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Security

Do We Need a New Internet? 690

Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. "...[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there." A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: "If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I'm hanging out here in v.1."

Comment Re:Let's teach kids to make hardware mods early (Score 5, Funny) 167

When I was a kid, my parents had a 'red button' called a leather belt. It was much harder to hack.

Harder to hack, my arse! When this happened to me, I used to modify the client (my bottom) by increasing the resistance (extra underpants) and return a spoofed result to the server.

Comment Re:DRM (Score 2, Insightful) 214

At least you can keep those patches. I cached the patch the Bioshock installer downloaded and tried everything I could think of to force the installer to use it instead of redownloading it, but it wouldn't have it.

BTW, ten megabytes is NOT trivial when downloaded at 6KB/s, which is what happens to a lot of Australian ADSL customers' connections when the monthly quota is exceeded.

Comment DRM (Score 4, Interesting) 214

Until recently I viewed the vitriol spewed by anti-DRM zealots with mild suprise. I'd never really felt it was all that bad. Then I bought and installed Bioshock. CD keys and mild disc protection I can live with, but those PLUS activation PLUS forcing a 10MB patch download every single time the game is installed took my breath away. After a few hours trying to install it under Wine I was ready to put my foot through my screen.

THAT ruined Bioshock for me. Spoilers I don't really mind.

Comment Re:eye candy (Score 2, Interesting) 559

XFCE is nice, but I think Fluxbox is nicer still, especially when used with XFCE apps. It loads in less than a second but still manages to look rather nice with transparency and stuff. The best bit though, aside from its fleety-nimbleness, is that it allows user-definable, chained keyboard shortcuts (I have {Alt+x, Alt+z} mapped to 'screen -Rd', for example). It's freaking awesome.

I apologise for evangelizing, but I just love it so damn much.

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