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Because usually we know either nothing or everything about such a mission. Here some detailed specifics have been made public while the actual purpose is kept secret. It's like they want us to speculate

I'm not sure I understand why this is news. Haven't there always been tons of secret spy satellites about which the public had little information?

Seriously, I appreciate WebRTC as much as anyone, but it's hardly a solution if it supports only a subset of Internet users.

Guess I'm not ready for "the future" then.
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Give me an MP3 player which has the following features:

1. OpenBSD
2. TrueCrypt - choice of encrypting all of device with 1st run and in settings
3. Rip from any device - an extension to the device (like the front part of ST:TNG ship's dish which separates for example) which allows CDs to be inserted and ripped on the fly without a computer connection, and the ability to plug into any electronic device which has the ability to contain audio files, scan for, and rip any audio files - all with the option to convert them to a format of your choosing
4. Complete support of as many audio/image/video codecs as possible.
5. Nothing about the device should be proprietary, neither hardware or software.

Before you say, "Why would you want to use a device with the MP3 format?" As #4 points out, and you should really know unless you're trolling, if you look at all of the MP3 players currently for sale, most support many audio, image (JPG and more) and sometimes several video formats.

I took a cursory look at Tails last year, but this announcement has me wanting to give it more than a passing glance. I'll be spending the day seeding the torrent and playing around with the OS.

It's certainly not minimal, but try Jitsi.

viva Jitsi.org!

https://meet.jit.si is the future, today.

and I seriously doubt many people still own old Sun hardware AND still want to use it. I have a Sun Ultra 10 Workstation but its gathering dust for a few years. It's a shame though considering it's almost 15 years old it feels blazingly fast in comparison to the commodity ARM boards you can find everywhere these days.

If so, why is its purpose not made public? The public surely pays for it, so if it would be entirely scientific there would be no need to make it a mystery. This leads to the conclusion that there must be some military application.

I'm sure there are many things its doing, testing the space plane, optics, any tests that are too dangerous to do on the ISS. Its like having a private US space station, without the need for life support or space for humans.

Well we're movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

Fish don't fry in the kitchen;
Beans don't burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin',
Just to get up that hill.
Now we're up in the big leagues,
Gettin' our turn at bat.
As long as we live, it's you and me baby,
There ain't nothin wrong with that.

Well we're movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

Clear your cookie.

There were many many problems, Alax Cox worked miracles. I'm not pretending it was anything apart from Finnish homerism that made the guys I was working around so keen on using Linux. It wasn't ready for the bigtime for a couple of years, but that didn't stop people using it. Budgets were tight, and students would happily admin things pretty much for free.

If I could give you more than one mod point for that comment I would. I couldn't agree more.

Congrats on the 1337 comment by the way! :D

Thank you for the complement on the username. :) I did not. Sadly it was very cloudy the night of April 15th. I will have to hope for better weather October 8th 2014, April 4th 2015, and September 28th 2015. At least we get a few more chances.

The platform actually does quite well with Solaris at the moment. Oracle is investing insane amounts of money for chip developments and to make their database run faster on SPARC. But sadly Oracle has little interest in maintaining any kind of support under Linux for its hardware AFAIK, and also killed OpenSolaris. Hobbyists also don't get SPARC hardware anymore these days because everything Sun has become very old and newer ones are very expensive. The T4 and later are hugely overpriced on ebay with maybe >10K$.

It'll become increasingly difficult to use your old Sun hardware though. Debian and Gentoo were the only two Linux distributions left with SPARC support IIRC.

I believe you mean SPARChitecture.

You've got a point -and it's the position I'd expect from you, given your awesome user name. Did you catch the eclipse the other day?

So "¦ Oracle has kind of been like the kiss of death for this platform. I like SPARC because it's interesting and because it's not x86, which despite its ubiquity I find boring and poorly organized and kludgy at best.

But Oracle isn't an OS developer, SPARC has been left to rot in the gallows, and the users are going elsewhere. Too bad, SPARC, say hi to all those other interesting-but-dead architectures out there. [Posted from my Pentium IV, which has burned a hole through my desk and is now melting its way through the concrete.]

Thirded. I don't even HAVE a cell, as I live in a rural town that is too small for the carriers to bother with. Google needs a "No. I will NOT give you my cell number--Now Stop Asking!" checkbox.

Actually, they should have ranked for "Distrust," rather than "Trust;" I'm not even sure I trust the ISP that hosts MY website, much less known collectors like google, facebook, MS, et al.

I took an awesome vacation with the family to the Adirondacks (http://therandymon.com/index.php?/91-Six-Nights-on-Fourth-Lake.html) looking forward to some time away from the Internet and looking forward to some isolation and time to reflect. But dammit if I didn't find myself down on the dock with my Nexus 7, trying to leach the neighbor's wifi connection so I could look some things up on Wikipedia, check email, etc. Surprisingly addictive, this information network. I might try it again and this time go gadget free, but I dunno, maybe that era has come to a close. I'd at least want my ereader so I could do some reading, and a cellphone might be nice, and ...

Or just don't take the devices in the first place, although having access to what could be critical information such as weather forecasts and the ability to contact emergency services (not that you should *ever* rely on just a mobile phone for that) might be an issue. It's also sometimes useful to be able to look up information on flora, fauna and geological features that you chance upon that you are curious about for some reason. The flipside is that depending on the location you might not be alone as there are various communal facilities at campsites etc. Even though you might have the disciple to leave your stuff at home or switched off, it doesn't follow that others do, so you would still have other people surfing on their tablets and nattering on their phones while you are trying to be one with nature.

So yes, having the option is great, but that also needs to be backed up with respect for the wishes of others present that might not want to see/hear it and a suitable amount of discretion over when, where and how the option is used.

The fact that there was no revision control at that time makes it of course difficult and I was quite sure there were many problems at the end of 1993 regarding networking.

Thank you for the elaboration. This is not only very interesting but also very credible :)

AH - they're multiplying. I've just got 3 mails telling me about the post I've just made. If the thread continues much longer, then I predict things could get even worse! It'll be an O(N^2) inbox from N posts in the thread!

It might be nice to have that technical connection if you urgently need some weather or life saving information, but I think it's a distraction otherwise. The first world has become too dependent on technology. We can't seem to put our phones, tablets, whatever down. We are much more disconnected than we think we are, but not in a technical sense. The wifi won't do much for you if Yellowstone does ever happen to go boom. We're better off relearning some basic survival skills. One day, technology may not be here.

Hi! I am unable to login. Login: cubancigar11

The job editing the English language webpages for the department was from Oct 1993 to Nov 1993 (a hard end-point, I never spent more than 2 months at each site). And for that, I definitely used rlogin from my desktop linux box into another linux box and edited the files there. I didn't get friendly with all the sysadmins from that place until about Feb 1994, and when we were talking infra issues, I found out they were running a small cluster of linux machines for the webserver (and my pages were still visible there). That would have been May 1994 at the absolute latest. Maybe they had migrated in those 6 months, but I doubt it, as the biggest linux loons had been there the whole time.

Linux's net/ethernet/eth.c has an interesting comment:
* Version: @(#)eth.c 1.0.7 05/25/93
and that version number and date's after Alan had already done a whole bunch of fixes.

If you would have written 1994, no one would have questioned anything. But 1993 httpd didn't even run on Solaris yet and the Linux network stack was beta at best. Gopher was also more common than HTTP at that time which makes people wonder if you're just a poser. The RFC you cite is the first result when you Google IP over Ethernet. You should've better googled when it was supported by Linux which was indeed 1994. You only support this doubt because because you get immediately offended.

No, you misinterpret. The first AC meant IP over Ethernet was introduced to Linux in version 1.0 in 1994, which is true btw. Of course the standard existed earlier.

I, too, am tired of all these places asking for a cell number "for security" reasons. I have a google voice number for this very reason, created back when it was still grand central or something. The other day some place I don't recall popped up the thing asking for my cell and when I punched in that number it errored stating it's not a cellular phone. Awesome. Even google accepted it as my cell number.

I don't see anything wrong with making internet available at remote locations. People who want to get away just have to practice some self-restraint and keep all electronic devices powered off.

Can you really not guess what webserver? httpd. Sheesh, was your head in a hole in the ground at the time?
Protocol? Erm, HTTP over a TCP transport over IP - does that really surprise you?

It seems people who are unwilling to associate themselves with their comments are as useless here as everywhere else.

The original AC thought an RFC created in 1984 didn't exist until 10 years later. If you think I'm less credible than that, you're just as clueless as your anonymity implies.

The figure I've seen for active www sites was 1000 rather than 500, but yes, the site was almost certainly in that first 1000 as I remember in 1995-ish trying to extrapolate back to what the figure would have been, just as the web was beginning to catch on more widely.

I'm sorry that a poor little country of only 5 million people might just possibly be better at being at the cutting edge than wherever you live.

Wow, having a submission history is pretty cool. Not sure if it's unique? In any case, it is a nice step in the direction of transparency and honesty. Cool technology - well done.

Maybe you just need more bandwidth? Video is a greedy beast no matter what the software. I think Skype does a pretty good job for the most part.

But yeah it would be nice if more people interoperated with Ekiga and other open source clients.

Indeed. I'm very grateful and would like to thank these editors. A quick look at the submission history shows a good overview of who all is helping to edit and publish articles. (Hint: it's not me :P)

No UIDs anymore? Fuck that! UID are part of the /. spirit we want to keep :)

You would be more believable if you would be more polite. Instead of enlightening us about some details like webserver/protocol, you start flaming some BS. Considering the entire WWW had less than 500 web servers in 1993 your initial claim sounds incredible. The first AC just questioned the possibility of running a web server on Linux in 1993.

There's no polite way of putting this, so I won't mince words - you're full of crap.

I'm wondering how I was hanging around on the same IRC network as the likes of Jarkko Oikkarinen, and posting to usenet back in 1993 from my linux machine at work, without the technologies you claim you don't exist. Next time I'm having a beer with Ari Lemmke, I'll ask him if he shares this hallucination too, of a mystical wonderous land that actually has RFC 894 unlike the universe you exist in which doesn't appear to have it.

Agreed.

Skype is horribly slow on android and sucks on Linux as well. Google took a step backwards with Hangouts, Talk before was actually almost usable. But nevertheless, XMPP is based on XML which sucks in itself. Is there a minimal, open source video conferencing solution that doesn't suck?

BTW there are at least 2 or 3 volunteer editors on deck, too.

As a buddy once said, 'the cream rises to the top.' Keep reading, posting, commenting, and the crowds will discover it and come to us. Feel free to spread the word to your friends, of course! That's what I'm doing!

I was also just recently poking around Adafruit and wishing I had considerably more disposable income and gumption than I do currently. Here I was feeling all pleased at finally figuring out how to turn my pi into an always-on VPN/Privoxy server for when I'm out and about on cellular, and then I see stuff like this guy's project and feel I've really set my bar too low. Always wanted to try circuit bending, too, and George Gleixner's recent project is something I would love to reproduce. So many awesome projects, so little talent and motivation.

Just a note from the proud first time submitter here.

This is yet another way that the good Pipedot folks (which I assume means Bryan) do a better job than either Slashdot or SN. Rather than slap up my submission, they edited it well, adding a short paragraph with two links (whereas I had only provided the Lifehacker URL) and also leaving an Editor's Note with some interesting background info.

Simple stuff, sure, but it's indicative of care and quality, and I appreciate it.

Again, though, we've got no article or comment volume to speak of. :(

The huge, huge problem is that you more or less need a centralized (or distributed) directory service to make connecting easy for people. Jabber/XMPP and Ekiga-style clients that do VoIP and H.264 video are all well and good, but without an easy directory to reach people, they're just dead meat walking. It seems Ekiga.net offers a directory, but who the hell uses it... Same with other providers of SIP / VoIP addresses...

But really, Jabber is the right way to do it; domain owners and ISPs should all be running their own video/telephony servers just as they do mail servers, so you@hyourdomain.com becomes your Videoconferencing address. Some day?

Who wants your youtube comments blasted out to everyone in your network? Not me.

When I add a comment to a YouTube video on my phone there is a checkbox of "Share Publicly". If it is unchecked I didn't see if in my feed, but I have not looked into this that much. I don't know about the website version.