No. Period, full stop. Very few think the "system" should gather as much data as possible on as many people as possible. I don't know the U.K. laws, but in the U.S., the authorities aren't allowed to search out whatever they want about you without probable cause and/or warrants.

So, we should hoover up all the information we can about everyone, so we can be sure we know who would be "of interest"? Cardinal Richelieu would be delighted.

Why, yes, most of us on Slashdot use a silly fake paradox to conclude that no investigative effort should ever gather any information. Idiot.

The real question is are you a troll or do you just come from a black and white world?

ISPs want to argue that, but it's not as relevant as it looks. Because QOS priorities really only matter if the network is congested. And, the ISP shouldn't have congested backbone links.

The car analogies the ISPs offer up are broken. It's not really about being able to have a faster than *normal* lane. Having a higher QOS priority is more like driving in a normal speed toll lane during rush hour because the the non-toll lanes are congested. But, outside of rush hour, when the non-toll lanes are running just as fast, there's no point to paying to drive in the toll lane. ISPs shouldn't have the congested links that are analogous to the rush hour though.

Much of the ISP's desire to do shaping seems to be about having intentionally under-provisioned links and then either charging a toll to "uncongest" or making a competitor's traffic suffer while the ISP's traffic doesn't.

I'm sure you have some lame pseudo-legal argument that you think proves that statement, but you're wrong. Whatever your argument is, it's not something people are actually prosecuted under. Some abortions are legal. If they weren't, all the abortion clinics would have been closed down. The people that want to use the legal system to stop abortions are finding other ways. They do things like passing the recent Texas law that required that abortions only be done in facilities that have more surgical capabilities than is required for other more complex surgical procedures.

No, almost all the posters have it wrong - a carefully done re-implementation can be legit. You can't use the exact same potentially trade-marked names. You can't re-distribute the original art work. But, you can do things like create a new engine and anyone who owns the original game can then re-use the content in the new engine. See the article on Game Engine Recreation or the OpenMW project that's creating a version of the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game in a new engine.

That said, I don't know if this Metal Gear Solid remake wasn't careful to follow the rules or if maybe they did, but Konami gave them enough grief to make them stop anyway.

MS-DOS was more or less a CP/M clone. Unless I misremember, the first version didn't even have folders.

Wow. You know, I had completely forgotten that. Please post more of this interesting history.

How the hell is that +5 Insightful?!? I seriously doubt undercover FBI agents are using their real names! The only time their real name should come out is sometimes at trial.

Agreed...

Which is why you should use layers of abstraction.

In this example, it would be sensible to support at least two services for back-end data storage. If you want a minimal footprint, you don't even have to ship your mobile app with multiple back-ends enabled (nor the config options to choose a back-end). You'd still be in a position to more quickly provide an update if the service disappears or looks like it's about to.

Electromagnetic mass drivers might make more sense than rockets for launching raw materials from the moon. At least that was what Gerard K. O'Neill and company concluded decades ago... Of course, you still have to build the mass driver on-site or deliver it there and run a mining operation.

I have to think that for sufficiently large scale offworld operations, you're going to want to mine materials from somewhere - either the moon or asteroids. As interesting as the topic is, I don't think we'll be building semi-permanent moon bases, Babylon 5, or mars colonies within ten years though.

INCONCEIVABLE!!!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Sure. But is the mapping provided here sane? It makes sense to provide a view of the variables as files. Reading the file should return that variables value. Writing the file should change that variables value. OK, so far.

If deleting the file is to have any effect on the actual UEFI variables, it should mean deleting the variable, not zeroing it. Does deleting UEFI variables from the BIOS even make sense? Note that for /dev, the files represent read/write/ioctl access to a device but that deleting a /dev file is like deleting a pointer to an object - it removes your pointer but has no effect on the object itself (and any other similar pointers are still usable). I strongly suspect that the filesystem for these variables should work the same way. Even if creating entirely new variables and deleting them from UEFI is a valid thing to do, it probably needs to be done by a mechanism other than filesystem semantics.

No, C *was* a great invention. That there are other choices today doesn't change that. It was perhaps the first HLL (high level language) that was small, efficient, and yet also usable for low-level tasks. It was "small" in the sense that that it provided a minimal number of constructs and didn't provide any hard to parse features (unlike, for example, Ada). The fact that it was small was probably a big factor in C having one of the very first machine independent compilers, the Portable C Compiler.

From the Wikipeda C entry:

That's nice... *today*. Well, assuming every protocol someone designs and that someone implements will be free of security flaws... But, "nice today" is not very useful long term.

Imagine, for example, that something is running using Windows XP or a decades old Linux distro. They could have had the best available security when they were built, but they would suck now. A decades old SSH would now be vulnerable.

It seems that historically, sites always end up with some sort of old cruft in existence. As long as you have to account for equipment not being patched or upgraded, the quality of that equipment's security is insufficient. You need layers. Sane physical controls. An architecture of least privilege. You probably want some sort of VPN that has a guarantee of ongoing security maintenance even when everything else doesn't. Even then, the network access should have some of the attributes you'd use in physical controls - you don't let Joe Whoever into just any control room, so *try* to not allow network connection from just anywhere.

Of the above layers, the architecture may be the most important. For example, if it's OK to be air-gapped, that takes a lot of attack vectors off the table.

Nope.

HTTPS is necessary, but woefully insufficient for protecting your privacy. Even with everything encrypted, your ISP still knows what sites you connect to - they do route the packets, after all.
Would it be OK if which ads are displayed on your TV to be affected by which sites you visit? And "you", of course, includes anyone in your household and your WiFi guests. Which snail mail adverts are sent to your billing address or service address? Or, in general, whether or not your name appears on various targeted advertising lists? Or lists that aren't at all about advertising...

A VPN will prevent your ISP from doing this, but then gives your VPN host the same capabilities.

On a similar note, we've had a bunch of articles here about how it's almost impossible to prevent web browser fingerprinting from allowing you to tracked from one web site to another. But, your ISP is in a special position to know all that you visit and who/where "you" are.

Here's the letter that was sent.

A different FA has some comments and/or speculation on how some ISPs are (ab)using customer info.