Comment So which agencies' backdoors are in there? (Score 3, Interesting) 135
Google
Does that suggest at least 4 countries with NSA-like taps into the data.
Google
Does that suggest at least 4 countries with NSA-like taps into the data.
I like the Surface hardware.
The problem is Microsoft's habit of killing support and forced upgrades (remember IE6, Zune, Visual Basic, etc).
At least if they unlocked the bootloader, I could continue to run Ubuntu on it after Microsoft's whims make Windows stop working on it.
I'd happily buy one if it had an unlocked bootloader.
But as it is now, you're buying an expensive brick.
Sad? I'd say it's happy.
So many big companies locked themselves in to "microsoft IE-6 only solutions" - and open source advocates have long cautioned them against depending too much on a vendor that might yank support whenever management changes or quarterly profits dictate yanking support to encourage upgrades.
This will teach them a lesson they'll hopefully never forget; and look for cross platform solutions in the future.
concentrate on securing the network to keep China/Isis etc out of America
Seems that would be redundant with the Department Of Homeland Security's Office of Cybersecurity and Communications: http://www.dhs.gov/office-cybe...
Often at that level, "he didn't have access to" really means "the policies stated he shouldn't access that." It doesn't mean that it wasn't possible, just that it was outside accepted policies and procedures
Or I guess it could also mean "the guy who made the comments was never permitted to know the details of how much access he had".
As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.
"He didn't get this data," Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. "They didn't touch --"
"The operational data?" the reporter asked.
"They didn't touch the FISA data," Alexander replied. He added, "That database, he didn't have access to."
Not quite irrelevant.
Microsoft probably sells Skype data to some law enforcement and intel agencies but not to others.
Info replacing man
If it replaced it, I could almost be OK with it.
The problem is that it didn't - so for half the stuff you have man pages (with pretty good see-also sections); and for the other half the stuff you have info pages; and suddently you have to do twice the work to find anything.
"apropos" command became buried in junk.
Better search technology could help that one.
Might require that FOSS distributions themselves maintain their own documentation.
I rather the distributions stay away from this -- or at most just passed whatever documentation they do add to the upstream projects.
IMHO the biggest *problem* now is that you often have to got to Red Hat's manuals, or to Arch's or Ubuntu's wiki, or to Gentoo's mailing list, etc. to find documentation to anything.
Seems like that means you have a half-dozen competing efforts that all are re-envengint the same documentation; and since many of those distros are commercial enterprises, are motivated not to share and to paywall off their investment. Ugh.
I think that's *half* of where the problem started.
The second half is when various Linux distros started writing their "own" documentation, rather than contributing back to the upstream projects.
Once documentation fragmented like that; every damn blogger started trying to make documentation "his" to preserve his own page-rank; and a bunch of commercial Question/Answer sites saw the business opportunity of trying to own the documentation for themselves.
Once all those were in place -- it seems most of the efforts moved away from contributing documentation back to the source projects, and moved towards commercializing and monitizing "answers" - which is only profitable when the documentation doesn't keep up.
Sad.
Now if only they would push such information to the upstream projects we'd be getting somewhere. Otherwise, that's just one more set of web-pages that needs to be checked.
Pretty annoying if the best way to find out about an application is to have to check the Yggdrasil archives, the Slackware web page archives, the Caldera docs, archives of the Mandrake web pages, Knoppix blogs, etc.
I think Unix (not just BSD, but I include BSD-based SunOS 4.x) documentation from the mid 90's was the best and easiest to follow.
The main thing I miss from that era is that practically everything I wanted to know could be looked up in man pages; and if not on that first man page I tried, in a meaningful see-also page.
These days, seems most software (not just Linux, but for any platform) is scattered amongst HTML-urls that point to long-gone former websites, and youtube tutorial videos.
Now you might say that much of today's software is too complex to describe in a man page --- but IMHO - that's the bigger problem. If people write complex monolithic bloat, writing pretty documentation for it is the least of our problems.
or research
The entire point of the research is to learn enough to be able to stop an outbreak in a major US city if one were to start.
Why do you seem to be advocating not doing such research?
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.