't really need to do anything. If your passwords contain lower-case letters only (not recommended), but are eight characters long then your million authentication attempts would represent only a 0.0005% chance of success. If you passwords contain numbers and upper-case characters too, then the likelihood is 1000 times less.

Yes. See http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=softraid&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

Most of the speed gains for high bandwidth x delay networks have been realised in stock OpenSSH already. HPN still does better on very fast long distance networks though.

You do realise that we implemented quite a few speedups for high bandwidth x delay networks already. The remaining "HPN" patches make marginal difference for most networks, other than the patch to allow deactivation of encryption that we refuse to merge at all.

Faster still (and a better cipher):

ssh -o Compression=no -o Ciphers=arcfour256 -o MACs=umac64@openssh.com ...

The umac-64 MAC is only supported by OpenSSH AFAIK (though the spec is available to anyone else who wants to). It is faster and has a better security guarantee than HMAC-MD5 (and is way faster than HMAC-SHA1).