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Comment Re:Learned the hard way (Score 1) 179

There is extraordinary precedent of Apple being open the quicktime server code has a BSD license. The Webkit engine which is basically in EVERYTHING is BSD licensed. Apple contributes code directly to FreeBSD on many occasions. Apple was instrumental in the adoption and maturity of LLVM.

I'm really tempted to link to some insane Stallman rant about how LLVM/BSD and Apple are EVIL because of the BSD licence. But this is slashdot not reddit and I don't want to turn it into reddit.

Comment Re:Priorities (Score 1) 48

Best argument I've heard is that back in the 17th Century India was one of the richest civilisations in the world. Then it was colonised by the Muslims and then the British.

Muslim colonisation was absolutely genocidal - the name Hindu Kush means "slaughterer of the Hindus" and refers to the high death rate of Hindu slaves moved over them.

The British one was no picnic either - famines were common under British rule and stopped when it ended. India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952.

So why does India need a space program? Defence basically. Most of the technologies to launch things into space are useful to launch warheads on a short suborbital flight to fry and enemy city.

And if India wants to avoid a rerun of the last two hundred years it needs to be prepared to fry enemy cities. The world is not a very nice place and only well armed and ruthless civilisations survive.

Comment Re:brighter? (Score 2) 376

If you drive along a motorway in the UK there's a nominal 70 mph speed limit and you'll find you have the following lanes.

Inside lane : lorries limited to 70mph, cars that can't do 70mph, etc

Middle Lane: Most people will do about 80 mph on the speedometer. The speedometers in UK are marked down by 5% so this is really 66 mph. It is rumoured that police won't prosecute people they catch doing this speed in a 70mph limit. I do this and pull into the inside lane if it is empty.

Outside Lane: People do 90-100mph. The police will prosecute at these speeds. Still presumably they have speed trap detectors or a GPS app that warns them. Or they've done something illegal like register the car to someone who doesn't exist.

Now this works fine except for something I call Wanker Driver Syndrome or WDS. A driver with WDS will whizz up behind you in the inside lane in a BMW or Mercedes doing 90-100mph if the inside lane is clear and slam his breaks on to get back to 80mph. He will hang on your tail for a while with his lights on main beam to fuck up your dark adjusted vision and then - before you have a chance to change lane - whizz off in the outside lane which is always clear in this situation. His (and it's always a he) reasons for doing this are obscure since he could just stay in the outside lane. Or drive at 80mph like everyone else, Or switch to the outside lane when he wants to overtake.

It's completely different from the US where everyone sets their cruise control to the speed limit and leaves it at that. WDS suffers in the US get jailed or shot or something.

So the benefit to the laser lights is safety for said WDS sufferer. You'll get a blast of light long before he has to slam the breaks on. It's very much not to the benefit of people who don't have WDS. I.e. the rest of us.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 2219

Don't say that. Imagine if the Russians had said that to Gorbachev when announced Glasnost. Our overlords have announced a period of openness and we should encourage it. Otherwise we'll be back in the gulag on meager rations of Jon Katz stories with a page that takes 10 minutes to load and looks like ass.

Though I'll say one for their attempts at a redesign - they may have looked like ass but it looked exactly the same ass whether you use Chrome, Opera, Firefox or IE. That's technically pretty impressive in that their horrible unusable CSS and Javascript monstrosity was browser independent. They must have tested it on each browser very carefully in order to make sure they same - and admittedly tortuous - user experience was had on each one.

Come to think of it slashdot's decision to embrace Glasnost is probably happening for much the same reasons as the USSR's if you look at the way the number of comments have dropped over the last few years.

Comment Re:Are you certain? (Score 1) 75

It's probably because of low wages too. I remember when I was in Malaysia I was with someone who dropped off some wages for Indonesians working in a Malaysia factory. Now I worked out the hourly rate and when I went back to Taiwan I mentioned it to people who know about things and they were surprised it was lower than someone doing the same job in China.

So a lot of Taiwanese companies like Foxconn are adopting a "China+1" strategy for manufacturing, i.e. factories in China plus one other lower wage country in Asia. Indonesia seems like a good bet for this.

Actually another thing that's interesting is that in places like Indonesia most people have a phone. Smartphone penetration is lower but it is growing fast

http://www.emarketer.com/Artic...

From 12% to 24% in one year. 84% of people have a mobile phone though.

Also if you look here

http://mashable.com/2013/08/27...

There are a lot places with more smartphones per capita than the US (56%). And a lot of them are in Asia - Hong Kong(62%), South Korea(73%), Singapore(71%) being the obvious ones. So the odds are that most Indonesians will buy a smartphone sooner or later. Importing stuff in Asia is a nightmare because of duties and bureaucracy. So one way around that is to make things in country instead of importing them. Foxconn are a contract manufacturer so they make things for other people's brands. It may well be that those brands think that manufacturing in Indonesia is a good bet because of a mix of low costs and the fact that getting a "Made in Indonesia" stamp on the device means they can avoid import duty on the devices they sell there. Also most likely they can get some assistance from the government given that they're building a factory which can employee a lot of people.

Another thing is that Indonesia may have its issues but it is probably easier to get your profits back from Indonesia to Taiwan. I've talked to people in Taiwan who've pointed out that doing that from China is non trivial. The Chinese RMB for example isn't convertible but the Indonesian Rupiah is.

Comment Re:how pathetic is it... (Score 1) 140

Also no ARM processor shipping has the horsepower to do a good job at emulating even a low end x86. I think even a really good JIT engine running on the fastest ARM you can get is going to be slower at running x86 code than even the slowest x86.

Back when Dec was trying to get people to buy Alphas they wrote a really clever piece of software called FX!32. It would take an x86 binary and initially run it slowly via instruction by instruction emulation. However while doing that it would profile the application and use the information it gained from that to work out which bits were worth JITting to native Alpha code. Since at that point the fastest Alpha was faster than x86 it ended up running JITted code faster too. So at one point the fastest way to run x86 code was in FX!32 on Alpha.

Now that was possible because of that speed advantage. However really everything comes down to power consumption. Alpha was a server processor and burnt watts prodigiously even compared to Intel. It was also a very clean design and just at the point where Risc was a very efficient design philosophy - the fastest Alpha run about twice the speed of the fastest x86 and the ISA was so recent that it could be implemented efficiently. As time went by it seemed like Risc seemed less of a net win - e.g. Risc chips with 32 bit fixed length instructions had worse code density than x86 and x86 chips moved to a design where x86 opcodes were decoded into Risc like uops internally.

Now with ARM it's not like that. ARM cores are designed for mobile devices and are brilliant for low power and small core size. However there aren't people selling ARMs that are faster than the x86. In fact in general the fastest ARM has run neck and neck with the slowest x86.

Comment Re:Such documents trove (Score 1) 237

What about this

So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for
them to be published, it is right to publish the names of
politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this
sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio
stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is
also right to publish the names of those people who have been
killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is
right to publish the names of all incidental characters who
themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm.

Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for
example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the
question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave
information that might lead to reprisals, were there some of those?
Um there were some villagers who - who had given information,
um so that is a regrettable oversight, but it is not our, not merely
our oversight it was the oversight of the United States military
who should've never included that material and who falsely
classified it, and who then made it available to everyone and it
then got out."

Bummer for those "villagers" who opposed the Taliban. Or for anyone who operated a radio station that was pro government and anti Taliban.

So he was in favour of publishing names. And he did too, after a Twitter poll of his followers. Up to that point there was no evidence that Leigh publishing the password had caused the unredacted cables to become generally available.

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

The Guardian book revealed the diplomatic files were placed by WikiLeaks on a secure online server in July 2010, which it was agreed would only be online for a matter of hours.

This server held a heavily encrypted file containing the unredacted embassy cables database. Assange had given Leigh the password to unlock this file once he had obtained it, and this password was included in the book - seven months after the temporary file was taken offline. No trace could be found through web links or Google's archives of this file ever being visible through this secure server.

However, at a later stage the same encrypted file and at least one other encrypted with the same password was posted on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network BitTorrent. One of these files was first published on 7 December 2010, just hours before Assange's arrest. In the days running up to his arrest, Assange had spoken of "taking precautions" in the event of anything untoward happening to him.

This file, it was later discovered, was the same file that had been shared with the Guardian via the secure server. It shared the same file name and file size, and could be unlocked using the same password as that given to Leigh.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former member of staff at WikiLeaks who is attempting to set up a rival whistleblowing website, discovered this republished file and shared information on WikiLeaks's security breach with a small group of journalists.

Avoiding the re-use of passwords and avoiding republishing temporary files are both considered basic security procedures among online security experts.

However, the file was not discovered or downloaded by the public. By 10am on Thursday it had been accessed once in the previous 31 days, despite mounting speculation about its existence.

Initial news stories did not give details of the location of files or of passwords. Later, WikiLeaks and some of its supporters published a series of hints about the passwords and files.

At about 11pm on Wednesday an anonymous Twitter user discovered the published password and opened a separate file - not the one shared with the Guardian - that had also been circulating on file-sharing networks for several months.

There was no evidence that any member of the public had sufficient information to find and decrypt the files even hours before their discovery.

In the hours immediately before the document cache was unencrypted, the WikiLeaks twitter feed urged users to download a different encrypted file from BitTorrent, without giving any details as to its contents or password.

Comment Re:Wasn't this a movie? (Score 1) 237

Err no. It's because of the way the Official Secrets Act 1989 works

http://www.headoflegal.com/201...

This language makes me wonder whether the Guardian was facing an "official direction" for the return or disposal of the material under section 8(5) of the Official Secrets Act 1989.

It would be an offence under section 6(2) of the Act for the Guardian to knowingly make a damaging disclosure of any information, document or other article which (section 6(1)(a))

(i) relates to security or intelligence, defence or international relations; and

(ii) has been communicated in confidence by or on behalf of the United Kingdom to another State ...

and (also section 6(1)(a))

has come into a person's possession as a result of having been disclosed (whether to him or another) without the authority of that State ...

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden about the work of GCHQ must I think fall within the scope of section 6(1), having presumably been communicated in confidence by the UK intelligence agencies to another state, the US, and having come into the Guardian's possession without US authority.

If that's right, then, as I've said, the Guardian and its editor would risk committing an offence if it published any of that information which was "damaging". By the interaction of section 6(4) and section 1(4)(a), by the way, disclosure of security or intelligence information would be "damaging" if (section 1(4)(a))

it causes damage to the work of, or of any part of, the security and intelligence services

In those circumstances, section 8(5) would apply. It says

Where a person has in his possession or under his control any document or other article which it would be an offence under section 6 above for him to disclose without lawful authority, he is guilty of an offence if he fails to comply with an official direction for its return or disposal.

This all dates back to when secret documents were not digital - e.g. paper or microfilm. If you had them you'd could be directed to "return or dispose[destroy]" them. And if you failed you could be prosecuted.

Incidentally if you or I rather than the Guardian were doing this the consequences would likely be much more drastic. The police would seize all your computers and get a court order to get access to all your offsite backups. In fact this is what happens when people steal data from their employers let alone from the NSA/GCHQ.

In the case of the Guardian it seems like they've gone through this charade as the minimum they can legally do given that the Guardian has told them that copies of the data exist in the US.

Comment Re:Such documents trove (Score 3, Informative) 237

One of the -false- accusations against wikileaks was their undiscriminate leaking of classified documents.

False?

http://download.cabledrum.net/...

Interviewer: "So come on, redactions are going on at the same time, now there is
or isn't a row going on about redaction, I haven't the faintest clue
whether there is or isn't...?

Mr Assange: No, there's no row going on about redactions at all....There was a
group of reports where although they were not really intelligence
informants there were sort of hotline tips...something called threat
reports comprised one in five of the Afghan War Logs and so we held
them back for a line by line redaction...But what we didn't do was
redact one in five lines, putting black marker through it, we just
removed them, and so it looked like we hadn't redacted everything but
in fact we had redacted a fifth of all material, and this permitted an
attack, a political attack, to come from The Times of London.... So The
Times did a proxy war on The Guardian through us by attacking us....
So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for
them to be published, it is right to publish the names of
politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this
sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio
stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is
also right to publish the names of those people who have been
killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is
right to publish the names of all incidental characters who
themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm.
Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for
example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the
question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave
information that might lead to reprisals, were there some of those?
Um there were some villagers who - who had given information,
um so that is a regrettable oversight, but it is not our, not merely
our oversight it was the oversight of the United States military
who should've never included that material and who falsely
classified it, and who then made it available to everyone and it
then got out."

Assange never wanted to redact but was forced his media partners. Then he published the full unredacted cables on wikileaks' website. Which they denounced

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

In a joint statement, the Guardian, El Pais, New York Times and Der Spiegel said they "deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk".

And before you mention the password that appeared in David Leigh's book that was supposed to be for a temporary copy of the archive

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

WikiLeaks claimed its disclosure was prompted after conflicts between Assange and former WikiLeaks associates led to one highlighting an error made months before. When passing the documents to the Guardian, Assange created a temporary web server and placed an encrypted file containing the documents on it. The Guardian was led to believe this was a temporary file and the server would be taken offline after a period of hours.

However, former WikiLeaks staff member Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who parted acrimoniously with WikiLeaks, said instead of following standard security precautions and creating a temporary folder, Assange instead re-used WikiLeaks's "master password". This password was then unwittingly placed in the Guardian's book on the embassy cables, which was published in February 2011.

Separately, a WikiLeaks activist had placed the encrypted files on BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing network, in the hours before Julian Assange was imprisoned pending extradition proceedings in December 2010, as a form of insurance for the site. Fewer than five people knew of the existence of the site.

As former activists' disillusionment with WikiLeaks grew, one told German magazine Freitag about the link between the publicly available password and files in an attempt to highlight sloppy security at WikiLeaks. The magazine published the story with no information to identify the password or files.

WikiLeaks then published a series of increasingly detailed tweets giving clues about where the password might be found as part of its attempts to deny security failings on its own part. These are believed to have led a small group of internet users to find the files, which were published in a difficult-to-access format requiring significant technical skill, on rival leak site Cryptome.

Domscheit-Berg, often referred to as Assange's former deputy at WikiLeaks, condemned the password reuse. "The file was never supposed to be shared with anyone at all," he said. "To get a copy you would usually make a new copy with a new password. He [Assange] was too lazy to create something new."

Assange always wanted to released the unredacted cables because in his mind anyone who cooperated with the US deserves to die.

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.

David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.

Of course there's a certain irony about this position. After all aren't Manning and Asssange "informants" from the perspective of the US? Doesn't that mean according to Assange's principles they've "got it coming to them" too?

Comment Re:Despite it's name (Score 1) 168

You are also forgetting that a x86 or a amd64 is a RISC cpu with a layer od CISC hidding the RISC. That layer takes cpu space, power and resources (both designing and working).

Look at a die shot of a x86 CPU. Most of the space is cache. The actual CPU is a small fraction. Sure on an embedded system where you care about power and die area ARM makes sense. Switching a desktop or server class machine to ARM suffers from diminishing returns because the CPU is already such a small percentage of die area.

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