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The recently released (11th May 2011) Pulseaudio 2.0 lists improved jack detection as one of its features so you will probably be waiting longer for a fix to show up in a non-rolling distro...
Maybe we should drop the term "carbon neutral" and call it environmentalism.
Also, is global warming, if it exists, man-made or not? Does it matter? Environmentalism for the sake of less pollution. I don't care if being "green" stops global warming. Stop pollution for the sake of stopping pollution.
I agree that pollution can't be good, so we should stop it irrespective of whether it can be proved to be actually linked to specific badness like climate change. However, Using the term "environmentalism" is a bad idea - to most people, an "environmentalist" is a wannabe do-gooder with no real grasp of reality. You know, the sort that seem to think we should ditch nuclear power because everyone knows that *every* power station chernobyls after a few years and that we can supply our entire power demand with windmills.
And businesses should focus on being more efficient rather than dealing with "offsets".
The whole offsetting or plant-a-tree thing is a complete fraud anyway. You want to be "carbon neutral", so you pay someone to plant a tree. You get a nice feel good glow. In 10-20 years time, someone chops that tree down and uses it for firewood, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere. Unless you can *guarantee* those trees will be protected over geological timescales (hint: you can't), its all a bit of a waste of time and money. Far better to spend that money *actually* reducing your carbon (or other pollution) footprint.
It's not that they captured some broadcast data, anyone can do that. It's that they systematically drove around and captured A LOT of broadcast data and correlated it to location information, with the intent that it could be mined for business purposes in the future.
"A lot" divided by the number of households they drove passed == practically nothing from each household. Given that they drive around in the middle of the day, the vast majority of wifi networks are going to be almost entirely idle, so they probably won't get anything from them other than the beacon. The beacon packet basically contains the SSIDs of the network (which they use to identify an access point for their wifi geolocation system), and contains no other useful data. Occasionally (probably every one in a few thousand networks) they might pick up something like a UPnP broadcast packet, which might tell you the brand of a device on the network. On networks where someone is surfing the web (again, middle of the day, so not that many), they might pick up a couple of packets from the middle of a session - its pretty unlikley that these packets are going to have much useful data in them, maybe a *fragment* of an email or something, more likley just a lump of javascript or part of an image from some random web page. On networks where someone is torrenting data, they will get a lump of binary data from somewhere in the middle of that torrent, again, doesn't really seem that useful to anyone.
Then we combine the above fact that they would've captured very little data from the average network (even less of any use) with the fact that the vast majority of the networks are encrypted, and you can see that they probably captured very little of value. Even if this was intentional, it was probably capturing the traffic "because we can" rather than them actually expecting to be able to use it for anything.
Scale matters when it comes to the consequences of your actions.
Yes, but I can't see any consequence here. Anyone who thinks google got a serious amount of useful data from this exercise is deluded and doesn't understand (a) how little time the Google car would've stayed in range of each network, (b) how little traffic the average network would've produced in that length of time, and (c) how tiny the proportion of personal data vs. random useless crap is in the average stream of network traffic.
Of just terminate your satellite runs at your cabinet for easy access to your Mythbackend. The frontends can all then just stream straight over ethernet.
Well since we're all moving to tablet and they don't need RJ45s, why put them in?
Because we're not all moving to tablet. Whilst I can see a use for a table for very restricted situations, it would be far too limiting to replace my laptop with a tablet and having both just seems daft, so no, I'm sticking with my laptop as the portable device (and I still have a desktop workstation in my office, lots of screen space is good).
Because whilst wifi is ok most of the time, occasionally you need the bandwidth of cable. For example, I can watch SDTV in my bedroom on a laptop, streamed over wifi, but HDTV is flakey at best (BBC HD is about 20Mbps, which is close to the bandwidth limit of 802.11g. Add a bit of interference and you're screwed). This only gets worse as the population density of 2.4GHz equipment increases.
my next home server will be some micro box that I'll put next to the socket the broadband comes in on.
That's not FUTURE proofing, that's what I'm doing NOW. So tomorrow I expect things to only get smaller and better.
My home datacabinet contains:
- Patch panel for terminating the satellite TV coax
- Patch panel for terminating Cat6 structured cabling
- Gigabit switch (which amazingly doesn't seem to overheat despite me getting pissed off with the noise and disconnecting the fans years ago
- Test server (rarely gets turned on, but needed for my job occasionally)
- Sheevaplug server (essentially my "main server" - handles file serving, firewalling, VoIP, runs Mythbackend, etc.)
- External hard drive (used by the Sheevaplug)
- DSL modem
- FXO/FXS gateway
- DVB-S2 receiver
- 802.11g access point (actually attached to the outside of the cabinet to avoid being in a faraday cage)
- Wallwarts and various cabling oddities such as a microfilter for the DSL
Whilst a lot of this stuff is "small" (e.g. the shevaplug, hard drive, DSL modem, FXO/FXS gateway, access point and DVB-S2 receiver could all be screwed to a wall somewhere), they all have assoaciated wall-warts (annoyingly mostly running at different voltages - everything that accepts a 12v input is already running off a single PSU but there are oddities like 5v and 9v inputs) and generally the mess of boxes and wires is enough for me to be happier just locking it all away in one small wall-mounted cabinet above head height.
I am using WLAN in the place I live. The same one that many other residents use. It is password protected, but once you login, everyone is still broadcasting their data to me also. Is it ok for me to sniff that data too?
Yes, why not? If you are sending data in the clear to untrusted networks you're a complete idiot. Presumably that wifi is either a LAN where all the clients are trusted (so everyone trusts you not to do bad things with their data), or it is an internet connection, which is inherently an insecure network so anything passing over it is liable to be intercepted (often legally required to be intercepted and logged by third parties in some jurisdictions).
In the same way, would it be ok for me to plug-in to your internet connection outside your house and sniff that data too?
Yes and no. The internet is an insecure public network, so I have no real expectation for privacy. *However*, in the case of my hard-wired internet connection, I am not blasting data out into the public environment, so by tapping into it you are either tresspassing on my property (to connect to my network) or you are tresspassing on the telco's property (their copper cables), both of which are crimes.
I mean, it's obviously your fault since you didn't use VPN.
I don't need to use a VPN. Protocols I use that carry sensitive data are encrypted (e.g. ssh, https, imaps, etc). And yes, if I shoved some sensitive data in the clear over an insecure network I would only have myself to blame if someone intercepted it. (Note: if someone captured my credit card details and used them fraudulently then, whilst it would've been my fault that they got the credit card details, they are still breaking the law by using them, so I would expect them to be arrested. If they captured the details and didn't use them for anything illegal then that's just tough for me isn't it?)
And, would it be OK for ISP's and VPN providers to sniff data that goes across them?
Not sure what you mean by "VPN provider" since pretty much all sensible uses of VPN is between trusted networks (so you inherently trust the other party to not do anything bad with your data).
I would have a problem with ISPs profiling my traffic (e.g. Phorm), and I do have a real problem with legislation that forces ISPs to do this (the security services shouldn't be interested in what law abiding citizens are doing). However, as mentioned above, the traffic going through my ISP isn't being blasted out over public space. Importantly: This isn't what Google was doing - they were capturing a few packets from random in-progress connections while driving past. They would've been lucky to get any kind of useful data out of a fraction of a percent of the packets they caught, let alone tie it back to an individual and profile their browsing habits.
I think this is scary and completely unacceptable.
Why is it "completely unacceptable" to capture data that is being broadcast in the clear over public radio spectrum in a public space? If someone wants to protect their data, their router has the tools to do this, just as if you don't want people to see you standing in your house nude you close the damned curtains.
No, I'm not defending Google, I'm defending *everyone's* right to not be penalised for something that shouldn't be considered "unacceptable".
Indeed. Part of the problem with a too exact / descriptive patent is that someone will research said patent, replace one minor piece, and be able to produce widgets that do not violate said patent.
No, a court would rule that a very minor change does not avoid patent violation.
The whole point of patents was to give inventors an incentive to open up their inventions so that the public could benefit from the work after a predetermined period. This is not what happens with current patents - currently the "inventors" (rather: the employer of the inventor) publishes some vague patent, then the next 20 years is spent suing people who come up with anything even close, then at the end of that 20 years the public is left with an "open" description so vague that they couldn't implement it anyway.
If the public isn't going to get anything out of a patent in the long run, why on earth should the government (who is supposed to act in the public's interest) be granting them?
Think of it this way: if you're a book author, and you put out a work that someone else changes a few words to, then claims copyright to, how pissed would you be?
Patents are not copyright. However, your argument doesn't even work for copyright - the modified copy would be considered a "derived work", and whilst the modifier could claim copyright on the changes, the whole work would still also be under the original author's copyright so would not be distributable without the original author's permission.
That's how many patent holders feel when someone does the above. If I spend 300+ hours working out a new, awesome tennis racket that doesn't induce tennis elbow, I'd be pissed if a lawyer took the words of my patent, found some inconsequential component ("cross-stitching"), changed it to something equally inconsequential ("horizontal-stitching"), and started making tennis rackets based 99% off my design.
You'd be pissed, and the court wouldn't allow it since it is a minor change so you'd be fine. However, as it stands, you spend 300+ hours developing a new tennis racket, spend vast amounds of money bringing it to market and then someone with a vague patent will put you out of business even though they're not even making tennis rackets (or if they are, their tennis rackets are nothing like your invention, its just that the vague description in their patent happens to match a vague description of your racket, regardless of the specifics).
To patent it, you must publish it. A magician does not reveal his secrets.
Modern patents don't tend to publish much in the way of specific information on how something works, they're pretty vague (which is why a patent holder can sue anyone with something that looks even vaguely similar). Actually fully implementing something described in a modern technology patent using just the published information is pretty much impossible these days.
Oh, I should add that VxWorks is such a "carrier grade OS" that doesn't crash. My Wifi SIP phone runs VxWorks (UTStarcom F1000G) and it is the most unstable piece of crap you'll find. That's not because VxWorks is unstable, its because all the software that UTStarcom wrote was written by idiots (unfortunately, idiots who ignore their customers when multiple customers ask for support on the same bug).
It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)