Back in the day, I had feeble dreams of someone making a paparazzi photography mod for Max Payne. Weapons ranging from tiny point-and-shoots to motorised SLRs with gigantic telephotos. ...no, seriously, that would look awesome on bullet time.

The problem is, the shady people who get the certificates end up actually using them, usually in the open Internet. The moment some third party notices any signs of impersonation, they go "now just wait a fucking second!" and there'll be some explaining to do.

Bad Analogy Time: In ye olde days, thieves just wrote memoirs along the lines of "60 years ago, I busted myself into the most secure bank vault at the time and they still have no idea where the money went". In a digital-currency world, the thieves have to go out there and spend the stolen money. Which has the bank's supposedly unforgeable digital signature on it. Which makes people go to the bank and ask inconvenient questions about their security, while the manager has to say that "look, this may look pretty bad, but our security is top notch, I assure you".

Pfft. More likely: "AOL buys Yahoo". Comments: "No one visits us either! We just bought Yahoo so that we could reminisce of the bad old days when people actually thought we were important."

There's no feeling like opening a router box and finding a printed copy of GPL and a CD-ROM with the source code. Shows that the manufacturer takes license obligations seriously. And finding out that the router works damn well and is configurable to hell and back is pretty cool too.

This was a D-Link router. Most of the experiences with other networking gear go in the category of "there's a Linux driver for it somewhere, meh." =)

*squint* ...nah, they've just taken a subtle jab at the decadent capitalist propaganda, the "C.S.I.". This is obviously a GUI made quickly in Visual Basic, to trace IPs.

Seriously, though, just because a some form of an user interface, or mockups of the same, exists, doesn't mean the software does. And the IP address shown doesn't necessarily mean anything - could be just a random number. What it does show is that someone in Chinese government probably considering whacking Falun Gong sites, one way or other - and that would not exactly be news, now would it?

This isn't about marking images as "offensive". If that was the case, then that would be wholly subjective.

They're marking images as containing nudity or sexuality or violence or whatever - obviously not that subjective categories. This is about description of the content, not making judgements on either way. You can describe the content in a methodical and neutral manner. The idea is that if you find those categories of images offensive, then you can make the decision to not view them.

This is not bad, because the system, as proposed, is basically going to be just an improved and integrated reimplementation of an already existing feature.

You may have heard of it. It's called "AdBlock Plus".

That's essentially what the Wikipedia community has been telling people to use. Offended by pictures of prophets? Ask your local friendly religious WikiProject if they have a handy ABP list or user CSS file for you to use. Offended by sexual content? Yeah, it's a lot of blocking, but it can be done.

All this is going to do is that it will be integrated to the software. It will also allow better collaborative tagging of pictures. And, of course, it has transparency. You can't do a lot of evil censorship if you've got to be transparent about it.

"Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine intelligent translator... Thompson iPhone."

Well, folks didn't foresee the future in 1995. Blender is GPL, but Metasploit is BSD. And iPhones come from Apple. (And why Johnny Mnemonic would use iPhone to begin with? All that jailbreaking! Bleh.)

This would be doable - if Windows had uniform package management infrastructure. Every installer ships as an executable that can do anything they want on the system, including messing things up and annoying the hell out of you.

Look at Linux distributions on how this is done right. While there are still executable scripts involved, at least there's a huge bunch of infrastructure that does a lot of stuff for you, and people hate you if you deviate from it. If you distribute software, you can set up your own package repository, and give out public keys so people can see that the updates really come from you. A software package may come with desktop icon, but the user can tell the icon to get the hell out of their sight.

I don't know why Microsoft never bothered with this. It's not like installer package software is huge business now that open-source Windows installers like NSIS exist...

Actually, seeing how common it is these days, I'm surprised the page doesn't have a gigantic "this newly restored recording is © us, now, here, until the hell freezes over" warning... followed by a lot of pointless whining when it gets uploaded to Wikipedia under the auspices of "no, seriously, read the law books some day, there's quite a lot of stuff about 1:1 reproductions there".

So thanks to the scientists - this is a remarkable piece of digital restoration and will hopefully inspire other restoration efforts, some of which may even turn out profitable. But there just is no copyright on a 123-year-old recording itself.

I don't have any opinion on the motivations of Lulzsec. I'm more concerned about what happens now.

Try not to think of "Lulzsec, the annoying and dangerous cracking group, just busted open a porn site. How evil of them."
Think of "A goddamn porn site was compromised. What does that tell of the security in adult industry? What does that tell to the victims?"

In short, it's irrelevant who cracked them. The milk's on the floor, too late to cry.

Someone pointed out that Lulzsec is definitely doing a good job at pointing out security flaws that should be addressed. Why did a porn site have such lax security? Why is a porn site storing passwords in cleartext? Aren't they aware that quite a few of their members might not appreciate being advertised as members? Should people be more concerned about the security in porn sites? Not everybody minds being advertised as a member of a porn site, but since a lot of people obviously have a problem with that, should the porn sites provide additional security measures for people who are embarrassed to admit this stuff publicly? (e.g. not store details that might identify them, such as email)

But your system assumes that you will be personally present at the Poo Reserve at all times. It hinges on our trust that the Poo will always be either collected by the Reserve or destroyed according to a secure standard operating procedure. As the brilliant Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said, "a man's gotta go when a man's gotta go". The Poo deposits may occur at weird, unpredictable times. What assurances do we get that there are absolutely no out-of-record deposits and all deposits occur at exactly specified manner? What if 100% genuine, DNA-verified Poo, which is not used for backing poocoin and shouldn't officially even exist, ends up in a place where it can be collected by the black market? Or the terrorists? Or the terrorists who run the black market?

Now, you may be thinking, "surely everyone can collect Poo! You don't need to be a specialist! We all handle Poo every day!", but secure collection of Poo is a surprisingly complicated matter, which is best left to the experts. What passes for everyday handling may not be enough when there's money in the line. Just goes to show that you shouldn't design a new currency if even a non-expert like me can see big fatal flaws in the system!

Yeah, except it always pays to ask one crucial question: What demands?

They're already subject to the laws of the countries they currently operate in. If the governments find out that Google is doing something illegal, you bet they should take action - and there might be a good reason why they're not doing anything right now. Like, no illegalities happening that they know of.

Laws of one jurisdiction don't necessarily apply to another. If Google gets busted in one country for doing something illegal, they won't get busted in another country unless a similar law exists there. And, frankly, if your democratic country is planning on quashing a frigging search engine for not building an alternate reality, perhaps it's just an indication of a really big problem somewhere else.

If you have to back down from some market because you cannot adequately serve your customers, that's fine. If you have to back down because you're worried that it might expose your global nefarious crime syndicate that's illegal everywhere, maybe you shouldn't run a crime syndicate in the first place and focus on legal endeavours instead.

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG, 2005

...nnnope, I'm pretty sure that that wasn't an excuse then, and it sure doesn't sound like an an excuse now.

Look, I'm not an electronics geek. Here's the thing I know about flashlights: there's a battery, there's a lamp, and there's a switch. I'm sure you can figure out how to hook them up together with a bit of wire. If not, there's plenty of "fun scientific experiments for schoolkids" books that tell you how. Frankly, I was surprised and flabbergasted that this wasn't the first illustration in Wikipedia article on electrical circuits. (Generator and resistor? Bah! Give the kids an example of a circuit that does something...)

I guess it just highlights one unfortunate side of the terminology: "open source" is just how things are - even before someone specifically decides to call it that way. We might as well call it "commonly accepted knowledge" and "stuff that's too obvious to even go into in great detail". If you want to build a flashlight, just about everyone already knows how to do it, or can find someone who does.

That said, this could be the world's first non-trivial and very cool open source flashlight. All I'm saying is that the boundary is kind of blurry and it's hard to say if it really was the first. =)