What a stupid statement. "They only knew what they were doing those times they did well." Most of their projects, with the exception of search, started out as disparate uncoordinated groups with no coherent strategy.

The reason we have rules of war is so we can react with some degree of international cohesion when they are broken. It's a deterrent for the little guys: follow the rules or the wrath of god will come down on you. Supporting you will be poison and in all likelihood you have damned your cause.

Honestly it seems like a win-win for humanity. The premise is, of course, that larger nations have the incentive and wherewithal to avoid total war. This cornerstone becomes the foundation to pull other nations without the maturity or international presence up to these standards.

Obviously if any nation, alliance, or cohesive group is adequately threatened they will never pull total war off the table. Rules of war / engagement help keep it off the table in areas where armed conflict is a threat with a much higher frequency than the first world. Frankly, autonomy and sovereignty have not existed since economies globalized, and that's also probably a good thing. We're moving towards a humane and cohesive world, but we're not there yet, and constraining war is a triage until we are.

A world without war is not a pipe dream, and, I would argue, an inevitability as countermeasures and technology continue growing in destructive power and ease of acquisition. However, looking at the state of the first world, much less its trading partners and the rest of humanity, we all have a lot of rapid cultural development and normalization to go through before we're ready.

The Internet will be the herald of all of this. So, tech world, keep up the good work.

I would personally disagree that blackmailing even 350 people is worse than murder. Regardless, I think OP's point still stands. Things like murder are in a completely different category of crime.

It's worth mentioning that the critical component here is using client-executed trusted/sandboxed code (in this case, JavaScript) to exhaust the memory space. The code must be able to allocate memory, and it must be able to identify the virtual address of the memory that it allocated, else when it begins opening a hole for ASLR determinism, the shellcode won't know where to target.

Any client-side language that can allocate arbitrary memory and identify the allocated address should be able to be used in this capacity. JavaScript is identified in the PoC, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if VBA can do the job in Office (e.g., Word/Excel/Outlook/etc.), and if other trusted/sandboxed codes could do the job in other languages (Java, C#, etc.).

An obvious defeat is to either have application-enforced restrictions on embedded language allocations (e.g., I can allocate up to 10G of memory, but my embedded script can only allocate 1G) to guarantee the presence of some random areas. Another option would be to allocate dynamically-loaded library memory in a different restriction context than standard process memory so that their respective allocations don't draw from the same pool.

Not much else to do but agree. However, you should really give KDE4 another shot. Ever since KDE4.5 or so, it has been a fully-usable (albeit heavy) desktop environment. It's achieved the level of maturity and configurability I've always associated with the KDE3 line, and has added several features that are genuinely useful (such as window grouping, tiling support, a full semantic desktop, and several powerful UI scripting techniques), as well as the traditional KDE integration technologies. After some early 4.x struggles, I'm once again in love with the full KDE user experience.

I've done my tour of GNOME2, XFCE, KDE3, Enlightenment, xmonad, GNOME3, Unity, and KDE4, and I would, for primary desktop purposes, choose KDE4 without hesitation at the moment. Definitely worth giving it another shot if you haven't already.

So, as an aside, isn't the entire point of a tech aggregator to provide a technical summary? Not just copy and paste the article's summary... anyway...

FTFA:

In other words, Intel has added new capabilities to Clover Trail that allow enhanced power management, and Linux doesn't currently support it. Anyone who thinks that this will continue to be the case for much longer is a moron, especially if Intel continues to release its architecture datasheets, which we have no reason to think that they won't.

The article really says: It can't run Linux because there's no support for it in Linux, and there's no support for it because it's literally brand-new.

It really doesn't matter what I think. This is how the standard was designed and implemented, and IE using it in its current form is clearly abuse. Apache's solution not only restores the (admittedly little) value that the tag has. It's also one of the only ways Apache has to actually take a stand against MS's abuse.

If DNT ever does get worked into law such that ignoring it carries fines and/or legal penalties, then its value ceases to be derived solely from web sites' acknowledgement of a user's explicit request and, instead, becomes largely derived from the threat of financial penalties. This, being a much stabler source of "power" (although, you know, rights and all), would nullify Apache's argument for their response and they should (and, I would bet, would) remove their new behavior.

Until then, it is what it is, and their response is very justifiable under those conditions. MS has turned a well-intentioned standard based around a gentleman's agreement into a marketing bullet at the standard's expanse, and Apache is fighting back. Props to them.

This is not an attack on privacy. This is the only valid option.

If you look at the details of the Do Not Track Header, you'll see that there's not much to it. It's an optional HTTP header that represents the user's request not to be tracked. There is no mechanism to actually enforce this choice; any party can easily just ignore the header and track you regardless. The entire purpose of the header is to express a user's intent, and, therefore, the entire value of the header is derived from that intent.

It's like the "Baby on Board" car signs: If I place one in my car's windowpane, polite drivers should see that sign and grant me additional driving space and courtesies, and I may be able to drive in the carpool lane. Imagine, now, that everyone always puts that sign in their car by default because they want the additional driving space and courtesies. The value of my sign is significantly diluted; not only does standard driving operation make it impossible to honor those requests, but my own actual situation gets lost in the noise. Drivers will surely ignore the little yellow sign altogether, and it becomes worthless.

Unless "Do Not Track" is actually an explicit expression of a user's conscious intent, it will face the same hypothetical fate and become yet another ignored standard. Its only value is derived from its explicit intent, and Apache and Fielding are taking steps to ensure that the value is not compromised.

Came here to say this. There will always be a vacuum for leaking facilitators, especially with the vast-reaching scale of the Internet and strong cryptography and anonymization technologies, and it will always be filled. Even without Wikileaks, there are other sites like Cryptome. Hell, even Gawker's filling that role. Hell, here's a compiled list. With decentralized file-sharing sites, any torrent tracker or public file server can operate as a host for information. As Brand famously said, "Information wants to be free", and the "99%" of any country will continue to be hungry consumers of that information.

It doesn't matter if Assange wants to be a showman or douche things up. He doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. He's merely the current public face of a system that has always existed and will always continue to exist. You can't make an example out of a thing like that.

The Powers that Be aren't stupid. They have to know this. Our job as the Public is to systematically remove any alternatives that they have to being good and respectful to their fellow man, and leaking is a critical and and inevitable part of that mission. With the Internet, we are closer than ever to having the tools to actually accomplish this. This doesn't mean that all leaks are good and noble; it does, however, mean that we need to respect their role in making the world a better place. It also means that legislating against this inevitability is both futile and self-destructive in the short term.

Oh goodie, someone who talks like this...

Sounds like we've got it right this time, though! Assuming you're referencing Junk DNA, there's a world of difference between "no discernable function" and "superfluous". Additionally, even with an upper bound in DNA functional density, there's no reason to assume there isn't also an optimal upper bound to superfluous-to-functional DNA ratio. Adding a massive chunk of DNA to an organism is going to have some effect, you have to agree, and with no functional purpose there's very little evolutionary reason not to just whittle it down to nothing. After all, if there was actually a benefit to more superfluous DNA, evolution's had plenty of time to add it.

So, I guess, thanks for really not saying anything at all.

There is a lot of naiveté in this part of your response. First, "good enough" is a form of optimization; it's just an optimization across factors other than straight efficiency. Second, there is a cost to copying useless DNA, bacterial cell or not, and unless there is a benefit to offset the cost, an organism that sheds that DNA will be fitter than one that doesn't. If, for example, I stuffed a kilogram of extra DNA into your cell, it'd probably matter, even if you aren't bacteria. You're asserting, without any logic, that this cost fits into some magical "good enough" threshold you have just conjured. Cool threshold bro.

It's painfully obvious that my "what if it's already been done" statement was not referencing other synthetic human works, but rather the natural genome. Just a heads up, but your genes may be missing some padding around your Broca's Area expression ;)

It's a cool thought. Another possibility, though, is that evolution would, within a few (relatively speaking) generations, completely reject the the superfluous DNA as inefficient and/or unfit. Duplicating it costs energy and matter, and transcription errors and/or cross-gene sharing may actually ruin critical parts of the animal. Given evolution's tendency towards optimization, it seems almost inevitable that the information wouldn't survive in even the short (again, relatively-speaking) term.

Another independent (and conflicting) fun thought is: "what if it's already been done?" Would be cool if we were walking books :)

This does raise a worthwhile issue: I couldn't find anything in the article that says that the US requested that Demonoid be shut down for this meeting.

Now, the US Authorities are likely quite happy that it was shut down, but that's a different point. Doing something to please a trade partner isn't necessarily being its "bitch". People, corporations, and countries, the US included, suck up to each other all the time as a sign of respect, deference, and/or good faith and to gain a more favorable status. That sounds like what this is: the Ukraine knew that the US would view the move positively, so they did it as a gift to strengthen their status.

If the Ukraine knew that Obama loved candied walnuts and consequently brought him a few bags for the meeting, nobody would say that they were his "bitch". Just because this gift is despicable doesn't change that fundamental intention.