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Comment use local models or venice (Score 1) 62

Anything you have that you wouldn't want your neighbor seeing should go into a local model or use venice ai... they have a nice, private, decentralized architecture.
These solutions aren't as powerful or feature rich by any means, but they do preserve your privacy (or, at least, put the privacy into your own hands to preserve or be careless with) and they offer a better chance at not being censored too.

Comment Depends on your use case... (Score 1) 374

by pfelipe (#23536889) Attached to: Smartphones For Text SSH Use — Revisited
Depending on what you'd like to do, a smartphone may be the perfect square peg for your round hole.

> for remotely administering Linux/UNIX boxes via SSH

What does remotely administering mean for you?

Lightweight (examples, not exhaustive)
* Killing/restarting processes when the pager goes off
* Acknowledging alerts/pages from your monitoring system
* Minor troubleshooting in a jam
* Simple edits to a config file before a kill/restart
Not-so-lightweight
* Involved troubleshooting
* Large-scale edits
* Many user, system, filesystem modifications at once
Heavyweight
* Postmortem analysis
* Adding users, filesystems
* Creating/Developing anything
* Day-to-day administration tasks

If you're doing only lightweight (and maybe some not-so-lightweight) activities say when you're on call and don't want to drive home from the movie/dinner/play/bar/club then most any smartphone with most any keyboard will meet your needs. Will your frustration level rise as task complexity rises, YES. But this should only be an occasional thing. If you need this regularly then you need to stabilize your infrastructure... or choose another career where your skills are stronger. If it's going to be needed frequently in the short term (while say waiting on a vendor fix) then optimize for remote use while at your desk with some aliases or scripts.
If you're wanting fire up a full screen editor (vi, emacs) then you're moving into heavyweight tasks and/or wasting time massaging your editor bias ego. Get over it, stop whining, and learn ed. It was designed for an even more limited environment than your smartphone and works everywhere. Sorry, subshells not included. You can find your favorite metakeys when you get back to your desk.
If you're doing heavy stuff, use heavy equipment, that's what it was designed for. You don't move pallets with a spatula, you use a forklift. Maybe try a small laptop and cellular data, it's the happy medium pallet-jack equivalent.

I've used a regular palm, 3 different treos, and even a samsung a900. They all got the job done. Today I use an iPhone and webshell. Webshell isn't the simplest client to set up and has its issues. But, it also has a ton of flexibility with multiple virtual keyboards and has added some pretty cool gesture support. It's the least frustrating of all the solutions I've used over the years.

Don't forget to live while you're wandering the world smartphone in hand, reading 8 different email accounts, all the very fulfilling blogs, and loading your favorite emacs extension while rescuing your company's web site. There are some pretty cool other things like outside, physical activity, girls/boys, vice & stuff.... smartphone not required.
Privacy

Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files 626

Posted by Zonk from the kind-of-strains-the-mind-to-think-about-huh dept.
mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."
The Courts

FBI Posts Fake Hyperlinks To Trap Downloaders of Illegal Porn 767

Posted by Soulskill from the if-you-thought-getting-a-shock-site-link-was-bad dept.
mytrip brings us a story from news.com about an FBI operation in which agents posted hyperlinks which advertised child pornography, recorded the IP addresses of people who clicked the links, and then tracked them down and raided their homes. The article contains a fairly detailed description of how the operation progressed, and it raises questions about the legality and reliability of getting people to click "unlawful" hyperlinks. Quoting: "With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account--and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids. The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any "computer-related" equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any "addressed correspondence" sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements. While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn't be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant."
Music

RIAA Not Sharing Settlement Money With Artists 233

Posted by kdawson from the play-nicely-now dept.
Klatoo55 writes "Various artists are considering lawsuits in order to press for their share of the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars the RIAA has obtained from settlements with services such as Bolt, KaZaA, and Napster. According to TorrentFreak's report on the potential action, there may not even be much left to pay out after monstrous legal fees are taken care of. The comments from the labels all claim that the money is on its way, and is simply taking longer due to difficulties dividing it all up."
Science

Bluetooth Prosthetics Help US Marine To Walk Again 127

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the better-stronger-faster dept.
Like2Byte writes "CNN is reporting that a US Marine who lost both his legs in Iraq is now able to walk again by using bluetooth technology to coordinate his leg movement. The two legs communicate to keep the man in motion. ' [...] Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion. Bleill's set of prosthetics [legs] have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it's doing, how it's moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example.'"
Biotech

Adding Capsaicin Improves Anesthetic Treatment 151

Posted by samzenpus from the so-hot-it's-numb dept.
eldavojohn writes "It's no secret what capsaicin, the fiery molecule of peppers, does to cell walls. In fact, it's now being used to open cells up to local anesthetics. Combine it with a new drug that works only from the insides of cells and you have a great system for relieving pain. From the article, 'QX-314 is known to reduce the activity of pain-sensing neurons in the nervous system and theoretically heighten pain thresholds. But there's a catch: Researchers found that "it wouldn't work from outside a nerve cell but it would work if you could get it inside," says Bruce Bean, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new study."
The Media

HBO Exec Proposes DRM Name Change 544

Posted by Zonk from the that's-all-that's-in-the-way dept.
surfingmarmot writes "An HBO executive has figured out the problem with DRM acceptance — it's the name. HBO's chief technology officer Bob Zitter now wants to refer to the technology as Digital Consumer Enablement. Because, you see, DRM actually helps consumers by getting more content into their hands. The company already has HD movies on demand ready to go, but is delaying them because of ownership concerns. Says Zitter, 'Digital Consumer Enablement would more accurately describe technology that allows consumers "to use content in ways they haven't before," such as enjoying TV shows and movies on portable video players like iPods. "I don't want to use the term DRM any longer," said Zitter, who added that content-protection technology could enable various new applications for cable operators.'"
Power

The 660 Gallon Brewery Fuel Cell 238

Posted by samzenpus from the drinking-electricity dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's University of Queensland has secured a $115,000 grant for a 660-gallon fuel cell that should produce 2 kilowatts of power. A prototype has been operating at the university laboratory for three months. This fuel cell type is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol, plus in this instance produces clean water."
Handhelds

Legislators Ponder BlackBerry Pileups 333

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the posted-from-i-94 dept.
WSJdpatton writes to mention that legislators are taking a look at a new driving offense, DWT — Driving While Texting. Sparked by an increase in accidents related to the use of an electronic devices, this is just the latest in a string of "distracted driving" laws that are being entertained. "Some wireless industry supporters argue that statutes barring texting while driving are too specific. What is needed, they say, is not narrowly focused legislation, but a campaign to educate the public about all driver distractions. In Washington, D.C., an industry lobby group called CTIA -- The Wireless Association has begun tracking legislation, including Ms. McDonald's bill, and scratching out a strategy to counter it."
Power

Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs 923

Posted by kdawson from the bright-idea dept.
While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil, the world's largest retailer has committed to get compact fluorescent lightbulbs into 100 million homes this year. CFLs are found in only 6% of households today. These energy-saving bulbs use 75% less electricity than incandescents and produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use. Wal-Mart seems determined to use its marketing prowess to do what hasn't successfully been done in the CFL's 25-year history: to convince consumers to pay more upfront for large savings over the product's lifetime.
Microsoft

Zune Sales Not So Bad After All 366

Posted by samzenpus from the on-second-thought dept.
pyrbrand writes "Despite the iFanboy jabber that Zune sales were horrific, CNN has a story to the contrary. Turns out Zune was the #2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales. Not a bad start for the challenger to the iPod throne. As others have pointed out the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors."

Surprises in Microsoft Vista's EULA 385

Posted by Zonk from the oh-look-a-sheep dept.
androthi writes "Scott Granneman takes a look at some surprises in Microsoft Vista's EULA that limit what security professionals and others can do with the new operating system. You want to post benchmarking results? Well, Microsoft may now have a say in it. Vista's EULA no longer shows up on Microsoft's software licensing page, but does still exist — also take note of Windows DRM deciding what you can and can not listen to, and Defender deciding and removing what it considers spyware automatically (by default)."

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