I came here for this exact sentiment. Spying has always had a component of risk of exposure, and that is needed to keep spying at a small scale. Drift net sieving of all our communications is the abuse.

Actually, with VERY few exceptions, you can run very old userspaces with new kernels. There have been a few 'fixes' that broke old userspaces (by exposing bugs in userspace that weren't triggered pre-fix), but there's a very strict, never break userspace rule. Sometimes you have to set the correct kernel build time options, but it's expected of a person doing that to know what they're doing, or to trust their distro to know what they're doing.

Look at the recent Linux Wireless mailing list... A few weeks ago, the ability to use 'Wireless Extension Compatability' to control wireless was made unselectable. They have been marked deprecated for YEARS(2008), and are now causing problems with supporting newer wifi features. This was very firmly 'NACKED' by Linus, and the wireless tree has to continue supporting an old, broken, way to control wireless devices.

There are also options you can configure in the kernel like 'COMPAT_VDSO' which work around 1 released version of GLIBC (2.3.3), which was also backported to OpenSuse 9.

I know that it may not have been until the 2.6 era that this became truly 'written in stone' law, but it's always been a pretty firm 'rule'. Hence I can still run a.out binaries on my 64bit system. 'ELF' binaries were added around 2.0 (15-20 years ago?), and have been the default since some time between then and now. Still, a.out support will always live on, because you don't break the kernel to userspace abi.

This has been a perpetual problem on my Lenovo W510. In one release, it did multiple steps, in the next one, no backlight control at all. I add some kernel command line options and get a crappy 4 step backlight. In the next release, I have to remove those options because my backlight didn't turn on at all with them. Now no working backlight controls (using the FN+Home/End combo on my laptop keyboard). I poke in the /sys sysfs mount at the backlight control that's registered, and can control the backlight that way. I've been following the ACPI development mailing list and this is a perpetual topic of confrontation.

There are lots of proposed fixes that would just resolve it, but they can't be accepted because they break userspace. The whole problem stems from the Laptop bios. In some cases, the bios will advertise ACPI methods to control the backlight, while the GPU driver exposes the controls as well. Depending on the particular bios version (and sometimes even bios settings), the keypress might, in bios, change the brightness, then report the keypress, or it might report the keypress and depend on the OS to use the ACPI interface to control the backlight, or it might depend on the OS to use the GPU driver interface to control the backlight. On some of the systems, the ACPI interface is sometimes broken, and on some, there are multiple controls (for display port and all the other possible display connections built into the system) with no clear way to determine which one to actually use. Some bioses report to work with 'Windows 2012' but actually completely don't. Some ONLY work with that, but report they work with older ones.

From what I recall of the discussion, Windows 8 deals with this by punting the actual event handling to the GPU drivers, expecting them to know how to handle the hardware.

Similar bugs can be seen in Windows if your run a newer version on hardware designed for a previous version (I saw this running Windows 7 on hardware designed for Windows XP, an old Dell laptop).

I find it kinda crazy that every single other feature of my laptop works perfectly (FIngerprint reader, color calibration, wimax radio {none of which I actually ever use}) while backlight which seems so simple (Press button, change brightness) is in a perpetual state of brokenness.

That's why NoScript, Ghostery, and FlashBlock are critical pieces of security software.

No... it's made of witchcraft!

That's even cooler than I thought. I knew high power radar was responsible for some bird deaths, but they were directly exposed to very high power radiation. I didn't know about the army tech statistics, so thanks! (And would you happen to have a citation to it I could use?)

It soon won't be, though. But I reckon waiting for this stuff to show up would be kind of a setback for a four-year college degree.

FTFY.

It takes a lot of RF exposure over a very, very long time to increase your chances of getting cancer by a statistically detectable amount. Despite decades of data, (and several very poor quality, highly-biased studies) there is still not a clear correlation between cell phone exposure and brain cancer*. During the course of a police action, the device will likely be on for a few seconds while they recon the inside of the building. For that to cause harm over that short amount of time, it would have to be emitting many kilowatts or even a megawatt of energy; and not only would the resulting burns be ridiculously painful, your heart would short circuit and your eyes would probably boil and explode. Cancer would be the least of your worries.

* If there was a link, cell phone usage is so prevalent across the globe that we should be able to trace a perfect curve that matches cell phone usage to brain cancer mortality statistics. But there isn't even a hint that brain cancer rates are changing due to phones. Toxins? Pollution? Asbestos? Smoking? Volatile Organic Compounds? All those have traceable curves that map exposure to human diseases. Cell phone exposure? Zero.

Just remember: the chicken-wire salesman got the first laugh when he cashed your check.

Agreed, it's clear the use of these without a warrant provides inadmissible evidence today.

So if an open source version becomes available, and people can just print one on their 3D printer so lots of people start using them, that somehow makes warrantless use of these legal for evidence gathering tomorrow? Go, Open Source, go!! ??

Sure it seems cheap, but have you seen the prices on the refill cartridges? Outrageous!

The weighted companion cube is the best cube, because the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you, and in fact, cannot speak. In the event the weighted companion cube does speak, the enrichment center urges you to disregard its advice.

I'm not saying Linus doesn't have talent, or that he's not "nearly always correct", but I am saying that he goes beyond stripping away sugar-coating, and resorts to name calling (I believe the phrase I once read was "unevolved chimpanzee"), and public (not private) belittling of people who makes mistakes. That's not simply "correcting you", that's not straddling the line in any way. That's fully crossing the line to being an asshole, and it's completely unnecessary. And here he is, talking about it again. Being an asshole has embroiled him in side debates about the correctness of it, and all of this effort and stupid side chatter is now nothing but a waste of his time.

There's a very-not-gray area of being blunt: "This code is too abstract and isn't efficient, it wastes cycles with all this dereferencing, and is not acceptable in the kernel." It's not nice, but it's not mean. It's actually easy to stay in that area. It takes no more or less effort than calling someone an insulting name, and it provides a not-hostile work environment that might bring extra talent to the table.

Sorry to poke at the god-like bubble people try to wrap Linus in, but I never see talent as an excuse for a prima donna getting away with unwarranted hostility.

There is not a reason that talent and asshole must always be coupled in the same person. And very few people who aren't assholes like to work in an abusive environment. Therefore, this kind of environment excludes people who have talent but who are not assholes. Of course, a "nice" environment excludes assholes for very similar reasons.

So what we need is what we've got: two distinct environments. One is where assholes with talent build one set of components, and nice people build other components. Occasionally they spit at each other from across the divide, but overall, it works. Yes, people will complain if they find they ended up working for the wrong team, and they may be appalled at the working environment of the other side, but those seem to be individual preferences.

Is one side better or more talented than the other? Probably, but they would unquestionably be better than they are today if they could draw from the full talent pool, instead of restricting themselves to just like-minded assholes or nice guys.

Yeah, I wasn't worried about her safety, only that all the hospital's systems are vulnerable because they have these malware infection hosting devices rolling around on carts.