elwin

Attacking Tor by passive analysis is one thing. Installing spyware, creating a botnet, and making the infection process quick and easy is another. There might be some justification for the former. The latter is too risky.

The more we learn about the NSA's capabilities, the more it seems like the Manhattan Project. They are developing the "cyberwarfare" equivalents of weapons of mass destruction. This exploit delivery network goes so far beyond any legitimate purpose it might serve that it belongs in the same moral category as hydrogen bombs.

EDIT: The above is somewhat hyperbolic and unclear. The NSA's capabilities may have legitimate uses. Similarly, there may be legitimate military uses for nuclear weapons. But building nuclear weapons creates the risk of worldwide nuclear destruction. Similarly, building this kind of highly efficient exploit system creates the risk of destroying all Internet security. The potential destruction far outweighs whatever good the weapons might accomplish. That is why I said they belong in the same category.

The articles call it a "Trojan", so I expect they trick people into installing it.

Imagine that cyberwar really is a new kind of warfare that is about to emerge. This may or may not be a useful way of viewing the situation, but governments do seem willing to attack each others' infrastructure, causing great damage to civilians in the process. They have also begun using the kind of surveillance that is usually only justifiable during wartime.

If the Internet is being militarized, Snowden has pointed that out. He's shown that the NSA is actually one of the "standing armies" that the Peace Prize rules mention. Now we can talk about reducing it.

I still think it would be a stretch to award him the Peace Prize, but anything that keeps the Internet from becoming a war zone promotes world peace.

I've run some CPU benchmarks, and the $80 droplet is roughly equivalent to the $40 linode. But if you get lucky and no one else on the same host is using much CPU, the linode will be over 50% faster. Of course, most customers aren't running CPU-bound tasks.

Statically typed languages also have worrisome features.

  #define readinto(obj, fd) (isatty(fd) ? readbuffered(obj, fd, findttystate()) : readfromfile(obj, fd))

I had a professor who did optics research sponsored by the NSA. They didn't tell him the intended application, but he suspected it was to tap optical fibers by evanescent wave coupling (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanescent_wave#Evanescent-wave... ). It's as if photons are quantum tunneling out of the fiber, so there is no need to physically cut into it. That would have made the tapping nearly undetectable.

William Freehling's Road to Disunion covers the topic thoroughly. Most of the founders expected slavery to die away gradually. The idea that it should remain permanently didn't appear for another 50 years and was never universal, even in the Deep South.

The book also explores the tensions between slavery and American ideals, and the many complications the tensions produced.

The info wars will not have a winner, any more than warfare with black powder, warfare with motorized artillery, or warfare with airplanes produced clear winners. The best possible outcome is to survive until the next kind of war makes the current one obsolete.

> We aren’t sure if this will bring again the “Other OS” functions to Playstation 4

It will at least have to be possible to install other systems. The screenshots show GRUB 2, which is under the GPLv3, so it should be unlockable.

Another virtue of That Hideous Strength is that Lewis is good at blurring the lines between "good guys" and "bad guys". Instead of Thought Police, he shows Mark Studdock and Feverstone doing evil things out of ordinary motives that we all share.

To continue your metaphor, when it holds up a mirror, we can all see our own faces.

It makes us consider how little it might take to turn us into collaborators in such a future. That might be a useful thought for tech companies right now.

They get appointed by the Chief Justice, not the administration.

No, I don't think the request is a brilliant idea, and I hope the investigation doesn't ask for the records of anyone's private phone numbers without some more justification. My point was that instead of dismissing it as partisan nonsense, we should see it as a skillful tactic that might accomplish something.

Many of the comments here are complaining about the partisanship of this request. I think such complaints are shortsighted.

Yes, it's annoying that the representative is trying to make the administration look bad and further his own party. But political embarrassment and partisan show victories are exactly what motivates politicians to do things. These partisan actions are the kind of actions the Obama administration will notice.

Or he could remain neutral and abstract and introduce a hastily written bill that purports to solve the problem, like Rand Paul. And nothing will happen.

The partisan political system responds to partisan political incentives. To see many interesting examples, try studying the period leading up to the American Civil War.

That's the problem with logging everything. Unless they deliberately filter out all the data coming from the White House, they have it, even though having it is only useful for their political opponents.

They offer the same amount of RAM for less than Linode, but they offer fewer cores, which makes me suspect they're putting more VPS's on a single host. I haven't yet run any benchmarks, but I think Linode gives you more CPU and Digital Ocean gives you more memory. It's a little more complicated than "better service and better hardware at a cheaper rate."

My guess is that the idea of objectivity started around the 1890's, when people like Pulitzer and Hearst realized they could sell cheap newspapers funded by advertising and do without the support of the local political machines. But I don't have any support for that idea.

This is one of the oddest things I've read all week. It accuses Snowden of a lack of character and claims that lack is a threat to society. But this society and its government are designed to minimize that threat.

The reason we have a "big government" is to make unnecessary the civic virtue Snowden supposedly lacks. The article calls "honesty and integrity" "the foundation of all cooperative activity." But we have a highly regulated economy, to ensure that it still works when most of its participants are dishonest people with little integrity. Now that integrity is unnecessary, it's predictably rare.

Similarly, it says Snowden damaged "the social fabric" and has "no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good." The U.S. doesn't need its citizens "knit together". The country is held together by government power, not a fabric of common consensus. Citizens don't need to look after the common good. That's the job of the authorities the author commends. NSA surveillance is supposed to prevent "solitary naked individuals" from causing any trouble.

In summary, not just Snowden but the whole country fails to live up the the character standard set out by this article. And that doesn't matter. Unless the cynical people are right.

Separation of powers was designed to prevent a few bad actors from seizing control of the whole system, as frequently happened in ancient republics. It's actually worked well for that purpose. It wasn't intended to defend against incentives affecting everyone who gets into any kind of office. No one foresaw that weakness.

People keep talking about separation of powers because it was once a good solution to a problem that no longer exists.

When you type "tmux" into a terminal, that starts a client. A client is the instance of tmux that's running in your terminal emulator. tmux manages a collection of pseudoterminals, and clients display whatever is going on in that collection.

(Warning: some oversimplifications.) This collection of pty's is called a session. Each pty within it is called a window. When you start, there will be one session containing one window. You can add more windows (C-b c) and switch the one your client is currently viewing (C-b p, C-b n, etc.) Each new window will start a shell that you can use to run programs independently.

Detaching (C-b d) means disconnecting your client from the session and exiting. Attaching ("tmux attach") reconnects to the session.

Multiple sessions and multiple clients are an advanced topic. Don't worry about them yet.

Unix sessions are unrelated to tmux sessions. Technically, each pty managed by tmux has its own Unix session.

Buffers and panes are advanced topics. Buffers help with copying and pasting; panes let you split windows into multiple pty's. Don't worry about either of them yet.

That's X11 panning, which has a similar effect. The X server has one big screen buffer, and the physical screens get mapped into regions of it. You can enable it by using xrandr with the --panning option, and it will work with any DE.

fvwm doesn't change the X11 screen size, it just moves all the windows to give the appearance of moving the screen in the other direction.

fvwm uses a virtual desktop. "The screen is a viewport onto a desktop which may be larger than the screen." You can move the screen around over this virtual desktop. Moving down has the same effect as moving all the windows one screen height up. If a window is larger than the screen, you can easily pan around to see other parts of it. This is very handy when your screen height is 600 pixels and $ENTERPRISE_APP draws dialog boxes 1200 pixels tall. It also means I can lay out windows with a total area several times the screen area without having any overlapping.

I wish someone would make a compositing window manager based on a big virtual desktop instead of on shrinking all the windows to illegibility and making me pick one to obscure all the others.

I use fvwm. The ability to work easily with windows bigger than the screen is vital on a netbook.

> That rule of thumb seems to apply to only a particular class of chips. Wouldn't the number of pins be somehow proportional to the power draw, as at higher currents induction would become a more severe problem?

I think it depends on the chip's speed. The problem is with rapid changes in current. Of course, higher currents can also have higher fluctuations.

> With the power voltage dropping below ground, that unless you had a floating ground, that'd be implying reverse flow of current, negative voltage, right? Or are you talking about a non-zero voltage ground?

Suppose the board's ground rail is 0 V and the power rail is at 12 V. The chip's ground voltage might bounce up to 9 and its power down to 8. It does cause reverse currents and other bad effects.

There are some interesting reasons for that.

When a lot of transistors in an integrated circuit all switch at the same time, it can cause the chip's power and ground voltage levels to shift, relative to the circuit board's power and ground levels. The size of the difference depends on the inductance between the chip and board, i.e. the inductance of the chip's power and ground pins. Inductance can be minimized by connecting a lot of inductors in parallel. Lots of small pins are better than a few big ones.

If the inductance is too high and the chip's power voltage falls below its ground voltage, this will randomize every storage element on the chip. The rule of thumb is that a third of the pins need to be power or ground.

There are manuals and an emulator here: http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/kim-1/

Interpersonal skills are not a one-dimensional quantity. You and the OP are saying Steve Jobs was terrible at making people happy. That's different from making people do what he wanted, an area in which he was far from terribly unskilled.

The advantage to FPGAs is that they can be designed rapidly. ASICs are cheaper to manufacture and usually run faster.

> Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session. I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an ounce of symbolic freedom.

Was that when RPI ACM brought him in to speak? I recall he spent a while complaining about Linus letting binary blobs into the kernel. Then in the Q&A, he got trolled by someone claiming a music sample business was being undercut by CC-licensed competitors. RMS didn't handle that well.

In my opinion, RMS is actually very pragmatic, meaning he's willing to do almost anything to further the goal. He only appears radical because he has uncommon ideas about what the goal is and what furthers it. His radicality varies according to pragmatic considerations. He'll give his blessing to BSD-style licenses in a case like this, and he'll hold out against GCC plugins for years when he thinks that furthers freedom.

From a purely principled point of view, Free Software advocates might want to weaken copyright for software. RMS hasn't put much effort into that, because it would weaken the GPL. It would also be harder for Free software to compete if all software could be distributed free and legally. So he rarely attacks copyright in general, for pragmatic reasons.

From observing reenactments of early American life, I think an 18th century agricultural technology is self-sustaining and directly bootstrappable, except for the problem of mining and working iron. So my guess is not much longer than 300 years.